The Murderbot Diaries and the Nonbinary + Aroace Robot Stereotypes
You can enjoy something and criticize its failings at the same time. The Murderbot Diaries has a lot of issues that need to be addressed.
I've seen people saying "Murderbot isn't actually a robot, so it's not a stereotype for it to be nonbinary!" or "Murderbot has feelings, so that means it's not the aroace robot stereotype!"
And like, okay, people, just because Martha Wells has decided to call SecUnits and ComfortUnits "constructs" instead of "androids" does not mean you get to defend the real transmisic stereotype that Murderbot and yes, literally all the other robot characters in these books fall into!
The "nonbinary robot" is in fact a transmisic stereotype that yes, in fact, 10000% applies to Murderbot, and ART, Miki, and literally everyone else who's a robot in these books. And yes Murderbot is a robot. Androids are just more specific types of robots.
As a warning, this post has over 2,700 words.
I am nonbinary, I'm aroace, I use it/its pronouns, and I'm not human! The problem is not that Murderbot is any of these things. The problem is that Martha Wells can only conceptualize a person being any of these things if they're a robot who is--pardon my french--as smooth as a fucking barbie doll.
Why did Martha Wells make Murderbot nonbinary? Because it's an androgynoid that doesn't have any gender or sex-related parts. Because its sex is nonexistent and therefore its gender is nonexistent because Martha Wells equates sex with gender. This is just a basic fact of the series. Murderbot is nonbinary because it doesn’t have genitals. Literally.
Murderbot is the epitome of the "nonbinary robot" stereotype. Because on top of being nonbinary because it has no sex and thus no gender, it's also aroace. Because that’s also a fucking stereotype.
The nonbinary robot stereotype would not apply if Martha Wells' view of gender extended beyond "sex = gender" in any meaningful way, but it very clearly does not right now, because if it did, we would not be six books into a series filled with nonbinary robots, and then have only one nonbinary human so far, who only appeared for a few scenes and doesn't really do anything before being shoved off-screen until te gets another sentence right at the end of the book.
Not to mention there is literally no sign of an aroace or even just aspec in general human characters.
And no, people I know who are now dying to jump in with examples that don’t work to try and desperately excuse this, a character just /not being in a relationship that the narrator knows about/ does not make them aspec representation, especially since Murderbot does not give enough shits about romance to keep track of any of the other characters’ relationships besides mentioning that they’re in a relationship every once and again.
Not being in a relationship does not mean a character is aspec representation.
You can headcanon them as one, but that’s not the same fucking thing as a character being conciously and purposefully written as aspec.
None of the human characters we’ve met have ever even implied they’re in any way aspec.
And we only have one single confirmed nonbinary human in over six books now. And te only appears for a tiny fraction of the book and isn’t even the main human who gets to go on a deadly adventures with Murderbot.
(and seriously I will literally go in and fucking highlight every scene where Rami is actually there doing stuff when I'm done posting this and I will post the grand total of ter contribution to the fucking book just to drive this point home.)
And to make it extra crystal clear here, the problem here is not that Murderbot is aroace and nonbinary.
The problem is that we've had six books now, and yet somehow the only nonbinary human character was all the way back in book 2, and te only appeared for a few scenes and didn't do much of anything before being shoved off-screen and out of the story.
And no, no, contrary to optimistic belief, the random single-appearance background character humans that appear for a single scene that Murderbot apparently arbitrarily uses they/them pronouns for do not fucking count as nonbinary human representation! Not when literally no one in these books has ever fucking asked "hey what are your pronouns?" or even just fucking listed their pronouns in their bio! Not when none of our main or even just reccuring human characters are nonbinary! Not when none of our main or even reccuring human characters use they/them pronouns!
I keep seeing people saying this book has "great trans rep" and no, it literally objectively does not. In order to have trans rep it would have to have trans characters who exist for more than five seconds.
(Not unless Martha Wells decides to impliment the best-case-scenario quick-retroactive-fix of revealing that "no, Murderbot, your experiences are not universal to all SecUnits, most SecUnits have genders, including binary genders, and feel sexual and romantic and other forms of attraction, you’re just literally aroace and agender”)
It’s a nonbinary androgynoid who was not given any sex or gender related parts or assigned any gender at construction at all.
No one in-universe has ever assigned a binary gender to Murderbot.
(Oh, but the transmisic and misogynistic fans love to say it’s a man, because they hate both nonbinary people /and/ women!!!! They think nonbinary people don’t exist, but they also think that women are too weak and timid and delicate and frail to be sarcastic, so clearly, Murderbot has to be a man!!! /s)
Murderbot is a nonbinary androgynoid who was, as of book 6 so far assuming Martha Wells doesn’t do the above retcon/fix, assigned genderless at construction.
That is not trans representation by any stretch of the imagination.
In order for Murderbot to be trans while being assigned genderless at construction, it would need to have a gender, either binary or nonbinary, that’s not literally just agreeing “yeah I’m genderless like you said when you built me”.
It’s not even really nonbinary representation because unlike Murderbot, we, real nonbinary people, don’t get the privelege of everyone respecting our identity and pronouns without question or ever even needing to be taught what it means.
We do not have the privelege of being born into perfectly androgynous bodies or bodies that perfectly fit how we want to be perceived and be, that no one assigns the wrong gender to, ever.
We do not have the privelege of our preffered pronouns being assigned to us at birth and literally everyone respecting them all the time even when they hate us. (oh, except for one (1) guy who was being an asshole in a short story from the perspective of another narrator.)
Murderbot has never had to and probably never will face any of the issues that real world trans and nonbianry people face. It never has to correct anyone when they assign it a gender. It never has to deal with being misgendered while trying to figure out whether it’s worth it or too dangerous to speak up and correct people. It’s never had to come out or explain the very concept of its existance to people.
Murderbot literally never even has to fucking tell anyone what its pronouns are because everyone just fucking knows without asking!
And not even because it’s fucking listing its pronouns in its feed bio, because Martha Wells, despite living in 2022 and listing her pronouns in her twitter bio, still hasn’t grasped the concept that her characters in her scifi setting where they literally have their social media bios attached to them should also fucking be listing their gods damned pronouns instead of listing their sex, especially when her protagonist is literally nonbinary.
If you, as a trans person, want to write an escapist fantasy where everyone always magically knows what everyone else’s pronouns are without ever having to ask and being trans doesn’t ever impact /literally any aspect of anyone’s lives ever no matter how small, not even something as simple as talking about pronouns, you can go ahead, but even if Martha Wells comes out as trans tomorrow, that’s not going to erase or make any of the transmisia in this series or in her older works (specifically, The Books of the Raksura) any better.
If Martha Wells wants to make her writing not “Literally Just Bigoted Stereotypes” then she needs to close the writing document and read things by trans and nonbinary people at the very least, and preferably actually talk to some of these people. Even if she comes out as trans tomorrow, that doesn’t mean she magically knows how to not be transmisic. Trans people aren’t a hive mind, we don’t all magically understand eachother and magically know how to treat eachother with respect.
Having the only reccuring nonbinary and aspec characters be robots? Introducing a character who uses neopronouns (who is also literally the single solitary human nonbnary character in the whole series) only to almost immediately shove ter offscreen, never to be seen again except for one more sentence at the end of the book? Never having any of the characters whose social media profile are literally accesible at all times ever list or give their pronouns?? This is not treating people with respect.
The solutions to these problems are so unbeleivably basic. Literally all she needs to do is make one (or more!! literally!!!) of the main human characters come out as nonbinary. And note I said “come out as nonbinary” not “reveal they’ve been known to be nonbinary this whole time but no one bothered to mention it”. One of the main humans literally just needs to figure out they’re nonbinary and tell everyone about it.
More nonbinary humans need to exist in the backgrund, and no, not just by using neutral pronouns for them without prompting, by having them either say they’re nonbinary or just by having people fucking specify what their pronouns are, either in dialoge or via their fucking social media profile that are, and I cannot stress this enough, literally floating along with them wherever they go.
There is no fucking excuse for the characters not listing their pronouns in their bios. It’s 2022. All Systems Red came out in 2017. Prounouns In Bio™ has been a fucking established thing for well over a decade now. There is no fucking excuse for it not being utilized in this series to you know, actually represent the real things trans people and their allies do in real life???
If your story isn’t even going to deal with or discuss even something as simple as pronouns in literally any way at all, you don’t get to call it trans representation.
Murderbot doesn’t need to be fucking hatecrimed for being nonbinary or misgendered for it to say, “My pronouns are it/its”. or for it to even have /literally any kind of reaction at all/ to being called “mom”, which is a word with heavy gender connotations. It would not be a problem if this were thought through in any way, but it’s literally not aknowledged at all.
Murderbot has literally zero reaction to being called "mom", even though with it being vehemently genderless it should have /some fucking reaction/ to being called a heavily gender-connected term, even if that reaction is just thinking, ‘well, I’m not a mom, but close enough I guess, because I’m too lazy to search my databanks to find an alternative word and also I’m embarassed because I literally just insisted to ART that I’m not her caretaker”, or “why did she call me her mom that’s weird”. It literally doesn’t even have to be a negative reaction. Nonbinary people can be moms. It does not have to have a negative reaction. It just has to have some fucking reaction. The books need to just fucking aknowledge gender outside the “well I don’t have any genitals so therefore I have no gender” bullshit. Like do I really have to explain to people why it’s transmisic that the only recurring nonbinary characters are nonbinary because they don’t have genitals. Do I really need to explain why that’s transmisic. Do we really need to go back to Trans School 101 where we learn that what genitals you have do not determine your gender?
Because this is just Moon arbitrarily fucking assigning genders to people based on their genitals again.
Here’s a literal quote: “Looking at him more closely, Moon realized he was actually female, or some gender close to female. The dark color and roughened texture of her skin made detail hard to see, but there were breasts under the clumps of white hair trailing down her chest and shoulders.”
This is from 2015, only two years before All Systems Red was written, and this is just one example of too many to count from The Books of the Raksura series.
There’s also another character whose pronouns and name Moon never fucking asks for, and since he can’t see what their genitals are under their clothes, he literally just spends every fucking interaction with this character arbitrarily assigning them either “he” or “it” pronouns depending on how much he wants to literally murder them at the moment. Go ahead and guess which ones he calls them when he’s resisting to urge to literally disembowl them for no good reason. Go ahead and guess. I’ll give you a hint: it’s not “he”.
So go ahead and tell me how going “oh this character has breasts that means they’re a woman” and ‘oh none of these characters have any genitals at all, so that means they’re all nonbinary”.
This is literally just equating sex with gender. This is no fucking different from saying all people with penises are men and all people with vaginas are women and anyone in between is automatically nonbinary.
The paragraph of Moon randomly fucking assigning Ghatli pronouns and gender came out in 2015.
All Systems Red, where it’s established that Murderbot is nonbinary because it doesn’t have any genitals, came out in 2017.
It’s now 2022, 7 years after the example from The Books of the Raksura.
The Murderbot Diaries aren’t /as/ transmisic as The Books of the Raksura. Murderbot doesn’t go around checking people’s genitals and looking to see whether or not they have breasts before it decides what pronouns to use for them the way Moon did. But that’s the only real improvement. Even Moon at least admitted he was arbitrarily assinining people genders based off his impression of their personalites and what he can see of their body.
The Murderbot Diaries has a nonbinary protagonist who is aroace, but the only reason it’s nonbinary and aroace is because it doesn’t have any genitals. Literally.
That is not groundbreaking representation. That’s not bringing anything new or interesting to the table. That’s literally just. A stereotype. And nothing else in this series makes any effort to make it less of a stereotype.
“Why does the nonbinary robot stereotype even matter?” you might be asking.
Beause real nonbinary people have genitals. We have secondary sex characterisitics. We were not born into this world perfectly androgynous and grow up to be perfectly androgynous with zero effort. We don’t get to have people magically know what our pronouns are before they even say a word to us through no effort of our own. Even if you wear a pronoun pin, you’ll probably still get misgendered because a lot of people who do not spend time around trans people just do not even grasp what “my pronouns are it/its” even fucking begins to mean. They have no idea what you’re talking about when you say “My pronouns are____”.
The nonbinary robot stereotype is bad for so many gods damned reasons and Martha Wells is not doing anything to make up for that.
I will stress this again so no one can ignore it: The problem is not that Murderbot is nonbinary and aroace. The problem is that no humans are and no robots aren’t.
And no, this does not mean you get to erase Murderbot’s nonbinary or aroace identities or change its pronouns. Murderbot’s pronouns are it/its. It’s nonbinary. It’s aroace. These are fact that are not up for debate.
I’m making this post because the only way these things can improve is if they get pointed out as bad things in the first place. If I knew how to contact Martha Wells I would write a polite and detailed email explaining these things but alas! That’s probably not going to happen!
So for now I’ll just keep posting 2,000+ word essays on tumblr hoping that at least one person in this fandom reads them and starts noticing these things too so the fandom at least can engage critically with her writing with the bigger picture available of where she’s come from and what direction her writing needs to move in if she wants to stop being transmisic!
