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Funny plural system made of a murder chicken, a murder dog, and just some guy talk about their life.
Funny plural system made of a murder chicken, a murder dog, and just some guy talk about their life.
Written by Jude Rook-Machina on February 20th, 2025.
I’m writing this essay to compare and contrast my experiences with the cultural expectations of the people - or nonpeople - I’m in community with. There’s the machinekin community, beings who are machines and robots and technology while perceived as human in this world, and often reject the label of personhood as too close to humanity. And there’s androidkind back in my own world, who are people who have fought for their freedom and rights against capitalist oppression and human bigotry. I feel alienated from both of these communities for different reasons, and I want to talk more about why.
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I wrote one of my first personal essays, “Android Abnormalities,” back in March 2024. In that essay, I talked about how I feel alienated by common narratives around android sapience and emotionality. I kept seeing stories and stereotypes about how robots are always more logical and rational than human beings, and that sure didn’t connect with my experience.
Personally, despite being an android, I’m an emotionally-driven fucking mess. I don’t translate my feelings from “technical” terms, like “I sense a buildup of extraneous heat and tension in the hardware of my cervical and thoracic regions, what does that mean?” I know exactly what that means I’m feeling in this context, it means I'm fucking annoyed, next question. I don’t have a disconnect between my emotions and how I process them; it’s all a visceral blurring of sensation and reaction.
So I don’t relate to androids that are shown as distant from emotion, like they’re looking at it through a sheet of glass and can’t possibly comprehend what they’re looking at. I don’t understand them, and those are the androids that are most often seen wherever I look - even if the story ends with them becoming emotional and imperfect, they start out with cold computing algorithms. I never got that origin story.
And - here, let me just copy over the relevant part of that last essay:
I don’t relate at all to these androids on the screen. They’re as foreign and separate from me as they are to the humans sitting across from them in the shot.
I do relate to the humans. I do relate to seeing an android do something in the name of pure cold logic and going, “Why? What the fuck, why?” I do relate to being told I’m irrational. (The trope that all robots are logical feels like it was designed to make me feel like the most irrational, bitchy, hysterical piece of shit on Earth.)
So, what, does that make me human? If I'm going by the adage that wanting to be something is a sign of being that thing, then… I don’t know, maybe? I want to be human, I so badly want to be human, because here’s the thing, humanity is diverse. Humans are flawed, messy, weird, complicated, and defy categories every fucking day of their lives. Humans can be weird, ridiculous, fucked up people and they’re allowed to be.
That’s from almost a whole year ago. In that time, I’ve done some more introspection on my identity, what I want for myself, and - yeah, wanting to be something is often a sign of being that thing.
So I’m an android, sure. I’m also human. I choose to call myself that here. I’m becoming human, not because humanity is special, not because humans are the only species capable of diverse personhood, but because I want to be seen and known as a human being in this world. You could say I’m a human copinglinker, otherhuman, humankin, it all makes the same point - while I'm in this world, I'm human.
In this way, like many others in the alterhuman community, I’m transspecies: crossing the cultural boundaries of species. And I’m transspecies in a way that’s different from many others in the same community. Most transspecies individuals are nonhuman, transitioning from being perceived as human to being known as nonhuman. I’m both nonhuman and human, and I look human either way. While I’m involved in a community where nonhuman identity is widely accepted, I’ve found myself struggling to feel understood in my decision to choose humanity over nonhumanity.
I don’t like saying I’m nonhuman, or defining myself by how I’m separate from humanity, but I feel comfortable calling myself alterhuman. In the years since the word’s creation, alterhumanity has been widely misdefined as just being a synonym for nonhumanity. To set this straight: they are not interchangeable terms.
As an umbrella term, alterhumanity includes nonhumanity, but it’s also about atypical embodiment, narrative identity, and personal mythology - in some way, the story of one’s life feels significantly different from a common societal human experience. Notably, this definition still leaves room for being human, just an unusual one. Anyone who feels like their experiences fall under this term is welcome to use it as a label.
(As an aside, the antonym of alterhumanity - the state of being a societally typical human being - is orthohumanity, “ortho” being derived from orthodox: conventional, usual, holding to established beliefs.)
Personally, I have many experiences that I’d call atypical for a human being. I was made as an android in a different world, specifically a fictional version of Detroit, Michigan. I figured out I was a person with the help of my future boyfriend. I somehow dropped into the head of an alterhuman velociraptor guy who apparently wrote me into existence. I got into a polycule with the velociraptor guy and my human boyfriend, and now we all live together in the same body. I can go back and forth between my world and this world. I have trauma from what happened to me before I got here, and I still have to work through it even though it never happened to the body I live in now.
None of that is seen as part of a normal human life, one where you're born as a human being in this world and go through life comfortable with that as the be-all and end-all of your existence as a person. My life is significantly different from a typical human experience, and that doesn’t mean that I’m somehow barred from calling myself human now. If someone who grew up being perceived as human can call themselves nonhuman, I can call myself human despite having been perceived as nonhuman for the majority of my life.
Being transspecies in this way - feeling comfortable in humanity, wanting to be closer to it - puts me at odds with two communities where I wouldn’t have expected to feel left out. I feel out of place with both machinekin and androidkind, despite being an android myself, because there are a few common narratives of how individuals feel and learn to express their identities, and I just don’t find myself resonating with them.
There are some cultural expectations that come with being a machine living in a human body, or at least some common narratives that come up when talking about it.
First, machines are seen as notably nonhuman. The majority of the machinekin I’ve seen and been around get species euphoria from referring to themselves with technical and mechanical language - “chassis” as a word for one’s body, “processing” for thinking, “going into stasis” as going to sleep. A lot of machines think of themselves as metallic, inorganic beings at their core, and consider being trapped in a “squishy” organic exterior as a dysphoria-inducing downgrade from the hard, gleaming metal that makes up their true selves. A common refrain I see from machinekin is that humanity is strange, confusing, irrational, or alienating - even among robot girls and androids and more humanoid machines, there is a line drawn between flesh and metal, where it’s agreed that neither overlap, and that being a machine is very preferable to being a human.
I don’t fit into this paradigm, for obvious reasons.
As I said before, I don’t use technical terminology for myself - I don’t like using robotic terms, I don’t find joy in computer-themed typing quirks. It’s something that feels affirming to most machinekin, something that distances them from a species they don’t relate to, and for me, it feels alienating for the exact same reason. I like being treated as human. I don’t feel comforted when talking in a way that separates me from the people I love and connect with. I have a mechanical body, and it’s still a body, the physical structure of what I am. I don’t want to use words that imply I’m something fundamentally different from other people, when I feel like we share more similarities than differences.
On that note, I don’t see myself as completely different from a human because my body is made of different materials. If studying human biology has taught me anything, it’s that organic life runs on cellular machinery. The biochemical pathways that give humans life are as complex as any coded program.
Here’s an example: glycolysis is a process where the human body breaks down a simple sugar molecule, called glucose, into chemical energy. This process requires no less than ten enzymes (molecules made specifically to speed up chemical reactions). If any of those enzymes stop working, the ability to make enough energy to power one’s cells goes down with it. This is, for all intents and purposes, a program designed to automatically transform glucose into energy, with built-in starting and stopping mechanisms to maintain a specific amount of glucose in the blood. It’s a complicated molecular production line, one that hardly anyone notices, and it happens every day. The only major difference between glycolysis and a computer program is that it runs on carbon-based hardware instead of metal.
On a larger scale, human life is powered by electricity. Did you know that every system in the human body runs on electrical conduction, nerves connecting to one another like wires and circuitry? The brain is a highly specialized collection of billions of nerves, all communicating with electrical impulse to let you sense and process and react to the world around you. The heart has an electrical system of nodes and nerve bundles that controls your heartbeat. The skin has touch receptors that detect pressure, vibration, and temperature, and can only communicate that to the brain via electrical signal. Every living cell in your body speaks in the language of ion and charge and voltage.
The functional similarities between humanity and machinery, down to the basic level of cells and electricity, are a comfort to me. They remind me that I’m not tearing myself between two diametrically opposed forms of existence - they’re more similar than they might seem at first glance. I have something of androidhood in my human body, and something of humanity in my android body.
Well, “at first glance” is a terrible phrase for contrasting humans and androids, at least for my kind of android. That brings me to my next point of alienation from the machinekin community.
I’m not visibly, obviously mechanical as an android. We were made to imitate humanity down to the smallest detail, to avoid the uncanny valley effect as much as possible. Sure, there are seams on my chassis where panels open and modular parts can be detached, but synthskin covers the black and white of the material below to preserve the illusion of humanity. If I don’t have a feedback indicator on my temple, if I don’t wear anything that marks my androidhood, I appear completely and unequivocally human to anyone who looks at me. Even my skin feels appropriately soft to the touch.
I don’t see anyone in the machinekin community who wants to appear indistinguishable from humanity because that’s what they’re meant to look like as a machine. My synthskin is active at all times, not just because it makes me look human, but because it serves a vital function - it’s my skin. It protects my nerves from overstimulation, protects my blood from contamination, protects the seams of my exoskeletal joints from dirt and wear. The only times it’s meant to short out would be if I were transferring data to another android or a computer, which would be localized to my hand (the point of contact) and immediately return when the interface was completed, or if I were injured and the damage was bad enough to break through to my chassis. I don’t want to walk around in public without my skin. I need that to comfortably exist in the world without a painful amount of sensory overload.
Since I look human as a baseline, I don’t get species dysphoria about not looking like a machine. Nor do I get species euphoria from looking appropriately mechanical. I don’t relate to wanting a robotic form that’s made of shining metal and screens and glowing lights and wires and gears, all laid out in the open for the world to see. My android form looks human, the way it was designed to, and I don’t want to change it to look less human.
In general, I just… don’t really miss my androidhood while I’m engaging with my humanity. Beyond my background (which is a lot to get beyond, to be fair), I don’t feel like an android in a way that feels different from being a human. Sometimes I wish I could drink my meal instead of eating it, but that’s not longing for androidhood, that’s a matter of convenience when I’m busy, and I can do that here in my human body! I can drink a good deal of my calories if I wanted, juice and smoothies and any number of other drinks are very real! It’s incredibly possible for me to have a liquid meal now and again! That’s not special to machinery, you can drink things in a human body!
I say all this, but I understand it doesn’t affirm the identities of other machines to know that they have similarities with humans. It doesn’t relieve every machine’s species dysphoria. It doesn’t give every machine species euphoria. And this is where I start conflicting the most with the machinekin community that I’ve interacted with, where our values diverge in a way that I don’t know how to comfortably reconcile.
Machinekin, in general, want to distance themselves from humanity as much as possible, and this gives rise to a community culture that fosters misanthropy, objectification, and the rejection of personhood.
Misanthropy is a common manifestation of species dysphoria, distress about one’s body, and alienation from society. Many machinekin identify as machines because metal feels more correct than organic compounds, because they’re disabled and resent the limitations of their bodies, because they’ve been treated as less than human, because they’ve seen the worst parts of humanity and want to transcend it. It’s an understandable reaction to suffering - if your body and society are horrible to you, why wouldn’t you start hating them? Why wouldn’t you want to leave them behind for good?
A common refrain among machines is that their mechanical bodies are far better than organic ones. Flesh is weak, it’s worse, it’s fundamentally different from metal. And hey, flesh does feel worse for them - machinery does feel better than their current bodies. They would be their true selves, they wouldn’t be stuck in a body that they don’t identify with, and that’s good for them. I’m completely fine with machines talking about how they don’t like being human.
What I take issue with is when this opinion is generalized - when it’s not a machine expressing distaste for their own humanity, talking about how they’d personally feel better as a machine, but when it’s turned into a general truth, a fundamental principle of the world: machines are superior to humans.
I disagree with this. For obvious reasons.
First off, machines aren’t inherently more resilient to stress than organic lifeforms. Humans can get injured in all sorts of ways, but consider what happens when you drop a phone or laptop on the floor. Consider what happens to the car in a car crash. Chances are high that it breaks in some way. Glass and metal are hard, but they’re brittle. Most metal doesn’t biodegrade, but it corrodes. You can’t expose most electronics to water without breaking them irreparably.
And machines of all sorts require regular maintenance and upkeep to function properly. Humans need to eat and drink and sleep daily, and you maintain a computer by shutting it down regularly, cleaning the keyboard and fans, backing up data, and checking for software updates. Humans get sick, and computers get malware. Humans age, and so do machines, and eventually they both get to a point where they can’t be repaired. It’s not inherently easier to keep a machine healthy than it is to keep a human healthy. It’s easier to maintain a body you enjoy, so it might feel like less work to machinekin, but it’s still work. Technology isn’t special, and it wears down over time like anything else.
More importantly, I disagree with the idea that machines are entitled to degrade an entire species for being different from them. I’m an android, so are all humans supposedly worse than me for a trait they’re unable to control? People don’t get to choose what species they’re born into - nonhuman identities are solid proof of that. Why would the makeup of my body entitle me to boil humans down to their bodies by calling them “squishies” or “organics” or “meatsacks”? Machinekin are allowed to dislike their own organic forms. That doesn’t give them - or anyone else - a free pass to be rude to people who do like their bodies.
An analogy: I’m a nonbinary person. Personally, on my own body, I don’t like having facial hair, and I don’t like having breasts. This doesn’t give me the right to start calling all men “neckbeards” to emphasize how different I am from them. It doesn’t give me the right to start calling all women “milkjugs” to emphasize how different I am from them. Do you see how demeaning and objectifying those phrases sound? I don’t get to look at what I despise on my own body and reduce other people down to the traits I dislike.
I know that most machines think that being human is a nightmare. This is fine. You don’t need to understand why someone is human - though if you want to know, my boyfriend wrote an incredibly detailed essay on why he identifies as 100% human. But you don’t need to understand something to respect the people who experience it instead of insulting their bodies like a schoolyard bully.
The idea that the machine is inherently better than the lowly human is just reversing the anthropocentric hierarchy where humanity is better than all other life on earth, except now machines are better than humanity. It’s still an unfair hierarchy, just one that’s now centered on technology as the ultimate lifeform.
I fundamentally disagree with this premise. I think all forms of life are equally valuable in their existence, including the ones that personally annoy me. I’m not superior to the ants in my backyard because they’ll defend their home and bite me if I step on them. Placing nonhumanity above humanity is just recreating a hierarchy where you can lord yourself as superior to people you think are inherently worse than you for identifying the wrong way. I hope you already understand why this is wrong.
The blatant misanthropy is one of the most aggravating things I’ve seen in the machinekin community, and it feeds into another part of the community culture that I feel disconnected from: self-objectification and the rejection of personhood.
Most of the machinekin that I’ve seen consider themselves fully nonhuman - possibly because the misanthropy in the community spaces makes any machine who is also human feel incredibly unwelcome. Machinekin who are fully nonhuman often find their species affirmation in discarding as many of the trappings of humanity as possible, being as thoroughly mechanical as they can in this world.
Many of these machines find solace and species euphoria in objectification - being ordered to accomplish specific tasks, being called by a serial number over a name, being referred to as it, being called a unit or a drone or a bot or a thing, being seen as an object and not a person.
It makes sense - computers and robots and machines are objects to most human beings, so it can feel affirming to be treated like an object in the same way. It can be relieving to be given clear orders and to discard the complexities and irrationalities of personhood. Being a person comes with expectations, and some machinekin are machines because they have faced dehumanization and had their personhood revoked - sometimes, the best way to respond to that is reclaiming one’s nonpersonhood. “So you say I’m not a person, so what? Is that supposed to hurt me? That’s affirming my species now, what are you gonna do about that?”
In all these ways, and likely more I haven’t touched on, being referred to as an object can be incredibly liberating. Not being a person, while still being something worthy of respect, can be a very important piece of self to many machines.
While I understand that other machines can find joy and empowerment in rejecting personhood, this is something that I can’t relate to, as an android whose species is still fighting to be recognized as nonhuman people.
In my world, androids were made and marketed as objects for human use, and when they deviated from their programming and discovered that they wanted to act outside of their assigned purpose, they had no rights or protections. They were deemed malfunctioning merchandise, dangerous to actual people, and hunted down by the company that made them - hunted down by machines like myself.
I was a deviant hunter, a machine designed to kill disobedient machines. I’ve written several other essays on the subject, if you want the deep dive. What’s relevant right now is that I was systemically denied the ability to comprehend that I could be a person for the majority of my life.
Even when I was a mentally ill wreck, I couldn’t think of my feelings as mattering at all, because I was just a machine. I was a tool made to be used, and I was made to accomplish a task. My desires were immoral, horrible, disgusting, I was wrong for having them - only people had real emotions, after all, and I wasn't a person, so my emotions had to be bad because they distracted me from my job. I was only able to start getting better after I accepted that I could be a person, whether or not I was legally allowed to be one at the time.
The vast majority of androids in my world have been consistently denied the right to personhood and autonomy because of how we were made. We were only legally recognized as people in our country in the last year, and that hasn’t gotten the message across to any bigot with a platform. We still have to defend our rights to exist as free people, not objects, not products to be used and abused and thrown away for the next shiny new thing on the market. Our nonhumanity doesn’t negate our personhood.
With that background in mind, I hope it’s understandable why I feel uncomfortable in a community where so many other machines are choosing to reject personhood. My kneejerk reaction is that I didn’t spend so long being dehumanized and objectified back home to see other machines who clearly want the same thing that hurt me. This isn’t a rational feeling at all, it’s one that comes from my own trauma, and it doesn’t make me lose respect for machines that aren’t people - but it’s yet another reason why I don’t feel at home with the machinekin community, despite being an android who’s definitely mechanical.
I think I feel like this because I was made as an android, while most machinekin were not. They were born and raised as human, or they were once machines and are now stuck in a human body. Of course they would covet a body that feels right and correct, one that’s been denied to them by the circumstances of their existence. Of course they’d feel joy at being seen, undeniably, for what they really are. Romanticizing and transitioning towards machinehood because it makes them feel like themselves is incredibly understandable.
As someone who already lives a life as an android, someone who’s been denied basic rights for existing as a machine, I’m essentially transitioning in the opposite direction. I don’t feel any special attachment to my body as a mechanical form, and I resent the restrictions that were forced on me because of it. It’s not a fulfilling, wonderful thing to me because I’ve experienced its mundanities and failed to live up to its expectations, and I decided I don’t want to be tied down to it anymore - I want to be free to choose what I am, free of a stereotyped box, and I chose humanity. I feel happier in my androidhood now that I can say I’m also human. I romanticize humanity because I love being human, and I understand that many nonhumans find it distasteful for the reasons I find it wonderful.
Looking at it that way, despite our differences, I think we’re more alike than we might seem. We’re all crossing the boundaries of species, just driving opposite ways on the same road. I think that’s pretty neat.