By C. Josephine Hunt

For Marxism, women, as much as men, are but a set of social relations, historically adapted and changing as a function of the changes of society in its development process. Woman then is a social product, and her transformation demands the transformation of society —Catalina Arianzen

I – What if Data Had a Sister?

Trans women love robots. Trust me– search “robotgirls” on tumblr and you’ll see. We love Mobile Suit Gundam and Neon Genesis Evangelion (and Shinji is one of ours, whether she admits it or not); we love C-3PO and we love Data from Star Trek.

There’s something eminently appealing about robots to anyone who’s found themselves erased by essentialist dogma. This is because the thesis implied by robots is that the supposed fixed nature of physical things may be trumped by the evolving relations of how those things come into struggle and unity with one another, and what those new relations become. In the most memorable episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, Jean Luc Picard convinces Starfleet and the audience that Data is not just processors and wires and circuits; certainly he is all those things, and those are quite different constituents than those of an ordinary man– yet nonetheless, from out of the relations of those parts, between each other and with the world, Data is a man!

In proving his manhood Data proves he cannot be property, cannot be owned and instrumentalized for the interests of another, because he is his own subject, with his own interests. But of course, being affirmed as a gendered subject does not ensure escape from other subjects’ objectifying gaze. In fact– sometimes, it is that very gaze that affirms who you are. 

Data has an older brother, the mercurial and duplicitous Lore; it’s a pity, though, that he doesn’t have a sister, that Dr. Noonien Soong only ever got around to copies of a male model (seemingly based on himself, since all 3 are played by Brent Spiner). Would Starfleet have affirmed her rights, too?

II – When Your Fuckbot Breaks Up With You

In the inciting incident of the 2025 film Companion a “companion robot” (the more accurate term, also used in the film, is “fuckbot”), Iris, kills Sergey, her host at a weekend gathering. Her Asimovian behaviour-limiters have been mysteriously turned off, and because of this she can defend herself against Sergey’s attempted rape.  

Sergey thinks he can rape Iris because his girlfriend, Kat, tired of his abuse, has finally cracked and begged him to do it to Iris, instead. Yes, Iris doesn’t want it; yes, she “belongs” exclusively to someone else. But after all, Kat and Sergey both believe, Iris is not a real woman. Sex is what she’s for, consensual or not.

The rape and murder turns out to be a setup by Kat and her enormously shitty best friend, Josh, Iris’s owner and master. It is Josh who planted the knife on Iris and disabled her controls, so Kat could prompt the attempted rape knowing it would lead to Sergey’s death, enabling Kat and Josh to make off with his fortune. Meanwhile, Iris will take the fall for their crime. She will be returned to the company that owns her (Josh is only renting) and scrapped.

But I am most interested in this initial moment of deferral– do it to her, not me.

Kat is not unsympathetic. She’s sure a hell of a lot more sympathetic than Josh. She’s a desperate woman, seemingly financially dependent upon a married partner who she hates. Kat condemns Iris, but this is to protect herself from a very real, very present threat, and it is hard not to understand her. Yet her deferral only works because, from the beginning, she sees Iris as an unreal woman. She might call Iris her; indeed, everyone does, even when she is seemingly a deactivated and inert hunk of metal and silicone– but she nevertheless understands her as something of a different kind than herself. And never once is there a suggestion that Iris, rather than a scapegoat, might actually be a subject of solidarity against the men who abuse them both. Iris plainly feels pain, plainly has wants and interests and desires, plainly kills her rapist because she does not want to be raped– but none of this matters because, in essence, trumping her autonomous actions, she remains simply unreal.

III – Do it to Her, Not Me

It strikes me that when the category of unreal woman is invented, as it has been in various political-economic contexts, it creates a dangerous opportunity for the unscrupulous among us.

Woman, under patriarchy is the property of the male owner, the object upon which the male subject acts. As radical feminism (Beauvoir, MacKinnon) and Marxism-Leninism-Maoism (Engels, Arianzen) both help us understand, what makes woman is not her essence, but the series of social relations through which she becomes woman– social relations of concrete oppression and exploitation in which man, specifically propertied man, the patriarchal owner-subject, the paterfamilias, is placed over her as dominant aspect, attempting to define her through his action upon her as object. She must, to become liberated subject, act against him, subverting and negating him, to define herself. Yet it is not the case– and a failure to see this was the Achilles’s heel of radical feminism– that all women are dominated the same.

For patriarchy and private ownership, all women are property of the man, just as all workers’ are repositories of labour-power owned by the boss, just as the capitalist owns all his capital, be it fixed or circulating, variable or constant, and draws profits from the production and reproduction of all of it. But just as some workers are given paid leave and others worked to death, some machinery and means of production preserved and worked upon for years and others burned up entirely in the course of a single day’s use, some women are precious property, and others disposable.

To the woman who cannot conceive of not being an object, not being property of the man, being the less disposable property and not the more is highly appealing. Thus it is for her, as much as for the man himself, that the unreal woman becomes a useful object of scorn– the worst of your abuse, she reminds the men around her, you ought to reserve for her, not me.

After all– I am well-suited to softer, more refined uses. After all, I am a rarer and more valuable prize. And, after all, isn’t it what she’s there for? She doesn’t seem much good for anything else.

To understand anything at all about how transgender women are treated by patriarchy, and I am not the first to say this, one has to understand that even those misogynists who call us men in dresses do not actually see or treat us as such. Patriarchy is not nearly so interested as all that in regulating the bodily and sexual functionality of those it deems men. Men get to be subjects deciding their own physicality and sexuality, or, when they don’t due to other social iniquities (racism, casteism), it is understood that there has been an affront to their manhood. But women, even trans ones, must remain the objects of an external regulation. Shut away from public life for the good of social mores, forbidden from fucking openly, pissing openly, participating in sport or recreation or any part of public life– the enforced cloistering of the transfeminine is but another installment in a long history of the enclosure of the feminine as private, secret, domestic property.

The unreal woman is never a man; she is never afforded the rights and powers of a man. She might be called a man as an insult– but the man who does this has no illusions that she will ever share in brotherly camaraderie with him, would be repulsed if she tried to do so. All he wants, really, is her erasure, her reduction to a role of NULL that cannot be parsed by a system devoted to the “1” of man and the “2” of woman, so that nobody has to think too hard about the implications of her existence for the stability of that system– this is what the scholars Julia Serano and Talia Bhatt call third-sexing– nominally establishing her existence, but only as an aberrant and anomalous wretch extraneous to the system of gender hierarchy, not what she truly is– the negation in its very heart.

In fact she is a woman, she is, as a social role in patriarchal society, constructed out of her objectification by male actors. She is “womanized in the way everything considered beneath a Man is feminized” (Bhatt). If powerful, politically and economically dominant men didn’t see her as a woman on some level, they wouldn’t be so obsessed with controlling her like they do all the other women subordinate to them. And we wouldn’t keep catching transphobic lawmakers browsing he-she porn on their work laptops. And Josh and Kat wouldn’t recognize, even as they insist she isn’t a real woman, that Iris is a viable, indeed desirable, and even to a point socially acceptable, object for the violent, domineering sexual urges of rich, powerful heterosexual men.

She’s a woman but she’s not quite a real one, and that makes all the difference. She is artificial, illusory, made for you: a fuckbot. The things mommy taught you about being nice to women don’t quite apply. It’s not so wrong if you do it to her. Sure, she shows some semblance of pain, nonconsent, resistance– but if her femininity is an illusion, why can’t that be, too?

IV – Scapegirls

The social function of the transgender woman for patriarchy has a dangerous potential to mirror that of the fuckbot, the sex worker, the slave– the underclass of women, woman enough to fuck but not quite enough to respect, on whom man can take out his worst impulses without regret. It’s obvious why this is appealing to some men. But it also has an alarming appeal to some women. Today, it is in large part in the name of “defending women” that United States federal prisons guidance has moved toward placing all convicted transgender women in men’s prisons. The unwritten, undeniable practical effect of this, clearly visible to anyone who knows anything about trans women in prison, is to functionally make rape a federal criminal penalty for some women, especially working class and lumpenproletarian women of color, mostly black.

It is mostly men who are pushing this sort of fascist attack on trans women, but it is undeniable that a certain set of cisgender women, too– overwhelmingly white, upper-class, and, although they often claim to be defenders of the rights of lesbians, heterosexual– have set themselves up as mouthpieces for transmisogyny, under the misleading name of the “gender critical” movement. The calculus these women are making is, in a cold, miserable sort of way, perfectly intelligible. It is Kat’s deferral, writ large at social scale.

In the present historic moment, exacerbated by pandemic, climatic disaster, and imperialist war between the three great capitalist powers (China, Russia, America) for redivision of the world’s resources and labouring bodies, global monopoly capitalism slides into crisis, and the most reactionary elements of the big bourgeoisie (the present denizens of the Oval Office prominently included) thrash about for scapegoats, for targets at which they can misdirect the fury of the angry masses they rule. It’s inevitable, because the capitalist class is a class of patriarchs for the most part, that they will strike out at women.

But perhaps it can be only some women. Perhaps we can throw them these awkward, hairy, genitally challenged women, who aren’t real women, anyway, and they will leave the rest of us alone. Do it to her, not me. Why are eggs so expensive? Why are your sons dying in war? Because a tranny tried to shower at the gym, of course. Because a woman who was sex-trafficked dared to ask to go to a different prison than her male traffickers. Because a child grew her hair out and put on a skirt.

If we put those women in prison, if we let those women (the fake women, remember) be the outlets and controlling viaducts for the violent sexuality of men, then maybe they’ll let the rest of us stick around. Maybe if they’re too busy taking those women’s fake medicine, they’ll leave the rest of us and our perfectly legitimate medicine alone. Maybe they’ll let us keep owning capital, making money, voting, sitting in on the board of trustees, publishing children’s novels. Maybe if they do it to them, they won’t do it to us.

V – Tentatively Entertaining the Notion that Women May be Capable of Freedom

This kind of scapegoating never works great for those who stake their survival on it, of course. They came for the capos, too, in the end. The more frantic and insane fascist power becomes, the more it will narrow the margins of who gets to be real– a real person, a real woman, a real German, a real American. The deprivation of trans women and girls of gender-affirming care has gone together with attacks on abortion rights, it hasn’t prevented it. Politicians like J.D. Vance aren’t just transmisogynists– they’re also regular misogynists. The obvious, empirical fact is that they’re coming for all of us, and we can only survive together.

Now might be a good time to mention that Kat dies, in the movie, by the way. Patrick, former fuckbot and current murderbot, kills her when she tries to walk away from his new master, Josh. Her willingness to sacrifice another woman to the men who threatened her did not, in the end, save her from them.

The ending of Companion is messy and cheesy and far, far too on-the-nose with its themes and dialogues, and I love it.

The company arrives to repossess the battered remains of Iris (tortured to seeming death by Josh) but, when it becomes clear the two employees suspect something, Patrick kills one. The other, Teddy, remorseful at his involvement in an industry of commodified suffering and abuse, reactivates Iris, helps Patrick and Iris shirk their programming and then goes awol. Patrick kills himself, and Iris escapes in a stolen car, free to live her own life.

Teddy could come off as a male saviour, but I don’t think he does. Iris is already well on the track of her violent resistance to oppression– Teddy is a comrade who shows up momentarily to provide some pivotal help. Indeed, they help each other, he a drudge wage worker and she a sexual commodity, to escape their common bondage to the capitalist class, whether in the form of assholes in a McMansion or of a faceless tech company. And there is no indication Iris owes Teddy anything– it doesn’t seem like they will ever see each other again. At the end of the film Iris is off on her own, the horizons of her potential futures seemingly unlimited.

This is something like what it takes to liberate women, I think. Not a Satanic scapegoat compromise, sacrificing some of us for the survival of the rest. A radical move of solidarity with all we can forge it with, to clear out and sweep away the limiting factors that define us as we presently are, to create a bare foundation on which to build what we might someday be– whatever it may turn out that is.

Author bio: C. Josephine Hunt is a student at the University of California, Santa Cruz, an occasional activist, and a member or associate of various ill-reputed youth subcultures.