i’m going to get cucked by a robot and all i’ll get is my girlfriend’s new vagina.

an essay by Lily Pando.

I'm not particularly interested in bottom surgery, but my girlfriend is. She needs the scalpel to her flesh, reshape to fit His whims, she needs Him. She needs His knife. She summons Him into the space we built for one another, displaces me with His phallus. I can only see Him through her, only when I push against her skin, her lack of hole, her nothing where she longs for something, do I see Him. The surgeon is not just a surgeon, He is a sculptor, He is a God, but He does not make us in His own image. He makes us in the image of them, the women he despises and lusts for. But, this version of the surgeon is old, rendered borderline impotent by decades of rebellion. I'm not worried about the surgeon, I'm worried about His robot. 

Ostensibly, the person creating my lover's vagina is not a man, but a woman. In just a few months a woman will design and execute a surgery to turn my girlfriend's dainty cock into a vulva. When you imagine a woman pulling on the Surgeons' latex gloves, you might feel spark of hope. Perhaps, a woman in the role might allow for the construction of a vulva free of the misogynistic logics inherent to the Surgeon as He used to manifest. But it doesn't matter because she won't be holding the scalpel. 

The robot, sterile and clean, will be the first to fuck my lover. He's the one who will do the cutting. Split my lover open and push himself inside. Fill her up for the first time, long before I'm even allowed in the room. The Robot will be there, ready and able to fuck her.  

Everyone else seems to think the Fucking Robot is perfectly reasonable, but I know the truth. The Robot is a man. I don't know what motivations the surgeon and her Robot have, but I know that they are recreating images previously established, maintaining a long tradition that finds its roots in the crimes committed against me and mine. This Robot, like many technological beings, presents a façade of objectivity to those who gaze upon Him, something post-human. Something beyond the failures of surgeons past. The Robot is not objective. The robot is not a whimsical AI, it is not summoned here by great technological conjurers and magicians, it is just a machine, doing as it's told. This Robot is not the future, but the past, and the transsexual past most certainly haunts the transsexual present, often maliciously unaddressed.

I am not a luddite, I can't come without my vibrator after all, I just know the Robot. I know He isn't free of the patriarchal logics that motivated His predecessors. The Robot presents Himself as objective, simply doing as He's told. It's a lie. When you put the scalpel in the arm of the Robot you give away the power we once had over the surgeon.  You can't look a robot in the eyes as it fucks you. 

The Robot will be a better lover than I could ever hope to be. I mean, how can I try and compete with the pussy-creating robot? The Robot is the architect of the pussy, like all spheres of our capitalist realities the robot represents the automation of labor, in this case pussy labor. The automated pussy factory. I'd be too scared to cut my lover's flesh as deeply as she needs. To hold her delicate flayed cock in my hands and manipulate it as my heart desires. To make the perfect hole for me to fuck. The Robot will take her, it will guide her to a deep rest, it will caress her, it will love her. In a way no human ever could. The robot and the surgeon. They will be tender; they will be careful. They will be gentle and kind. The Robot and the Surgeon, they'll fuck her so hard she can't walk. And when it's over, she'll come back to me.