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I think about this scene a lot.

He has just had his whole body turned against him by a company exec openly telling him he is a product, not a person, then been dehumanized, misgendered and nearly killed by a dozens of colleagues. His body is a mess and the grafted face under the armor is unnerving without the helmet.
He removes the helmet, and it's not a pretty sight. His face, his body movements, the deliberate harm done to his explicit memories to make him useful only as a company product, because the company owned his body, his skills, his memories of his wife and child, and did not value those and threw them away, along with the arm the doctors managed to save.
And he's still feeling that the next morning.
To Lewis' credit, she doesn't look away, despite what I think is obvious discomfort, and says something that must be true also: "It's good to see you, Murphy." Because she is glad of him, glad he's there.

There's a lot going on in this emotional nadir. When he says he's not hungry, perhaps it is because he's being offered baby food -- basically similar to the "nutrient paste" he was being fed for his "rudimentary" digestive system -- but I think it's because he feels sick. He has just been told his wife and child, who he had to learn about through investigating himself in police archives, moved away to start a new life elsewhere.
"I can feel them, but I can't remember them."
They own the way he twirls his pistol, they own the cheesy lines he says, they own his face that's stretched across his metal skull.

There are shortcomings to using this metaphor to describe gender dysphoria as I experience it -- one person responded to this by asking why RoboCop still considers himself a man if he doesn't have a dick anymore, which kinda ended that conversation -- but it's the best I've really got at present. That horrible sense that someone else has chosen the meaning of my body and self, that its meaning is not in fact mine to assert. That it has an inherent meaning, and that meaning is that I am a man.
It makes me nauseous when that happens too.

#robocop #robocop-1987 #officer-murphy #gender-dysphoria