Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?

[Shana A]

 Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?

http://radnichole.wordpress.com/2008/09/26/do-androids-dream-of-electric-sheep/

Over years I've been struck by the singular parallels between the story Phillip K. Dick was moved to write in his novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep and in the lives of the transgendered, particularly the lives of transsexuals who change our bodies and often the sense among others that we have changed our humanity to something meant not as an experience of "the self made whole," but as an affront to them. Somehow we forego, I think others think, the humanity that graces us all. 

The struggle of the novel is separation: what separates the "andy" from the human? In the novel the separation is two-fold: 1) the "andy's" inability to replicate cells (thus, they live for four years and die) and 2) the "andy's" inability to feel empathy and any truly expansive emotion such as love or even hate. Like the "sociopath" the "andy's" internal emotional make-up is limited to self-referrent emotion: "I hurt, this is bad" while "other-referrent" emotions do not exist for the androids.