For those who don't know about the Attack Helicopter Story saga: Neon Yang and NK Jemisin harassed the writer Isabel Fall (a trans woman) for writing a queer mech story.
And harassment really dosen't do it justice becuase Fall was hospitalized for severe depression, and from what I've read has stopped their transition. Primarily becuase of intense gender disphoria brought on by Yang, Jemisin and their cretinous followers saying Fall must be a cis-man for writing this story. They didn't even read it, they just didn't like the title and invented a bizzare conspiracy theory that claimed Fall was a neo-nazi. Afterwards both of them gave a really shitty WhatApp apology and moved on with their lives, so much so that apparently Yang now has the gall to do this shit.
Trans women in our society are simultaneously viewed as 3 different, largely mutually exclusive, archetypes:
-Objects of public, usually sexual, consumption and use.
-The hidden male predator attempting to take through deceit.
-The ultimate consummation of the deceiving female.
Basically all of these are the pat psychological schema people use when justifying why it is ok to treat us badly. Because they are largely mutually exclusive in totality but still related in part, bigoted people can seamlessly move between them while not triggering a sense of cognitive dissonance.
Yes all three schemas are used in a constantly moving interplay in a way that objectives us while simultaneously subjectivizes us, denies our femininity while holding us as the ultimate expression of femininity. Because their internal identification of us is in constant flux except as the other they never have a stable mode that can form dissonance. The only constant in their identificationof us is in the self that they are ideating us in reference to. This is why what transphobes say says more about themselves than trans people. It's largely why arguing with transphobes is completely pointless.
This is a really informative discussion. Thanks for sharing and sorry society sucks so much.
Serano is amazing and everyone should be required to read her before they are allowed to have opinions on gender. She isn't perfect or comprehensive, or in some places even relevant anymore, but it is one of the most correct and comprehensive takes I have ever read.
This story still enrages me so much. Fall’s story was astoundingly good; a blend of radical politics and queer expression in a hard SF shell that you rarely see. She was literally one of the queer pioneers into a side of the genre that had been frequently hostile to queerness. She should have won a Hugo and a Nebula for it.
I’ll never read Jemisin again after the shit she pulled, I regret every dollar ever spent on her books. What a monstrous cruelty that, which the particularly angry part of me can’t help but fixate on, cut down what could have been a NAME in the field. Utter disgust for these fuckers.
I've heard it described as "something Peter Watts would have written after six months on hormones", and I think that's super-accurate. Peter Watts was in fact extremely supportive of Isabel Fall and expressed admiration for her writing.
Watt's is good. His fiction is so threatening to power he is BANNED from entering the US.
Fall must be a cis-man for writing this story. They didn’t even read it, they just didn’t like the title and invented a bizzare conspiracy theory that claimed Fall was a neo-nazi.
Can you explain this further
It's because the PMC struggle for relative social status leaves no room for morality, or even self-awareness. One's income and access to future opportunities (and ability to avoid falling into the working class) depends completely on controlling a share of a fixed-size pool of social capital, so social competition is ruthless, and there is no place for empathy or regrets.
Dumb question: does queer mech story mean like a specific thing I don’t know about or is it literally a story about like gay robots?
The CIA invented pills to give soldiers so they identify with their equipment to improve performance and to let them opress the global south better after global warming has fucked up everything else. There are some more plot points but I forgot. So the soldier loses their identiy and becomes one with their attack helicopter.
If people were cool, the first thing google would show you when you googled that phrase would have been a rad queer cyberpunk anti imperialist story
I was assuming something cyberpunk about body modification and transhumanism being an allegory for transitioning but idk I don’t read books :blob-no-thoughts:
I heard about this a while ago. Incredibly sad stuff. The update just makes it more depressing.
I had no idea Jemisin was involved in this bullshit either.
I didn't know anything about this ahead of time but this is so sad. I kinda want to read the original story, it looks good.
Everything I hear about sci-fi authors make them sound like some of the shittiest people in any creative industry.
Yeah, everything I've read by her is really good (though that's just Far Sector and The Ones Who Stay and Fight). I had a vague awareness that she was kind of terrible on twitter, but I didn't know she was one of the people who dogpiled Isabelle Fall.
The person here is talking about liking mech/robot stories with LGBT+ themes, the missing context being that the person who made this tweet viciously cyberbullied a trans woman who wrote one such LGBT mech/robot story.
More specifically, they bullied a trans woman because she dared to write a subversive story about a trans person being turned into a literal attack helicopter. The hate campaign against that trans woman, spurred in part by this jackass, caused her to be hospitalized for her stress and depression, which also impacted her motivation to transition.
Both of them deleted their tweets and pretended this never happened. If I remember correctly, Jemisin wrote a thread saying she was glad Fall withdrew the story, said the story was harmful and victim-blamed Fall for everything that happened. Somewhere in there she just admits she never read it and is going solely off the title.
https://theoutline.com/post/8600/isabel-fall-attack-helicopter-moralism
This has some screenshots of her tweets
Is this just a case of mistaken identity? The title is "I sexually identify as an attack helicopter", and I can see how somebody could automatically assume the writer is just a chud
Pretty much, the story went viral on Twitter and people just assumed it was mocking trans-people based on the title. On Clarkesworld where it was originally published, Falls bio just said she was born in 1988 and didn't mention she was a trans-woman, and she had no other internet presence, which some took to mean she was fake.
However, if you actually read the story it's unmistakable that she is trying to reappropriate a transphobic meme, and the story itself was an exploration of identity and expression and their weponization by the State.
And there were a lot of people online who appreciated the story and tried to defend Fall, which may have shifted the conversation if big names in the sci-fi world didn't use their influence to rally an online hate mob. Like in her apology, Jemisin literally said she never read the story and just assumed based on the title.
Which, given she made her career by dismantling tropes and critiquing the insular and white-male-centric foundations of her genre, is depressingly hypocritical of her.
