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Some of the things to point out about Isabel Fall: 1. Isabel Fall was a pseudonym, with no other works attached to this pseudonym. 2. Isabel Fall only states

Some of the things to point out about Isabel Fall: 1. Isabel Fall was a pseudonym, with no other works attached to this pseudonym. 2. Isabel Fall only states in the bio having been born in 1988. (88 is a dogwhistle for nazi). 3. The piece itself was military science fiction, which already has a bad reputation among progressive circles (case in point: a prominent military scifi publisher's forum just got closed down after it was reported their mods were literally calling for violence against the cops protecting the white house at the 1/6 riot). 4. The work was describing gender in a way that itself has some controversy, commentating on the physical/body expression of gender as well as the nonphysical/performance expression of gender. All these together created a powder keg where people literally believed that somehow Isabel Fall was a nazi who had pulled the wool over the eyes of one of the most prominent science fiction and fantasy magazines in the industry to get paid professional rate work and platform transphobia. The actual truth was extremely messy, Isabel Fall herself reportedly was hospitalized for suicide, and people are still talking about it year+ later.

dogman144 6y ago
It seems Isabel was "verified trans," and had sensitivity reading done. As lived experience is the metric that matters here, and then she/they got the additional verification done, that's the full stop here. She/they lived it, she/they got sensitivity readings done, and QED she/they can write about it... at least as the current rules go. All your points largely summarize to there being some suspicious aspects to her/their identity, and because of that, shoot first and ask questions later was apparently ok. "Because we as an industry are hyper tuned to any slip up on these key metrics, let's verbally slaughter whoever has some oddities to their author profile regarding these metrics." Given that Isabel ended up in a hospital, as you said, the lack of introspection from the publishing community once the facts of the matter came out is ugly and why many authors are terrified for their careers.

dogman144 6y ago

It seems Isabel was "verified trans," and had sensitivity reading done. As lived experience is the metric that matters here, and then she/they got the additional verification done, that's the full stop here. She/they lived it, she/they got sensitivity readings done, and QED she/they can write about it... at least as the current rules go. All your points largely summarize to there being some suspicious aspects to her/their identity, and because of that, shoot first and ask questions later was apparently ok. "Because we as an industry are hyper tuned to any slip up on these key metrics, let's verbally slaughter whoever has some oddities to their author profile regarding these metrics." Given that Isabel ended up in a hospital, as you said, the lack of introspection from the publishing community once the facts of the matter came out is ugly and why many authors are terrified for their careers.