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Isabel Fall’s sci-fi story drew the ire of the internet

• bitwize 5y ago
  A sci-fi writer attempted to normalize hate speech and got called out for it. Just another case of "sparkling consequences".
  • erellsworth 5y ago
    The sci-fi writer in question is a trans woman herself. Saying she was attempting to normalize hate speech is the least charitable read of the situation, in my opinion.
    • bitwize 5y ago
      Aka the only read that matters. Charity breeds wiggle room for actual hate groups. Similarly, depending on the conference, naming your talk "Make X great/Y again", even ironically, may be grounds for a ban from the conference, under the same rubric: normalizing hate speech.
      • _vertigo 5y ago
        That strikes me as extremely reductive. You're trying to narrow the avenues of acceptable discourse, and worse yet, you're putting your enemy in the driver's seat of that effort.
      • BitwiseFool 5y ago
        >"Charity breeds wiggle room for actual hate groups." We must fight bigotry and hate, by being intolerant and disavowing the principle of charity! It is better that ten innocent persons "face consequences" than that one hateful person speak freely.
      • chipotle_coyote 5y ago
        Why is your read the only read that matters?
        • bitwize 5y ago
          I don't make the rules, mate.
          • deleted 5y ago
            [deleted]
      • dandelany 5y ago
        What a bizarre comment. I guess we should get rid of ALL queer lit then, since the least charitable reading of “queer” is a slur? I’d rather be a part of a community that gives folks the benefit of the doubt/charitable interpretation despite sometimes being duped by bad actors, than one which shuns and demonizes anyone who says anything that could be taken the wrong way despite their true intentions.
      • teawrecks 5y ago
        Oh hey, I just read an article about you.
      • zasz 5y ago
        Did you even read the short story? It's an excellent exploration of gender issues.
        • dragonwriter 5y ago
          ...among other things. I’m in awe of the amount packed into that tightly-written package.
      • jfengel 5y ago
        This was a case that deserved a charitable reading. She was attempting to co-opt a slur that had been used against her. Unfortunately, co-opting slurs is hard. You'll get push back. It was the headline, and many people don't read past headlines. She wasn't normalizing hate speech, but she was reflecting hate speech, very much in public. It's easy to call that a mistake in retrospect, and easy to say that as somebody who wasn't prepared for the consequences she should have shied away from it. That puts the blame on her and misses the bigger picture, that almost anybody can get caught up in forces far beyond their expectation or ability to handle that. I don't know how to fix that. There's not much advice I can offer. I wish I could offer her some comfort, but probably the best thing I can do is leave her alone and hope that she can recover.
        • zozbot234 5y ago
          > She wasn't normalizing hate speech, but she was reflecting hate speech, very much in public. Even if that was the case (and do note that the claim that the "attack helicopter" phrase is hate speech is by no means uncontroversial), how does this excuse the Twitter trolls who hurled far greater amounts of hate speech at her? Is this the sort of moral code that the "woke" would want to universalize on our society in their inerrant pursuit of perfect social justice - lex talionis on super steroids? Come on, even on its most charitable reading this makes absolutely zero sense.
        • Wowfunhappy 5y ago
          > She was attempting to co-opt a slur that had been used against her. Actually, I'm pretty sure she used the slur as her writing prompt, which is far more interesting! Particularly as it generated a genuinely good story!
          • jfengel 5y ago
            That's a more accurate description of what happened, yes. It's more like satire than like co-option, but has some similar social dynamics.
    • dragonwriter 5y ago
      No, to be even “the least charitable read of the situation” it would have to be a remotely tenable reading of the situation. It's the most actively looking for the opportunity to regurgitate shallow canned complaints kneejerk reaction to the title in isolation.
  • kurthr 5y ago
    Where did you get that information? Was it in TFA or somewhere else?
  • rhn_mk1 5y ago
    This is a beautiful illustration of the cause of the drama described in the article.
  • ChrisClark 5y ago
    This right here is exactly what this is all about. People who comment without actually reading the article, let alone the story they think is transphobic when it's the exact opposite.
  • andybak 5y ago
    What an utterly bizarre take on the situation.
    • cwillu 5y ago
      It's a great example of the problem the article is about. It's great irony. And I'm fucking done with irony.
• fidesomnes 5y ago
  vox.com. opinions discarded.
• devindotcom 5y ago
  This was a really interesting read. How horrible for the author that she had to be the sort of rag doll at the center of a bunch of ignorant and/or malicious flamewars. For someone in transition to have your identity and sort of gender worthiness questioned and evaluated must have been especially hurtful. If you haven't read the story, you should. It's an interesting one that explores in a smart way how the military and government might exploit the concepts of gender and sex in pursuit of ever-more-effective warfighters.
• dbrueck 5y ago
  A culture of hypersensitivity to the opinions of others + a source of infinite negative opinions = bad stuff for one's mental health.
• only_as_i_fall 5y ago
  I'm sympathetic to the author but I don't see anything in this very long article about how this "ruined her life"
  • _vertigo 5y ago
    She checked into a hospital because she was considering suicide..
    • xdennis 5y ago
      Possibly. But you can't trust everything you read on the internet.
    • e40 5y ago
      And removed her other stories from the publication queue.
      • only_as_i_fall 5y ago
        Do you consider the following claims to be equivalent then? "author chooses not to publish more stories following criticism" And "Woman's life ruined by internet mob"
        • deleted 5y ago
          [deleted]
    • only_as_i_fall 5y ago
      Sure, but would a stable healthy person contemplate killing themselves because of negative feedback from strangers? Moreover, she didn't kill herself so I fail to see how being in a mental hospital for a few weeks ruins your life? I'm not saying it's a good thing that happened to her, but I am saying that clearly it didn't ruin her life and the hyperbole demonstrated in the article is harmful to discussions about cancel culture.
      • 5y ago
• flotzam 5y ago
  Luckily, the (wonderful!) short story was archived at https://archive.is/oXDEt https://archive.is/oXDEt
  • pocw 5y ago
    Thank you for posting that. I've never read this story before and I love it. It so perfectly captures the tension of gender and turns a common critique of gender transition on its head. What is it called when you fill the straw man with rebar and concrete? I am also unsurprised that it generated controversy. There was an article yesterday about the Cassandra project using sentiment in fiction to track social change and conflict. This piece is a great bellwether for conversations around gender.
• MrBuddyCasino 5y ago
  > Isabel Fall was on a path to becoming herself, and then she wasn’t I don't understand why people are ignoring the fact that the suicide statistics for trans people are on the wrong side of the transition barrier? They have an identity perception illness (call it autogynephilia or whatever) which they expect to fix by transitioning. When that doesn't work they commit suicide in high numbers, since now they also ruined their bodies while enriching some sociopathic surgeon who profitted of the whole endavour. I won't go into details here (feel free to Google them), but the thing that trans-women call a vagina is not something you wish on your worst enemy. I don't expect anything from vox.com, they have no integrity whatsoever, but why is this on HN?
  • hjanssen 5y ago
    It is a shame that there still exist people out there that hold opinions like this one.
    • at_a_remove 5y ago
      It never fails to amuse me -- in that kind of bitter ironic "oh, humanity, how you never fail to become the thing you hate" fashion -- that people who once wailed about voices being silenced and certain (favored) people being "erased" or being told that they should not be alive have effortlessly rotated to complaining that someone out there should not exist.
      • hjanssen 5y ago
        I have never said that the person should not exist. Please refrain from interpreting my comment in bad faith. I am just sad that these opinions still exist. And I am more saddened that people think it is helpful or furthers the discussion to post these opinions. Suicide rates among trans people are definitly a topic to be discussed, but seeing the rest of the comment, I just cant shake the feeling that it was twisted in a way to support a talking point that was just _mean_ and ill-intentioned.
        • 5y ago
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• Jiro 5y ago
  >“The powerful want to say that we are entering a dangerous new era where ‘people disliking things en masse’ has coalesced into some kind of crowdsourced [weapon], firing on arbitrary targets from orbit and vaporizing their reputations,” she wrote to me in an email. “The use of mass social sanction gives the less powerful a weapon against the more powerful, so long as they can mobilize loudly and persistently. This is not new. Shame and laughter are vital tools for freedom.” >She cautions, however, that “like all weapons, it will do the most damage when aimed at the least defended, the isolated, those with no one to stand up for them, publicly or privately. And we must be careful with the temptation to use it inside our own houses to destroy shapes we think are intruders.” Repeating what I said elsewhere: If you support mobs, and the mob makes a mistake and attacks you or a friendly target, that's your own fault. Stop supporting mobs. Don't say "mobs are great, as long as they attack the powerful and avoid 'our own houses'". We know that mobs don't use nuance in picking their targets. Mobs hardly ever read what they're complaining about, and mobs freely ignore mitigating circumstances. So it really isn't surprising when the mob doesn't read your story and ignores that you're using the meme sarcastically.
  • jgon 5y ago
    “I didn’t think the leopards would eat my face!” says person who supports leopards eating people’s faces as an effective weapon for the less powerful against the more powerful.
    • deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    • MomoXenosaga 5y ago
      The revolution turns on itself. Predictable.
    • busterarm 5y ago
      Roar! is a pretty great movie!
  • Wowfunhappy 5y ago
    I think the situation is considerably more nuanced. Firstly, I haven't seen anything to suggest that Isabel Fall supported "mobs." In the quoted paragraphs, she was speaking about social media more generally. Secondly, communities do need immune systems. If you don't enforce some set of norms, everything goes downhill quickly. I don't know about you, but I don't like it when trolls come onto Hacker News and post incendiary nonsense for the sole purpose of starting flamewars; I imagine queer fiction communities don't appreciate that either.
• philipswood 5y ago
  Wow.
• Barrin92 5y ago
  Not entirely sure what to make of the ordeal. It seems pretty clear that the author has mental issues that go well beyond the shitstorm that the short story caused. As I understand it her real identity was never actually part of the conversation, so I don't understand what stood in the way of simply getting off twitter and leaving the pseudonym behind. It's totally reasonable to point out that the flamewar that was started by the story and revolved around the author is awful. But you don't need to own it, and it isn't new. Fiction around contentious cultural issues has always created controversy and trashing, and Twitter is just about the biggest cesspit there is on the internet. When the article ties the online behaviour to her suicidal thoughts and her being institutionalized and at the end her having abandoned transitioning, it goes too far because it implies that the former is responsible for the latter. It is not. As harsh as it sounds if an artist puts something out there, it might receive feedback in the crudest, dumbest, and harshest form possible. That is just how it is and you have no control over it.
  • Wowfunhappy 5y ago
    > As I understand it her real identity was never actually part of the conversation, so I don't understand what stood in the way of simply getting off twitter and leaving the pseudonym behind. She couldn't stop herself, which I can relate to after she'd poured her heart and soul into the story. >> “I sought out and read everything written about the story. I couldn’t stop,” Fall says. “It was like that old nightmare-fantasy. What if someone gave you a ledger of everything anyone’s ever said about you, anywhere? Who wouldn’t read it? I would read it; I would go straight to the worst things.” And then there's the whole gender identity thing making it even harder: >> One criticism above all got to her: that Fall must be a cis man, because no woman would ever write in the way she did. And because this criticism was so often leveled by cis women, Fall felt her gender dysphoria (the gap between her gender and her gender assigned at birth) increasing.
• TMWNN 5y ago
  >Fall wanted the story to be titled “I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter,” and when she eventually retitled it “Helicopter Story” as a vague gesture of goodwill, many people assumed she had been pressured into doing so. Fall wanted the story taken off the internet, and when it was, many assumed she had been “canceled.” Both narratives framed Fall as an unwitting puppet of forces beyond her control. How are the above not examples of Fall being coerced into doing things she did not want to? No one thinks that when an Internet mob causes someone to pull a blog post that that mob actually logged into the author's account and pushed "Delete". It doesn't change the fact that Fall was forced/coerced/strongly encouraged to do something the author would not have done otherwise. (Reading further) Ah, I see. Fall isn't against cancel mobs in general, and believes that one just happened to accidentally throw a glancing blow at one Isabel Fall, powerless (and thus someone undeserving of any Internet mob's wrath, unlike those with actual power) author in this case. >“The story was withdrawn to avoid my death,” she says. “It was not withdrawn as a concession that it was transphobic or secretly fascist or too problematic for publication. When people approve of its withdrawal they are approving, even if unwittingly, of the use of gender dysphoria to silence writers.” The level of copium Fall displays is over 9000.
• TMWNN 5y ago
  >Because there was little biographical information available about its author, the debate hinged on one question: Who was Isabel Fall? And that question ate her alive and >So what’s the worst that might have happened if, somehow, the “Attack Helicopter” detractors were right and the story was a secret reactionary text? Why did this matter? Why does this matter? I find peculiar and dangerous the idea that the author's biography matters. A story speaks to its reader, or doesn't, regardless of whether Isabel Fall or Adolf Hitler or Donald Trump or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or Bernie Sanders or Isaac Asimov or Robert Heinlein wrote it, or what motivated them to write it.
  • Wowfunhappy 5y ago
    This is, of course, a literally centuries-old debate about the importance of authorial intent!
• hirundo 5y ago
  > This is not censorship. She needed this to be done for her own personal safety and health.” This is not censorship. This is the heckler's veto.
• BugWatch 5y ago
  To my knowledge (and and all encountered uses), "apache attack helicopter" is not transfobic, but a reactionary meme against the "I identify as wolf-dragon asexual demi-boy with insert_list_of_self-diagnosed_psychological_conditions_here and pronouns t'ghe/t'gheyu'r," and similar "snowflakeisms") that's arose in the "tumblrsphere" of the 2010s... i.e. gender(change) is not the issue; the obvious bovine (drac[on]ian?) excrement is.