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

Luckily, the (wonderful!) short story was archived at https://archive.is/oXDEt

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.

A culture of hypersensitivity to the opinions of others + a source of infinite negative opinions = bad stuff for one's mental health.

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.

>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.

>“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.

> 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.

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.

I'm sympathetic to the author but I don't see anything in this very long article about how this "ruined her life"

>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.