Conversation

“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.” At the time of writing, Isabel was not yet ready to be out publicly as a trans woman, and there was a shortage of information out there about her. This lead readers to become suspicious of the story, and many read it as a right-wing transphobic piece, assuming that the author was a cisgendered male (which was not the case.)Her star rose even higher after Beyoncé sampled her well-known TED talk, “We Should All Be Feminists.” Sophie. Karenn. Georgia Girls. Neana. Millie & Andrea. What do these electronic music artists all have in common? They're all men. The question many people asked when “Attack Helicopter” was published was: What were Fall’s intentions in borrowing a transphobic meme for her title?it eventually spilled over to cis sci-fi fans who boosted the concerns of trans people who were worried about the story.Neither Sophie nor A.G. Cook's image appears alongside their work, and so the age-old cultural construction of woman as body and man as mind remains intact.many people began to worry that Fall was somehow a front for right-wing, anti-trans reactionaries. the feminine—sweetness, beauty, passivity—and encouraged to believe that they're their greatest asset at the same time as being their biggest crime. As Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie highlighted during a TED talk last year: "If a woman is getting ready for a business meeting, she has to worry about looking too feminine, and what it says, and whether or not she will be taken seriously." “More abstractly, more emotionally, I have stopped trying to believe I am a woman or to work towards womanness. If other people want to put markings on my gender-sphere and decide what I am, fine, let them. It’s not worth fighting.”Fall was channeling that ironic reclamation, but readers were quick to jump to their own conclusions. Many only read as far as the title before assuming Fall was either transphobic herself or a trans person intentionally using the meme to make a point. There was no Isabel Fall Twitter profile. “When the story was first published, we knew nothing about Isabel Fall’s identity, and there was a smattering of strange behavior around the comments and who was linking to it that led people to suspect right-wing trolls were involved in this,” says science fiction author Neon Yang. They were publicly critical of the story on Twitter. “In hindsight, they were probably just drawn by the provocative title and possibly did not even read the story. A few people insisted to me that the controversy began with honest but negative readings of the story by people who felt Fall had missed the mark, before mutating into something worse. One unstated assumption made here is that only trans people should write about trans experiences, and therefore, Fall should have identified herself as a trans woman directly in the bio attached to the story. On the other hand, by appropriating and objectifying stereotypically feminine identities while obscuring their own, the men of PC Music and Sophie are literally colonizing the female body and using it as an instrument for projecting their own agenda. Sounds familiar.Suspicion of her motives in writing “Attack Helicopter” spurred an almost immediate attempt to figure out her real identity, which fueled suspicion that she was trying to hide something. She was accused of being an alt-right troll or a Nazi. I have also heard people say, ‘We deserve to know if Isabel Fall is someone with a history of writing things that divide queer communities.’ 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 womenIt’s about the way the world treats us, and I think if you’ve lived in the world as a man with the privileges that the world accords to men and then sort of change gender, it’s difficult for me to accept that then we can equate your experience with the experience of a woman who has lived from the beginning as a woman and who has not been accorded those privileges that men are.…I don’t think it’s a good thing to talk about women’s issues being exactly the same as the issues of trans women because I don’t think that’s true.It’s really fucked up to call yourself SOPHIE and pretend you’re a girl when you’re a male producer [and] there are so few female producers…I think it’s really good music. I probably shouldn’t have said that.Nope.The page you're looking for doesn't exist.Back to the homepageWomen spend their whole lives being battered by this maddening catch-22: their social worth is measured by a femininity that, it turns out, is not really regarded as of much worth at all.“In this story I think that the helicopter is a closet. ... Where do you feel dysphoria the hardest? In the closet. Or so I have to hope; I have not been anywhere outside it, except for [in publishing ‘Attack Helicopter’], which convinced me it was safer inside,” Fall says. “Most of all, I wanted people to say, ‘This story was written by a woman who understands being a woman.’ I obviously failed horribly.”“It ended the way it did because I thought I would die,” she says.This kind of nuance gets completely worn away on Twitter, home of paranoid readings.(Fall also issued a limited-edition ebook of the story under the title “Helicopter Story” last fall, to qualify for an award — not the Hugo. The ebook was not nominated.)https://timeflayer.com/arc/heli/index.htm

Public

Notices

Feeds