Clarkesworld Magazine, Issue 95, August 2014 by Neil Clarke

It has been held up as an example of progressives eating their own, of the dangers of online anonymity, of the need for sensitivity readers or content warnings. In the 18 months since, what happened to her has become a case study for various people who want to talk about the Way We Live Today. Isabel Fall was on a path to becoming herself, and then she wasn’t - and all because she published a short story. She bristles when I ask her in an email if she’s stopped transitioning, but it’s the only phrase I can think of to describe how the situation appears.

That’s what she did, staying out of the limelight and growing ever more frustrated by what had happened to her.

She decided on something drastic: She would no longer be Isabel Fall.Īs a trans woman early in transition, Fall had the option of retreating to the relative safety of her legal, masculine identity. When she emerged from the hospital a few weeks later, the world had moved on, but she was still scarred by what had happened. 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. The story - and especially its title, which co-opts a transphobic meme - had provoked days of contentious debate online within the science fiction community, the trans community, and the community of people who worry that cancel culture has run amok. In January 2020, not long after her short story “I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter” was published in the online science fiction magazine Clarkesworld, Fall asked her editor to take the story down, and then checked into a psychiatric ward for thoughts of self-harm and suicide. If she wanted to publish again, she surely could.

There is a person who wrote under that name alive on the planet right now, someone who published a critically acclaimed, award-nominated short story. “The fact that Isabel Fall was an unknown led to her death.” Unknown travelers are shot on sight,” says Isabel Fall.

“In a war zone, it is not safe to be unknown.

Clarkesworld Magazine, Issue 95, August 2014 by Neil Clarke