In retrospect, four years later, I feel like the Isabel Fall incident was just the biggest ignored cautionary tale modern fandom spaces have ever had. Yes, it wasn't limited to fandom, it was also a professional author/booktok type argument, but it had a lot of crossover.

Stop me if you've heard this one before: a writer, whether fan or pro, publishes a work. If one were to judge a book by its cover, something we are all taught in Kindergarten shouldn't happen but has a way of occurring regardless, one might find that there was something that seemed deeply problematic about this work. Maybe the title or summary alluded to something Wrong happening, or maybe the tags indicated there was problematic kinks or relationships. And that meant the story was Bad. So, a group of people takes to the Twittersphere to inform everyone who will listen why the work, and therefore the author, are Bad. The author, receiving an avalanche of abuse and harassment, deactivates their account, and checks into a mental health facility for monitoring for suicidal ideation. They never return to their writing space, and the harassers get a slap on the wrist (if that- usually they get praise and high-fives all around) and start waiting for their next victim to transgress.

Sounds awful familiar, doesn't it?

Isabel Fall's case, though, was even more extreme for many reasons. See, she made the terrible mistake of using a transphobic meme as the genesis to actually explore issues of gender identity.

More specifically, she used the phrase "I sexually identify as an attack helicopter" to examine how marginalized identities, when they become more accepted, become nothing more than a tool for the military-industrial complex to rebrand itself as a more personable and inclusive atrocity; a chance to pursue praise for bombing brown children while being progressive, because queer people, too, can help blow up brown children now! It also contained an examination of identity and how queerness is intrinsic to a person, etc.

But... well, if harassers ever bothered to read the things they critique, we wouldn't be here, would we? So instead, they called Isabel a transphobic monster for the title alone, even starting a misinformation campaign to claim she was, in fact, a cis male nazi using a fake identity to psyop the queer community.

A few days later, after days of horrific abuse and harassment, Isabel requested that Clarkesworld magazine pull the story. She checked in to a psych ward with suicidal thoughts. That wasn't all, though; the harassment was so bad that she was forced to out herself as trans to defend against the claims.

Only... we know this type of person, the fandom harassers, don't we? You know where this is going. Outing herself did nothing to stop the harassment. No one was willing to read the book, much less examine how her sexuality and gender might have influenced her when writing it.

So some time later, Isabel deleted her social media. She is still alive, but "Isabel Fall" is not- because the harassment was so bad that Isabel detransitioned/closeted herself, too traumatized to continue living her authentic life.

Supposed trans allies were so outraged at a fictional portrayal of transness, written by a trans woman, that they harassed a real life trans woman into detransitioning.

It's heartbreakingly familiar, isn't it? Many of us in fandom communities have been in Isabel's shoes, even if the outcome wasn't so extreme (or in some cases, when it truly was). Most especially, many of us, as marginalized writers speaking from our own experiences in some way, have found that others did not enjoy our framework for examining these things, and hurt us, members of those identities, in defense of "the community" as a nebulous undefined entity.

There's a quote that was posted in a news writeup about the whole saga that was published a year after the fact. The quote is:

A paranoid reading describes perfectly what fandom culture has become in the modern times. It is why "proship", once simply a word for common sense "don't engage with what you don't like, and don't harass people who create it either" philosophies, has become the boogeyman of fandom, a bad and dangerous word. The days of reparative readings, where you would look for things you enjoyed, are all but dead. Fiction is rarely a chance to feel joy; it's an excuse to get angry, to vitriolically attack those different from oneself while surrounded with those who are the same as oneself. It's an excuse to form in-groups and out-groups that must necessarily be in a constant state of conflict, lest it come across like This side is accepting That side's faults. In other words, fandom has become the exact sort of space as the nonfandom spaces it used to seek to define itself against.

It's not about joy. It's not about resonance with plot or characters. It's about hate. It's about finding fault. If they can't find any in the story, they will, rest assured, create it by instigating fan wars- dividing fandom into factions and mercilessly attacking the other.

And that's if they even went so far as to read the work they're critiquing. The ones they don't bother to read, as you saw above, fare even worse. If an AO3 writer tagged an abuser/victim ship, it's bad, it's fetishism, even if the story is about how the victim escapes. If a trans writer uses the title "I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter" to find a framework to dissect rainbow-washing the military-industrial complex, it's unforgivable. It's a cesspool of kneejerk reactions, moralizing discomfort, treating good/evil as dichotomous categories that can never be escaped, and using that complex as an excuse to heap harassment on people who "deserve it." Because once you are Bad, there is no action against you that is too Bad for you to deserve.

Isabel Fall's story follows this so step-by-step that it's like a textbook case study on modern fandom behavior.

Isabel Fall wrote a short story with an inflammatory title, with a genesis in transphobic mockery, in the hopes of turning it into a genuine treatise on the intersection of gender and sexuality and the military-industrial complex. But because audiences are unprepared for the idea of inflammatory rhetoric as a tool to force discomfort to then force deeper introspection... they zeroed in on the discomfort. "I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter"- the title phrase, not the work- made them uncomfortable. We no longer teach people how to handle discomfort; we live in a world of euphemism and glossing over, a world where people can't even type out the words "kill" and rape", instead substituting "unalive" and "grape." We don't deal with uncomfortable feelings anymore; we censor them, we transform them, we sanitize them. When you are unable to process discomfort, when you are never given self-soothing tools, your only possible conclusion is that anything Uncomfortable must be Bad, and the creator must either be censored too, or attacked into conformity so that you never again experience the horrors of being Uncomfortable.

So the masses took to Twitter, outraged. They were Uncomfortable, and that de facto meant that they had been Wronged. Because the content was related to trans identity issues, that became the accusation; it was transphobic, inherently. It couldn't be a critique of bigger and more fluid systems than gender identity alone; it was a slight against trans people. And no amount of explanations would change their minds now, because they had already been aggrieved and made to feel Uncomfortable.

Isabel Fall was now a Bad Person, and we all know what fandom spaces do to Bad People. Bad People, because they are Bad, will always be deserving of suicide bait and namecalling and threatening. Once a person is Bad, there is no way to ever become Good again. Not by refuting the accusations (because the accusations are now self-evident facts; "there is a callout thread against them" is its own tautological proof that wrongdoing has happened regardless of the veracity of the claims in the callout) and not by apologizing and changing, because if you apologize and admit you did the Bad thing, you are still Bad, and no matter what you do in future, you were once Bad and that needs to be brought up every time you are mentioned. If you are bad, you can NEVER be more than what you were at your worst (in their definition) moment. Your are now ontologically evil, and there is no action taken against you that can be immoral.

So Isabel was doomed, naturally. It didn't matter that she outed herself to explain that she personally had lived the experience of a trans woman and could speak with authority on the atrocity of rainbow-washing the military industrial complex as a proaganda tool to capture progressives. None of it mattered. She had written a work with an Uncomfortable phrase for a title, the readers were Uncomfortable, and someone had to pay for it.

And that's the key; pay for it. Punishment. Revenge. It's never about correcting behavior. Restorative justice is not in this group's vocabulary. You will, incidentally, never find one of these folks have a stance against the death penalty; if you did Bad as a verb, you are Bad as an intrinsic, inescapable adjective, and what can you do to incorrigible people but kill them to save the Normal people? This is the same principle, on a smaller scale, that underscores their fandom activities; if a Bad fan writes Bad fiction, they are a Bad person, and their fandom persona needs to die to save Normal fans the pain of feeling Uncomfortable.

And that's what happened to Isabel Fall. The person who wrote the short story is very much alive, but the pseudonym of Isabel Fall, the identity, the lived experiences coming together in concert with imagination to form a speculative work to critique deeply problematic sociopolitical structures? That is dead. Isabel Fall will never write again, even if by some miracle the person who once used the name does. Even if she ever decides to restart her transition, she will be permanently scarred by this experience, and will never again be able to share her experience with us as a way to grow our own empathy and challenge our understanding of the world. In spirit, but not body, fandom spaces murdered Isabel Fall.

And that's... fandom, anymore. That's just what is done, routinely and without question, to Bad people. Good people are Good, so they don't make mistakes, and they never go too far when dealing with Bad people. And Bad people, well, they should have thought before they did something Bad which made them Bad people.

Isabel Fall's harassment happened in early 2020, before quarantine started, but it was in so many ways a final chance for fandom to hit the breaks. A chance for fandom to think collectively about what it wanted to be, who it wanted to be for and how it wanted to do it. And fandom looked at this and said, "more, please." It continues to harass marginalized people, especially fans of color and queen fans, into suffering mental breakdowns. With gusto.

Any ideas of reparative reading is dead. Fandom runs solely on paranoid readings. And so too is restorative justice gone for fandom transgressions, real or imagined. It is now solely about punitive, vigilante justice. It's a concerted campaign to make sure oddballs conform or die (in spirit, but sometimes even physically given how often mentally ill individuals are pushed into committing suicide).

It's a deeply toxic environment and I'm sad to say that Isabel Fall's story was, in retrospect, a sort of event horizon for the fandom. The gravitational pull of these harassment campaigns is entirely too strong now and there is no escaping it. I'm sorry, I hate to say something so bleak, but thinking the last few days about the state of fandom (not just my current one but also others I watch from the outside), I just don't think we can ever go back to peaceful "for joy" engagement, not when so many people are determined to use it as an outlet for lateral aggression against other people.

Thinking today about a post I saw some time ago about how wearing glasses shouldn't be considered a disability because it's "socially acceptable" and also about how I haven't been able to update my prescription for 2 years because I just cannot afford an optometrist visit or new frames.

I understand the impulse to say bad vision doesn't count because glasses are such a normal part of our society we don't even think of them as a disability tool anymore, bur the fact is if something happens to my glasses, I am Fucked. I can't drive. I can barely do everyday tasks. Working is going to be impossible. Even if I scrounge the money to get new frames, I have to wait WEEKS for them to arrive. And what happens to me in that time frame? Nothing good, I can tell you that. I literally need this tool to function on a daily basis, because my vision is bad enough to seriously disrupt my life without them.

If anything, glasses are a great example of what society could be if we took MORE disability seriously. If we had actual tools so readily available and normalized you saw them everywhere. But that doesn't make me not disabled, because the minute I lose access to that tool, I can't function.

Glasses wearers: often cannot legally drive without glasses or some form of vision assistance because our vision is impaired without them

“Okay but are you really disabled?”

A couple years ago I broke my glasses to the point of being unwearable. I happened not to have any backup pairs nor contacts.

I became ABRUPTLY aware of how disabled I actually am, visually. I’d had brief moments of “lol I’m so near sighted” before but all those times I’d had backup pairs (old prescription, but still let me SEE) or contacts (my eyes don’t like them, but again….)

This time, nope.

It was STARK.

There’ve been school districts that institute programs to make sure every child who needs glasses gets them, and the reading ability and test scores ALWAYS improve.

Ebenezer Scrooge’s Middle-Class Blues

It’s an interesting feature of the time – not unique to it, but characteristic of it – that Scrooge and his clerk belong to the same class. One is a poor man, one is a rich man, but Scrooge was Bob Cratchit at one point; a young man sufficiently educated to be employed as a clerk in some sort of financial establishment. However, it seems vanishingly unlikely that Cratchit will ever be Scrooge in the future – a wealthy, financially stable man with employees of his own. Before the visit of this particular Ghost, Scrooge doubtless congratulated himself on not being Bob Cratchit – or castigated Cratchit for his failure to be him. Fifteen shillings a week, and a wife and family, talking about a merry Christmas. I’ll retire to Bedlam.

The diversion point in their respective economic destinies is clear enough. Bob prioritizes having a family. Scrooge does not. (An unprofitable dream, from which it happened well that you awoke.) Cratchit’s choices are clearly presented as better – he’s surrounded by a loving family, he’s happily connected to his community, he’s enjoying his life a lot more than Scrooge is – but they are not without costs, and he is not the only one to bear them. The oldest daughter is already working – in the kind of job that expects her to come in on Christmas day. The youngest son is disabled, and needs care that the family cannot afford. No one is starving – yet – but the family is clearly one unexpected expense away from disaster.

Both Scrooge and Cratchit, to be clear, are in very good positions relative to many in their time! They are not condemned to lives of backbreaking agricultural labor or factory work. They have options, but those options come with tradeoffs. It seems unfair, to say that Bob Cratchit’s choice is between no family at all and a family where his child might die for lack of medical care, but that is more or less the shape of it.

Perhaps this intensifies Scrooge’s anxiety, knowing that the only thing that keeps him from being Bob Cratchit is his own choices. It’s one thing to have the poor safely stratified into a class to which you do not belong. It’s another thing to suspect that if you relax your guard for even a moment, if you even once prioritize something other than financial security, you might be the one in the threadbare clothes, working in someone else’s office for a wage which will not quite cover your bills.

A writhing shadow behind this anxiety, the bootstraps narrative is already beginning to take shape. If my choices could have put me in your position, then surely your choices could have put you in mine. Your poverty is a personal choice, and a personal affront to me. I can’t afford to make idle people merry. How dare you throw a party you can’t afford, take time off you can’t afford, have children you can’t afford? Why are you, my employee, asking me for something, just as if I were the one who owed something to you by virtue of having more instead of you owing something to me by virtue of having less?

There are two problems here – one, that even if you do everything right, luck as well as choice plays a role in whether you rise to the iron-girt top or sink to the precarious bottom of the middle class. The other is that the choices you have to make in order to do everything right – if an outcome that results in a Scrooge can be called doing everything right – are straight-up monstrous. To make, at every turn, the choice that maximizes your profit, imposes a terrible cost on others and ultimately on yourself.