Please Do Not Get Mad At Me For What I Am About To Say About Dickstoats and Brave Buttercups: How to Fiction in an Angry World (Patreon)

Greetings, dear ones. It’s cold and rubbish over here HOW BOUT YOU? That’s all you can really say about January in New England. January, the worst month. The hangover of months. The month with crap weather, no holidays to look forward to beyond reading someone you thought was more or less okay being racist on the internet about MLK day, sitting there pissed off under a pile of things procrastinated that must finally be un-procrastinated, and all the while you’re supposed to make resolutions everyone knows you won’t keep. January is a total asshole. Everything is encased in ice and sludge and the salt that’s meant to deal with the ice and sludge and even the morning wind is like eh, fuck you and the boiler is all fuck you extra this is my time and I will be chewing through everything you got and you’ll still be taking baths to stay warm lol.

But you know what melts the snow and keeps our fingers red in the pale northern seasons? THAT’S RIGHT, KITTENS, FLAME WARS.

This is a very delicate essay to write, as the SFF world has been highly embroiled and extremely on fire with controversy about a particular story lately, and everything surrounding it is all just an upsetting, slushy, unclear mess. But I think it’s an essay I want to write, as much for myself as for you, because it’s an essay about fear and fearlessness, about risk in art, and about consequences. None of that is anything easy to talk about. It is easy to yell about. That’s sort of the problem. Taking a hard stance and allcapping it to the world in 280 characters and never backing down is easy. Looking at everything with empathy and nuance in 5000 words is hard.

SO LET’S NUANCE THE SHIT OUT OF THIS AND GET ME IN TROUBLE.

The long version of what happened is here. The short version is this: Clarkesworld Magazine published a story by a new writer named Isabel Fall called “I Sexually Identify As an Attack Helicopter.” This story obviously refers to the transphobic meme and was an attempt to reclaim it for the side of good, as some other slurs and offensive phrases have been reclaimed. It did not have the intended effect, and many trans (and cis) readers were deeply upset by the story. Others found it powerful. Everyone fought about it, and things got way out of hand, resulting in, among other effects, the doxxing of Isabel Fall, who was not out as trans and was forced to come out at a time and in a fashion not of her choosing, a great deal of invective leveled at Neil Clarke, who was not online to manage the fallout as he was having heart surgery, and in a final absurdity, the bizarre necessity of having to state for the record that being born in 1988 does not make someone a Nazi. (If you don’t know what’s up with ’88’ Google it and be sad.) The story was finally pulled at the author’s request.

Thanks a fucking bunch, January. 

I’m not here to argue the merits of the story or tell anyone they are right or wrong to feel the way they did about it. Fiction causes feelings. That’s the entire point. I’m not here to talk about “cancel culture” or track the phenomenon and cluck about social media, at least not much. There’s practically a whole industry devoted to that at this point. I’m also cis, so it’s not remotely my place to sit here and talk to you about what trans writers and readers experience and or speak from any kind of authority about this story in particular.

I’m here to look at where we go from here, because here is pretty unique.

This is the first time I can remember a story being “unpublished” due to reader response in all my years as a professional, and as a professional, everything else aside, it’s impossible to avoid feeling some kind of way about that. It isn’t censorship, because that’s a top-down process and this was at the request of the author due to the avalanche of responses, which is a bottom-up process. And of course in the days of anthologies you couldn’t just click a button and remove a story from a print book, so maybe this would have happened many times over if the internet had been around in earlier decades. The possibility of unpublishing is only a recent one. But still, it’s happened and we have to wrangle with that as a community.

Now, stories have certainly caused strong reactions before. In some sense, a strong reaction is what most writers hope for. Cat Person, for example, printed in The New Yorker last year, provoked a storm of controversy and yelling from all over the political and artistic spectrum. The difference, you know, if I had to ballpark it, is that the author of Cat Person ended up with a seven-figure book deal for her controversy, and the author of I Sexually Identify As An Attack Helicopter (referred to as ISIAAAH from here on out because I feel gross even typing that phrase) ended up pulling her story from a zine and is probably not in the best mental health space right now. 

And I promise you that stories far more offensive than ISIAAAH have been published online and in print, stories that meant to hurt, that meant to portray marginalized communities as risible and less than, not just a thought experiment by an inexperienced writer that failed rather drastically to launch. (Sweet baby jesus have you ever read a small press horror zine?) And they remain readable and accessible by anyone. Orson Scott Card, after all, is still a bestseller, and he does not give one lonely fuck what you have to say about him on Twitter.

I’m not sure what there is to be said about why this story and why now—there’s rarely a good answer for that when it comes to art, in terms of both approbation and celebration. Attention falls where it falls, like lightning, or rain after a drought, and which it will be is difficult to predict when it comes to challenging work. Because another thing I can promise you is that this absolutely could have gone the other way, and you’d have seen this story on every award list (it’s not even impossible that you may still). Perhaps it went the way it did because the title meant it wasn’t necessary to read the story to have a strong reaction to it (many did read it, some didn’t), perhaps because it was published, not by some Puppy-friendly shitpress but by Clarkesworld, a generally quite progressive publication with a demonstrated commitment to diversity and whose audience has certain expectations of content, perhaps because the author was new, and writing under a pseudonym, so there was no personal history available through which to understand the intent of the story, perhaps because the trans community on Twitter has been going through a lot of controversy and abuse lately and is justifiably afraid of more of the same, perhaps perhaps perhaps. 

Again, no one was wrong to feel any way they felt about the story itself. If you felt harm, that is valid. If you felt seen, that’s valid, too. It is unequivocably wrong to doxx, abuse, mob, and threaten anyone, but having powerful feelings about a story is never wrong. Raise your hand if you’ve ever felt victimized by a science fiction story. My hand is up and most of yours are too. But look, without blaming anyone: no one names a story after the supreme asshole edgelord meme and doesn’t expect a reaction of some kind. It was an intentionally provocative piece. People were, thus, provoked. We live in a post-postmodern universe and the function of art in that mess of starstuff is very much up for debate right now.

And that’s where I come in. Intentionally provocative.

Because shit, man, most of us are intentionally provocative in our work. Unless we just want to crank out another phat-ass pink-slurry quality dragon novel, we try to wrangle with difficult issues, cover new ground, say something that makes people re-examine themselves, and otherwise and generally push the envelope of “the conversation.” In fact, when I saw the title, before everything went Vesuvius on the Twitters, I knew at once the story would be a fairly lyrical reclamation of the meme, an attempt to neutralize it by taking it seriously and empathetically, and I will (somewhat riskily) admit that my first thought was: damn, I wish I’d thought of that. 

Pretty glad I didn’t now.

It hardly ever goes quite this badly, but a whole bunch of us actively try to make confrontational science fiction and fantasy, and I think we’re all having a real think right now about, well, not to crib from The Good Place, but what we owe to each other.

I’ve talked a lot in this space about taking risks with your writing. I’ve given you the old phraseology about spilling blood on the page, which I really do believe. I’ve told you to put your unique and fragile and powerful experience into everything you create, to be fearless in your work, break boundaries, munch on paradigms for breakfast, push yourself, believe in your intrinsic value, in your singular voice, leap into the unknown, unwritten page and write what scares you, what you think is taboo, what confronts you, your deep self, the world and its perspective, to speak the truth as you see it and let it stand on its own, to write what you are passionate about and believe is important to write, and let your gods sort it out.

And now there is this. Now there is someone who did just that and suffered deeply for it. She intended to provoke, but not to harm, I don’t think anyone is arguing anymore that Isabel Fall meant to harm her audience, but guess what, babies, the intent of the author hasn’t mattered in a minute. Welcome to critical theory. It kiiiiind of sucks here. Lee Mandelo has a great thread on the notion of harm in art and I’m going to let them say what should be said on that topic while I say what should be said on this one:

Darlings, did I steer you wrong?

Did I tell you to be fearless when there is something to fear? Did I tell you to embrace risk without proper safety equipment? Did I tell you to provoke and confront from a seat of privilege, knowing that an established author will never be quite as furiously skewered as a newbie whose vilification will have few consequences to anyone but her? Did I send you out without protection?

Maybe. Maybe I did. Maybe I committed the sin of the old pro—dwelling in the world as it was when I was a rookie. In 2004, when I was all new and bushy-tailed and full of manifestos, if you wrote an intentionally provocative piece, it would take awhile for the reaction to get back to you. And while Livejournal hosted MANY an epic social media battle royale, most notably Racefail 09 (look it up in the dusty tomes of ancient internet history if that phrase is unfamiliar to you) it simply took much longer to write a substantive essay, field comments, read other 3000 word responses to your response, and have it all pretty neatly archived for anyone to refer back to. I think the last real LJ blowup was the Requires Hate situation, (and I suspect lingering trauma from that fueled some of the very dark speculation on who Isabel Fall could be, since she had no track record under that name, as RH published under the pseudonym Benjanun Sriduangkaew until she was exposed and the sense of betrayal and a wolf among us was profound) and the person who pulled that all together and analyzed it literally won a Hugo for Best Related Work, it was so much labor. Twitter is easy and fast and pissed off and truly, egregiously terrible at archiving or providing any ability to follow a conversation back to its source. 

And back then, online zines full of free, linkable fiction were brand new. In fact, I was in one of the very first issues of Clarkesworld in 2006 and back then we had whole panels on whether the concept of a free fiction zine was even a good idea, whether they should be eligible for Hugos, whether it was possible for any of them to last more than a few issues without getting people to pay to access stories. Previous to that, zines really were that, zines. Paper magazines. Electric Velocipede. Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet. Mythic Delerium. You had to buy them at cons or subscribe through the mail like a savage. Short fiction appeared there and in print anthologies and there just wasn’t the chance for a story to spread like an Australian wild-fire the way it can now. Even if you posted a righteously angry review, people had to have already read it or go and buy it to know whether they agreed or disagreed. You had to put money in the game to play. 

And on top of all that, you could, and I did, win a Tiptree Award just for writing a female-forward fantasy novel. We were barely coming out of the jock-fantasy 90s and the other panels at those cons where people wrinkled their nose at online fiction were about whether diversity was a threat or a menace. The whole convention scene was a lot like certain corners of the internet now, barely able to tolerate women in SFF, talking like businessmen forced to take a sensitivity course, questioning the necessity of it all, let alone ready to embrace POC who weren’t Delany or Butler, trans and queer issues, disabled protagonists, #ownvoices, or any of “the conversation” as it runs today. The online scene was fighting for all those things, though, and that’s where Racefail and all the its angry children came from, the new generation coming up against the old guard. Where that happens, there is always anger. 

And on top of that, there was still a pervasive sense in the mid-00s that the internet was not real life, that what happened there could and should be brushed off, that there was some kind of magical boundary between what was said on the screen and what was said in meatspace or whatever the deeply uncool kids were calling it, that a strong person wouldn’t let it affect them (and other greatest hits phrases you heard at school as a child when you were bullied and no one wanted to deal with it), would just log out and walk it off, that online abuse couldn’t really hurt you. Conversely, and crucially, there was also a tacit assumption—and I know this sounds crazy, but hear me out—that the internet was an inherently good place. It was the future. It would make people better. Let us communicate and see each other without prejudice. (I KNOW. We were so young.) That when abuse and stalking and cruelty happened, it was just a few weirdos, but that on the whole, the internet was where you went to belong. A big part of this was that most people used pseudonyms and usernames and handles that made them truly anonymous. This was supposed to erase prejudice, since you couldn’t know for certain who anyone was. Authors and other artists were outliers in that we had to have our real names out there on our sites in order to use social media effectively to convince people to read our books. People knew who we were, and we only knew their nicknames. 

Now, for better or for worse, we’re all hanging out there with our professional reputations attached to every word. The internet is more real than life, in many frightening ways. That was supposed to fix the “just a few weirdos” issue. Surely, no one would be a flaming dickstoat if their work colleagues and families could see them do it any old time, would they? 

Welp.

So the point of all that is that when I wrote The Labyrinth and the books about Japan and The Orphan’s Tales, people had to really fucking care if they wanted to tear me a new one over it. And some did! A sensitivity reader (yes we had them then) once told me that The Orphan’s Tales was the most sexist thing she’d ever read and it hurt me down in my bones. I stood by my work but I ached and in some ways I still must or I wouldn’t remember it to tell you. A lot worse was said about my Japanese books, to the point that I nearly turned down the Japanese publishing company who commissioned Melancholy of Mechagirl because I was afraid it would look appropriatory, despite everything I’ve ever written about Japan coming from my very intimate and traumatic experience living there. But when I wrote my passions fearlessly, there was just…there was a lot less risk of permanent, career and psyche-shredding damage.

And then there was Palimpsest. Which did traumatize me to the point of trying to forget that I wrote it, of not wanting to answer even positive questions about it. I wrote a book full of bisexuality because I am bisexual, I wrote my experience, I wrote a confronting book, and by 2009, people could get to me very easily online, and my first Hugo nomination was a horrific experience of being told I was a deviant and a predator, attacked by douchebags because they hated the queer content, attacked by my own community because it wasn’t sex-positive enough when that was so needed at the time, on and on. For a book that would barely be considered woke today. And the stuff that hurt the most was the stuff that came from "my side." It's easy to dismiss people who just hate queer content. Not so much the rest. I suffered for that book, and later for writing Deathless while not being Russian, and it was from a place of having come through that suffering that I told you it was more important to be fearless than to be undamaged. I am not undamaged. 

But that suffering does not compare to what can happen now. What can happen with the best of intentions. Because you know what? The flaming dickstoats with the worst of intentions? Do not give a sad frozen shit on a windswept tundra who they hurt. They want to hurt. Hurt is a win condition for them. Call them racist and they will be proud. Call them sexist and they will crow. Call them transphobic, homophobic throwback reactionaries who wouldn’t recognize good work if it sat on their faces and they will organize their buddies to hijack the Hugos for two years just to spit in your eye. And this is part of why the furor has gotten so loud in the last four years. You can’t cancel them. You can’t cancel Stephen Molyneux or Sargon of Akkad or Vox Dei or Donald Trump. Fuck, you can’t even really cancel Weinstein, it would seem. They have their own network that will never take them off the air. And we feel helpless in the face of that, because we are, and so we try to make a difference where we can make a difference, which is really only with each other, because we’re the only ones who listen and care when we fuck up. So differences are made and damage is done and the pain goes around and around and does not dissipate. Everyone involved can mean as well as is possible (even when they don’t, because some of the people involved are dickstoats in gentlestoat disguise) and everyone involved can still get hurt. 

I’m reminded of what a friend and writer told me many years ago when I finally figured out I was lactose intolerant and couldn’t understand why all my other allergies went away when I quite dairy. She said: “When you’re constantly having a low-level histamine response, even if it’s so mild you don’t really notice it day to day, any irritant is going to have an outsize effect on your body and your reaction to it will be way out of proportion to the damage it’s actually causing to your system, because your system is already overtaxed dealing with a constant influx of input it can’t tolerate. Once you took away that source of low-level reaction, you were able to deal with everything else normally, and your system found equilibrium.”

And I think it’s like that now. We’re all like that now. Constantly exposed to a low-level influx of things we can’t tolerate, over and over and over. With every meal. Every night before bed. Every hot summer day. And unlike Livejournal or MySpace or even early Facebook, the President and his braying donkey dickstoat parade is in our Twitter feed, our social media, which is most of our internet, occupying what was once our space to belong, our place to relax and shitpost and talk to our friends. We can’t escape contact. There is no allergen-free menu.

But of course, you’re not a dickstoat. You have good intentions. You are inclusive and aware and plugged into “the conversation.” You want to do everything right. You can even be from a marginalized community yourself, writing about that experience. 

And you can still screw up. 

On a long enough timeline, everyone will screw up. Sometimes big, sometimes small. Sometimes no one will notice. Sometimes The Guardian will write a goddamn article about you because everyone noticed.

That is the risk when you are intentionally provocative. Perhaps—no, definitely— even more so for the marginalized. White straight men, especially established figures, can provoke, appropriate, experiment nearly at will, and few will find it worthwhile to complain in the same way (exceptions exist, obviously). No one gets that mad at Stephen King for his pretty terrible attempts at female characters or even his embarrassing, borderline addictive use of magical negroes. Despite being gay, Chuck Palanhuik’s fiction will blow your hair back and it’s barely discussed online anymore. Jonathan Franzen is an ass and a sexist writer who wanted to adopt a child of color to better write about their experience and literally people just laugh and he’s still a millionaire. But a trans artist without a track record? She must be perfect. Like so many other things, if you are not the default demographic, you must be a hundred times better just to be accepted as competent. Just to be given the benefit of the doubt. Cat Person was written by a cis woman about a trauma most frequently suffered by cis women. She suffered, but she was rewarded in the end. I don’t think Isabel will find herself with the second half of that equation, and I think that’s part of why.

And it will have a chilling effect. It just will. Pretending it won’t, that justice has in some sense been served, hurt sustained by reading that story paid back, doesn’t serve much of anything. We are all going to have to reckon with our own cold equation—how much damage am I willing to sustain to write what I believe is important?

Because Isabel believed her story was important. That taking back that meme would have healing value to herself and her community. What she didn’t anticipate was that no two trans people or enby people or fluid or queer or neutral people experience their identity and journey in the same way, and it is just so intensely personal that seeing it presented differently can make it all feel alienating and cast out and not understood all over again, just when those experiences are just beginning to be understood on the most basic 101 level by the culture at large, while at the same time gender nonconforming people themselves are absolutely under siege by the government, by that same culture, by some of their families, and perhaps most importantly for this situation, by bad actors online. Not all discourse on this subject is genuine and some of it comes from some serious goddamn goblins who just want an excuse to target trans people and - real names or not - it’s almost impossible to tell the difference. Their experiences and their bodies have been turned into battlegrounds. And when you’re fighting for your life…sometimes all helicopters just look like attack helicopters.

And I’m not sure it’s remotely fair to expect Fall to have known that was going to happen. Intentionally provocative, yes, but not like this.

Which means we all have to wonder what will happen that we don’t expect, no matter how many sensitivity readers tell us we did fine, no matter how confident we are that we spoke truth to power, when we try to write fearlessly and without heed for the consequences, as I still believe we should because that is where art must live.

Because the answer can’t be that no one writes about marginalized communities, not even the marginalized themselves, writing about their own lives, in their own voices, as Fall did. That way lies the old world of all-white all-male dickrocket dragonballs with nothing real to say. (And maybe not even that, because white men are just about as sensitive as anyone else these days). It can’t be to take no risks. It can’t be not to try. And it sure as fuck can’t be to just believe everyone is going to start being super nice and understanding and Twitter is going to stop being Twitter, because that’s not going to happen, certainly not while no one down here can affect the shitworld at large in any meaningful way.

So what is the answer? HA HA YOU THOUGHT I HAD ONE.

Ugh, gross, maybe I do.

I think the answer is…this is just part of it now. This risk. This fear. I’m not saying if you can’t stand the heat get out of the kitchen, I’m not saying if you write a story with an offensive meme title you should know what’s coming down the pike toward you, I’m not saying toughen up buttercup. No one can stand the kind of heat Fall copped. To have to unpublish your first story and have your first appearance in fucking mainstream media be all about how you hurt people with your art jesus post-postmodern christ. The fact is we are all beautiful sensitive buttercups, no matter how tough we want to seem in the face of a harsh industry and a harsher internet. Writers of fiction are largely introverted and breakable and riddled with self-doubt. We buttercup people wilt in the face of judgment and that won’t change even if we always leave the house in very excellent buttercup armor that makes us look super badass and invulnerable. 

But maybe this is just part of it now. Understanding that even if you do your utter best and are writing about your goddamned self, you can still faceplant in pretty spectacular fashion and people will be afraid to help you because incoming fire is indiscriminate. Shit, I’m afraid to write this and I’m putting it under a paywall on my own Patreon, where preumably people pretty much give me the benefit of the doubt. 

Because maybe fear is part of literature now. For some of us. For most of us. For those of us without the power to not care. For those of us whose demographic makes us acceptable social targets. For those of us who risk writing something out of the usual. Sometimes it will go spectacularly and sometimes it will…not. People have said for decades that the worst thing is for people to not feel any strong response one way or another to your work. The horror of the resounding meh. Or of silence. But maybe that’s the old way. Because that is…not the worst that can happen. If art can move the heart, it can also harm it, and if you aim to pierce the soul, you might just miss and break it. 

And maybe the silver lining of that is that fear will make us more careful, more considerate, better writers because we have to be. Maybe the dark undercloud of it is that for some writers, it will paralyze them, because fuck me, how could it not? Your stories are your babies and it hurts so bloody bad to watch your babies burn to ash on the stake of public opinion, and it hurts even worse to have to sit with the guilt over whether or not you made a bad baby or people just didn’t understand it or what.

But…you gotta try. You gotta try. Did I steer you wrong? I don’t want to think so. I don’t think so. You have to perform your truth. You have to bleed on the page. And you have to write beyond yourself and your own small universe as well. If I were to revise what I’ve been telling you these years it would perhaps be to be fearless in the draft and careful in the edit. Mindful in the edit. Before this, I said all the time that if you work with love and respect and you infuse that love into every word, (and find a good sensitivity reader) it’ll come out all right in the end. But the reason this controversy strikes me so deeply is that Isabel Fall definitely did just that and it did not come out remotely all right for her for a thousand reasons. So maybe love isn’t enough anymore, on this, the dead author side of critical theory. If it ever was.

There is fire out there and we are all of us wearing gasoline pants. The fire itself isn’t anyone’s fault, it’s there because we’re all fucking traumatized by our own cultures these days, all having that outsized histamine response because our systems can’t take the repeated exposure to every other goddamn shit-ass thing that’s happening all at once everywhere. But we have all got to learn to dance in those pants, because they don’t come off as long as you’re making art that matters. You are constantly at risk, because your readers are too, and we can only get through this together. A little kinder and less quick to assume the worst on one side, a little more careful and slow to mend our ways on the other.

Because you gotta try. Forever. The trying is the thing itself. And if we burn anyway, at least we did try, we weren’t dickstoats, we were GOOD STOATS, BRONT, because that story moved people, too, and some loved it, and some felt their perspectives shift from reading it, and I know because they’ve said so, and it’s hard to square that, that the same piece can cause such harm and such benefit, but that’s art, man, that’s how she do, and I guess in the end you just have to hope you come out whole and have done the minimum of harm being intentionally provocative can do rather than the maximum. We gotta be brave buttercups. Who knows what the scene will look like in 15 years when social media has found an even faster and more toxic way to shit itself on fire. We have to be ready for that too, and able to create within and in spite of it, and accept that there will be consequences sometimes for confronting and provoking, and they won’t all be from easily-dismissed assholes. Sometimes your own folk will pull you up, and sometimes they will be having an outsized histamine response to trauma, but sometimes they will be right to call you out, and you have to be able to sort out the difference with enough grace to sleep at night. And you have to be able to survive it either way, which is so, so hard, my loves. It can’t help but be hard. We aren’t well-equipped for this as human primate beings with big leaking eyes and soft vulnerable brains.

But all this is a part of it now. It just is. It’s always January somewhere. And someday it will probably be January for me and for you and it will only sometimes be because we deserved a garbage month of garbage. (No one deserves full January, though. First half of February at worst.) Sometimes it will just be that time of year. Something to weather. 

So listen, this is all I can pass out as far as safety gear: Don’t be a dickstoat. Be a buttercup on the page and a strong independent armored flower on the stage. Hope for the best. Write with kindness. Read with a little mercy. Shine as hard as you can while you can. Understand that when you set out to provoke, you are poking others in the trauma and you can’t ever tell ahead of time how much dairy their system has had to choke down today. That doesn’t make them evil and it doesn’t make you evil. It makes cows evil. Obviously.

And still, and always, write fearlessly, even though it opens you up to pain, to severe disapproval, to making mistakes, because one day we will all be gone and our stories will be all that’s left of us, so they should be the best of us. If people hate the best of you, well, at least you put it out there to be hated. It will shine when you’re dust. Even if once, long ago, it hurt quite a lot in the making or the shaking out of it.

And maybe, you know, don’t put the part that might upset people in the title.