Thread by @MariaHaskins

“I sexually identify as an attack helicopter.

I lied. According to US Army Technical Manual 0, The Soldier as a System, “attack helicopter” is a gender identity, not a biological sex. My dog tags and Form 3349 say my body is an XX-karyotope somatic female.”

https://twitter.com/clarkesworld/status/1212852332553220097

I don't know how to process this story, and I don't know who Isabel Fall is. But this story went into me like a sliver under my skin.

From a paragraph near the end of this story:

"Maybe what Axis feels is a necessary new queerness. One which pries the tool of gender back from the hands of the state and the economy and the war. I like that idea." [cont]

[cont]

"I cannot think of myself as a failure, as something wrong, a perversion of a liberty that past generations fought to gain.

But Axis can. And maybe you can too. That skepticism is not what I need . . . but it is necessary anyway."

From the middle:

"But how often—really—do you think about the grand strategy of gender? The mess of history and sociology, biology and game theory that gave rise to your pants and your hair and your salary? The casus belli?

Often, you might say. All the time. It haunts me."

I read this in three sittings. I bounced off it hard in my first try, then came back to it to see where the premise went. I'm still not sure if I know where it went.

Several things about this piece are hitting me weirdly, and after discussing it with a few friends now, I am more concerned, not less.

Every line that starts with "When I was a woman" is jarring, even more on re-reads. Maybe because I don't feel like I've really ever met a woman who would say those things about herself as being what she liked/hated about being a woman.

Adding some thoughts on this story I received from Linn via DM:
"Whoever wrote this writes a lot; there's a fair amount of competence to the prose, and I kept having the feeling that the author was betrayed by the act of writing into accidentally writing a few good lines." [cont]

[cont]
"What I noticed most of all is that pretty much every emotional beat in the story depends on a set of assumptions that this reader doesn't share, and those bad beats threw me out of the story."

[cont]
"Basically, it's the gender fluency equivalent of getting basic science wrong in a science fiction story that depends on those ideas for its fuel. This is different from understanding ideas and interrogating them."

[cont]
"This is someone writing from a set of assumptions that are so unexamined they are not capable of seeing them in their own work. They also probably believe wholeheartedly in them and are writing the story as a joke, or a trojan horse or a way to "own" somebody..."

[cont]
"...they disagree with on these topics.) But basically, their world building doesn't hold up, in this story.The clumsy usage of "my sexuality is" suggests the author is not familiar enough with the body of work on gender to get the phrasing right."

[cont]
"The rest of the story does seem to bear that out."

And further from Linn:

"I decided I was done with womanhood, over what womanhood could do for me" -- this is strongly reminiscent of the conviction that pick-up artists and garden variety misogynists often hold..."

[cont]
"...that women use their gender as a source of unfair and vast power at the expense of men. It implies greed and power-hunger as motivation for changing how the world perceives the narrator's gender. This is also a terf dogwhistle."

Thank you so much to everyone who are engaging with this thread and putting their thoughts and reactions here. I'm heading to bed shortly (what is sleep????), but I have a feeling the discussion will go on here and elsewhere.

To clarify again: these particular quotes and this analysis is from Linn, who contacted me via DM.