Thread by @dynamicsymmetry

Okay, here are my feelings and thoughts on the Fall story. They are mine. They were very hard to write. I cannot express how uninterested I am in getting into a fight over them. I may just mute this outright. But anyway.

A few things to get clear first.

Cis allies on all sides, what we need from you in situations of crisis is to make space for us to speak and make sure our voices are heard. What we *don’t* need is for you to come riding in on a battle steed to tell us how we should feel.

Also, there is a difference between “X hurt me” and “X is a piece of trash with no redeeming value”. There is even a difference, god fucking help us, between “I think X plays on harmful tropes in a bad way” and “I think the author of X might be an undercover neo-nazi”.

Incidentally, I actually thought that last was a joke when someone told me about it. Then I found out otherwise. I’m not going to name any names here and I’m going to try not to berate anyone because my emotions are also running hot but what the fuck, people

1988 is a real year that really happened in which real people were born. Lots of them, good and bad and everywhere in between. I haven’t spoken to my brother in a long time but it’s not because he was born in Hitler Year, jfc

Someone disagreeing with you is not automatically bullying you, or you being gaslit.

A writer having their narrator say something does not mean the writer is right there with them. It’s a bad idea to take the thoughts and words of a character and automatically map them onto the author. It’s understandable, it’s just a bad idea and I think it should be avoided.

Okay. Moving on to the actual meat of what I want to say.

I fucking loved The Helicopter Story (I won’t use the title because people were hurt by it). Fucking. loved. it. I think that if you know me, and you know what I write, that probably doesn’t surprise you.

No, I didn’t write it. But it’s the kind of story I’m always trying to write. Which, more about that in a minute, because yeah.

That said, I completely understand why a lot of people *didn’t* love it. I completely understand why a lot of people were extremely hurt by it.

Especially the title, which, yes, maybe some of this could have been blunted by going with a different title and/or a disclaimer—but maybe not, and honestly I don’t think it matters at this point. The situation is what the situation is and we have to deal with it.

What I said this morning, and what I stand by, is that we need to make space for the fact that a thing can make some of us feel upset and hurt and some of us feel powerful and seen and it can be the *same damn thing*.

I want to be clear: I would be horrified and infuriated by what‘s happened even if I didn’t love the story. But I am going to talk about the fact that I did and why, because it matters.

I didn’t just love it because I thought it was very good (I do). I loved it far more because it reached deep into some painful and angry and confusing veins in my own experience of gender and body and turned them into knives and put them in my hands.

I loved it because it did what the best stories do for me: it reshaped parts of me into clarity and affirmation and in some cases into jet fuel. Not just my pain but my *confusion and bewilderment*, which are cousins to and intensifiers of pain.

It articulated some things, broke up others, made me feel uncomfortable and made me feel faintly euphoric in ways I can’t explain.

The title is included in this for me. The title was a scream of triumphant rage for me, a gigantic upraised middle finger, and for that reason I loved it.

I’m not saying that’s the right way to feel. I’m not saying anyone else should feel that way. I’m saying that I do.

(And if you come at me trying to delegitimize my identity as a nonbinary person just because I feel that way, I will block you so hard and so fast that your *descendants* will experience it.)

And this appears to be such a sticking point: it’s not just that a story full of stuff can make different people feel different ways, it’s that *the same exact stuff in the story* can do that, have two opposite effects simultaneously for different people. Neither is invalid.

I have my own experience of gender, and body, and dysphoria and pain associated with both. That experience is mine alone and it shapes how I respond to things. And I don’t have the same visceral reaction to the meme that some do.

I have one, it’s just not quite the same one.

We do not all trans in the same way. We aren’t a monolith. There’s no one right way to do it. We are a confused, angry, agonized, traumatized, infuriated, *messy* group of people struggling with our words and with people who use words against us.

And what I think people need to not lose sight of is that what can feel wrong for someone can feel so incredibly *right* for someone else. Someone‘s trans experience might be reflected where you see yours rejected or ignored. Your experience is yours; someone else’s is theirs.

That’s one of the things that makes it so difficult to wrestle with gender in this way (and why, again, cis people do not get to tell us how we feel): it is by definition fraught and raw and even combative.

If it feels like a fight it’s because we’ve been thrown into a war we didn’t choose and don’t want and nevertheless can’t get out of. Our very existence is a fight and we’re all walking wounded.

Which is why, yes, something like this story’s *title* can hurt someone so much. You see the fist and you flinch, even if it turns out to not have been aimed at you. Even if it turns out someone on your side was throwing the punch.

Reclaiming words is a difficult business. I think it’s extremely worth doing, but it’s still difficult and the potential for hurt is high.

But that’s another reason why someone else might see that title, read that story, and feel like someone has handed them the keys to a fucking Gundam and told them to go waste one of the chans with it. It’s why they might feel like they’re not only being seen but given a weapon.

Which is what the author was *trying to do*. Just... unfortunately in a setting where a lot of people will only see the weapon itself.

I understand that and I have no immediate solution to offer for it (I do *not* think the best solution is “don’t write/publish the story”).

I’m not really in a place to offer solutions at all right now. But what I’ve seen here? Ain’t it. This is not how we do this. Or it *better* not be how we do this, or we are in a lot of trouble as a community.

People have a right to their pain and they have a right to express their pain. But not every kind of expression is always okay, and people are still responsible for what they say and do.

And some forms of expression are just not okay under pretty much any circumstances.

Again, I don’t want to call specific people out. I don’t even feel like I could if I wanted to; something I do when shit like this goes down is blur it all into an indistinct soup of Horrible and I lose track of who says what.

But the disingenuousness and bad faith I’ve seen is just. This is not how we do this.

I said this was the kind of story I’m always trying to write. Messes like this frankly make me nervous for myself, because wow, *I’ve* never written anything jagged and raw and confusing and potentially hurtful.

My entire body of work isn’t *defined* by that trait, nosir.

So many of our experiences of gender are messy and fraught and raw and painful, and we want to tell those stories. We should be able to tell those stories. That doesn’t mean we should be able to tell them without criticism, but.

Again, you really shouldn’t need me to tell you that there’s a meaningful difference between criticism and “this story is trash and the author is probably a fake trans neo-nazi” (WTF ARE YOU EVEN).

You also shouldn’t need me to tell you that there’s a meaningful difference between “I understand why you felt the way you felt, but I felt the opposite way” and “your feelings are not my feelings and therefore your feelings are wrong”.

We have *got* to learn how to navigate this landscape, because guess what: as more trans/nb/gnc people find the courage to make and share their stories, we’re probably going to get more stuff like this.

More jagged, raw, hurtful stories. Stories that are inelegant and confused. Stories that make people feel angry and upset. Stories that are working out painful experiences. Stories that attack ugly things in ways that mostly just remind us of how ugly those things are.

I’m not saying we can’t criticize those stories. I don’t know how much clearer I can be about that.

I also know that we often internalize toxic shit and spit it back up in our work (and yet not everything that hurts you is internalized toxicity.)

I’m saying that we need to manage criticism and pain much better than this. Because aside from Fall, and from me, I’m worried about trans/queer people struggling to find their voices who are looking at this fiasco and thinking it’s not worth it because I promise they’re out there

Risks are risky, I completely agree with @AlexandraErin on that. When you take a risk you should do so mindfully. That said, I think we ought to do whatever is possible to make those risks less unnecessarily risky for vulnerable people.

Certain jobs are risky, but that doesn’t mean efforts aren’t made to mitigate the worst parts of that risk. When you get hurt on the job, “well it was risky” isn’t adequate.

I realize that’s not the best analogy, working construction or whatever isn’t making Art, I’m just saying I don’t consider “it’s tough out there” a sufficient state of affairs, and I do worry about people who will not take risks because they’re afraid of what will happen to them.

Not afraid of criticism. Afraid of being personally attacked and called a fucking neo-nazi (WHAT. THE. FUCK.)

This is not about white cis male comedians complaining about being canceled. This is about marginalized people who are already afraid to tell their stories and have probably already received abuse over it.

Honestly, things like this make me take a step back and consider myself and my own actions. Have I increased someone’s pain just because I wanted the pleasure of being part of a dogpile? Have I punched down just because I felt punchy and wanted to punch?

Have I torn something to shreds after carefully considering it and what it means? Or did I just get to tearin’? Did I hurt someone else simply because I was hurt? Was that an okay thing to do?

I’m sure I have. I’m sure I’ve been cruel far outside what a situation justified, and I’ve sicced followers on people because I was mad and because I could. I need to do better.

I think it’s also worth noting the exceedingly obvious, which is that this is a complex story that deserved thoughtful, careful discussion in just about any setting that isn’t Twitter. I blame the affordances of Twitter for a lot of this.

Thoughtful criticism and discussion of this story was happening, is happening, but that’s not what was amplified to the loudest volume and dominated the conversation. Which is how it always works. And I’ve been guilty of that before. I’ve dialed the rhetoric up to 11 for the RTs.

One could even fairly say the *title* is guilty of that. But again, I don’t want to get hung up on the title, because the title is important but is at least for me really is not ultimately the point here.

We are all constantly dealing with so much power and so much pain, so often far too little of the former and far too much of the latter. Then something like this comes along that mixes and blurs the two in a way that sets off intense reactions.

I actually think that’s good, on balance. I think this story might have generated some positive things.

Instead it’s been taken down, the author is in a bad place, and everyone is hurt and everyone feels misunderstood and as @BBolander said all the wrong people are probably laughing their asses off right now.

And I’m left looking at this thing that I loved, that I’m so glad exists, that I thought was beautiful and which made me feel less powerless and more seen, and I’m like... someone else’s pain matters.

But so does my power.

They both matter. Neither invalidates the other. The same work of art—yeah, it’s art—made us both feel those things, and feel them deeply and sincerely.

We should have been able to talk about that. And we are not going to be able to talk about that. Not now, anyway.

And I think that is such a fucking shame, and I think we’ve lost something, and I really hope people across the board do some serious soul-searching. I’m certainly going to.

This is not how we do this. We need to do better. I don’t know how we do that, but we do.

I’ve lost a workday to feeling absolutely sick over this and I really just wish I could focus on something else.

Oh, and one more thing: when you say a story like this is total shit, or worthless, or neo-nazi/alt right propaganda, please consider the possibility that you just totally took a sledgehammer to someone else’s transness.

Words matter.

The entire *point* of this mess is that words matter. That includes yours.