The sci-fi writer in question is a trans woman herself. Saying she was attempting to normalize hate speech is the least charitable read of the situation, in my opinion.
Aka the only read that matters. Charity breeds wiggle room for actual hate groups.
Similarly, depending on the conference, naming your talk "Make X great/Y again", even ironically, may be grounds for a ban from the conference, under the same rubric: normalizing hate speech.
That strikes me as extremely reductive. You're trying to narrow the avenues of acceptable discourse, and worse yet, you're putting your enemy in the driver's seat of that effort.
>"Charity breeds wiggle room for actual hate groups."
We must fight bigotry and hate, by being intolerant and disavowing the principle of charity! It is better that ten innocent persons "face consequences" than that one hateful person speak freely.
What a bizarre comment. I guess we should get rid of ALL queer lit then, since the least charitable reading of “queer” is a slur?
I’d rather be a part of a community that gives folks the benefit of the doubt/charitable interpretation despite sometimes being duped by bad actors, than one which shuns and demonizes anyone who says anything that could be taken the wrong way despite their true intentions.
This was a case that deserved a charitable reading. She was attempting to co-opt a slur that had been used against her.
Unfortunately, co-opting slurs is hard. You'll get push back. It was the headline, and many people don't read past headlines. She wasn't normalizing hate speech, but she was reflecting hate speech, very much in public.
It's easy to call that a mistake in retrospect, and easy to say that as somebody who wasn't prepared for the consequences she should have shied away from it. That puts the blame on her and misses the bigger picture, that almost anybody can get caught up in forces far beyond their expectation or ability to handle that.
I don't know how to fix that. There's not much advice I can offer. I wish I could offer her some comfort, but probably the best thing I can do is leave her alone and hope that she can recover.
> She wasn't normalizing hate speech, but she was reflecting hate speech, very much in public.
Even if that was the case (and do note that the claim that the "attack helicopter" phrase is hate speech is by no means uncontroversial), how does this excuse the Twitter trolls who hurled far greater amounts of hate speech at her? Is this the sort of moral code that the "woke" would want to universalize on our society in their inerrant pursuit of perfect social justice - lex talionis on super steroids? Come on, even on its most charitable reading this makes absolutely zero sense.
This right here is exactly what this is all about. People who comment without actually reading the article, let alone the story they think is transphobic when it's the exact opposite.
This was a really interesting read. How horrible for the author that she had to be the sort of rag doll at the center of a bunch of ignorant and/or malicious flamewars. For someone in transition to have your identity and sort of gender worthiness questioned and evaluated must have been especially hurtful.
If you haven't read the story, you should. It's an interesting one that explores in a smart way how the military and government might exploit the concepts of gender and sex in pursuit of ever-more-effective warfighters.
Sure, but would a stable healthy person contemplate killing themselves because of negative feedback from strangers?
Moreover, she didn't kill herself so I fail to see how being in a mental hospital for a few weeks ruins your life?
I'm not saying it's a good thing that happened to her, but I am saying that clearly it didn't ruin her life and the hyperbole demonstrated in the article is harmful to discussions about cancel culture.
Sometimes it's better to accept that someone's lived experience is more accurate than your assessment of it from an article you just read. Your comment comes across as extremely callous and insensitive towards someone who is sharing their feelings of pain and loss.
"The story was withdrawn to avoid my death," she says.
It is not sensationalism, she was nearly driven to suicide. She is not obligated to summarize her trauma into bullet points for you so it meets your requirements for being described using certain words.
Just consider empathizing rather than antagonizing as a first response to something you personally don't understand or agree with.
I empathize but I just don't like the narrative here where it's all the internet fault and cancel culture has gone too far or whatever.
If you tell someone they're ugly you're a dick and if you tell someone they're ugly and they go home and shoot themselves you're still a dick but you're certainly not responsible for their death.
Apparently we aren't mature enough to have a discussion about reasonably expected consequences here though.
This wasn't just "negative feedback" from strangers. It was vicious hate from people claiming to be speaking for her own community - complete with crude misgendering, and accusations of being a Nazi based solely on misreading her frickin' birthdate as some sort of super secret sign. Talking about "but, but what would a stable healthy person do???" is just outrageous victim-blaming at that point.
>After she checked out of the hospital, Isabel Fall ceased to be Isabel Fall. “I had a few other stories in the works on similar themes, and I withdrew them; that is the most concrete thing I can say that I stopped doing,” Fall says. “More abstractly, more emotionally, I have stopped trying to believe I am a woman or to work towards womanness. If other people want to put markings on my gender-sphere and decide what I am, fine, let them. It’s not worth fighting.”
>Isabel Fall was on a path to living as an out trans woman with a career writing science fiction, and now, she says, there will be no more Isabel Fall stories. She is done writing under that name, and she now considers “Isabel Fall” an impossible goal to achieve, a person she will never be.
And the conclusion:
>“Isabel was somebody I often wanted to be, but not someone I succeeded at being,” she says. “I think the reaction to the story proves that I can’t be her, or shouldn’t be her, or at least won’t ever be her. Everyone knew I was a fraud, right away.”
Thank you for posting that.
I've never read this story before and I love it.
It so perfectly captures the tension of gender and turns a common critique of gender transition on its head. What is it called when you fill the straw man with rebar and concrete?
I am also unsurprised that it generated controversy.
There was an article yesterday about the Cassandra project using sentiment in fiction to track social change and conflict. This piece is a great bellwether for conversations around gender.
> Isabel Fall was on a path to becoming herself, and then she wasn’t
I don't understand why people are ignoring the fact that the suicide statistics for trans people are on the wrong side of the transition barrier? They have an identity perception illness (call it autogynephilia or whatever) which they expect to fix by transitioning. When that doesn't work they commit suicide in high numbers, since now they also ruined their bodies while enriching some sociopathic surgeon who profitted of the whole endavour. I won't go into details here (feel free to Google them), but the thing that trans-women call a vagina is not something you wish on your worst enemy.
I don't expect anything from vox.com, they have no integrity whatsoever, but why is this on HN?
It never fails to amuse me -- in that kind of bitter ironic "oh, humanity, how you never fail to become the thing you hate" fashion -- that people who once wailed about voices being silenced and certain (favored) people being "erased" or being told that they should not be alive have effortlessly rotated to complaining that someone out there should not exist.
I have never said that the person should not exist. Please refrain from interpreting my comment in bad faith.
I am just sad that these opinions still exist. And I am more saddened that people think it is helpful or furthers the discussion to post these opinions. Suicide rates among trans people are definitly a topic to be discussed, but seeing the rest of the comment, I just cant shake the feeling that it was twisted in a way to support a talking point that was just _mean_ and ill-intentioned.
"It is a shame that there still exist people out there ..." is not exactly ambiguous. People, then Exist.
If you want to be taken with as much charity as you think you deserve, try "it's a shame that person holds that opinion" and then go on as to why. But you didn't, you went straight for "exists" and left it there.
I think it was very clear what I was trying to say, and it was sincerly not calling for the eradication of people or whatever you are making out of it. Please stop being obtuse.
Contrast with flat-earthers. Despite all the proof that the earth is round, some people still believe that the world is flat, and their detractors belong to a mind-controlling conspiracy. You can be sad about folks believing that without calling for their violent eradication.
Don't believe everything you read on 4chan. (Not at all saying this as some sort of catch-all insult or that I even have any inherent issue with 4chan or think it's bad to go there; just saying it because they definitely read/post a lot on 4chan based on phraseology, and the misleading "41% meme" is also extremely prevalent, there.)
I don't know if you're intentionally misrepresenting the situation or legitimately don't know. There was a time when the scientific community believed what you are suggesting. That trans people had an illness that caused confusion about their gender, which led to depression, and suicidal thoughts. But in the last decade the science has indicated something different. Yes, Gender Dysphoria is a real thing, it's possible for your brain to tell you one thing while your body tells you another, and no amount of societal acceptance will solve that; the only real known treatment is to transition the person's body to match what their brain expects.
But the depression and suicide that often happens post transition is always associated with how society reacts to their transition. After years of study on this topic, we now know the depression/suicide has nothing to do with their transition. It's brought on by the people around them who see them now that their body physically reflects the self they've always known, and reject it.
> the only real known treatment is to transition the person's body to match what their brain expects
Except it doesn’t work. It is not a „treatment“. I had much less issues with the whole concept if that where the case. Why would I hate people with gender dysphoria? It is a terrible predicament.
>“The powerful want to say that we are entering a dangerous new era where ‘people disliking things en masse’ has coalesced into some kind of crowdsourced [weapon], firing on arbitrary targets from orbit and vaporizing their reputations,” she wrote to me in an email. “The use of mass social sanction gives the less powerful a weapon against the more powerful, so long as they can mobilize loudly and persistently. This is not new. Shame and laughter are vital tools for freedom.”
>She cautions, however, that “like all weapons, it will do the most damage when aimed at the least defended, the isolated, those with no one to stand up for them, publicly or privately. And we must be careful with the temptation to use it inside our own houses to destroy shapes we think are intruders.”
Repeating what I said elsewhere: If you support mobs, and the mob makes a mistake and attacks you or a friendly target, that's your own fault. Stop supporting mobs. Don't say "mobs are great, as long as they attack the powerful and avoid 'our own houses'".
We know that mobs don't use nuance in picking their targets. Mobs hardly ever read what they're complaining about, and mobs freely ignore mitigating circumstances. So it really isn't surprising when the mob doesn't read your story and ignores that you're using the meme sarcastically.
“I didn’t think the leopards would eat my face!” says person who supports leopards eating people’s faces as an effective weapon for the less powerful against the more powerful.
I think the situation is considerably more nuanced.
Firstly, I haven't seen anything to suggest that Isabel Fall supported "mobs." In the quoted paragraphs, she was speaking about social media more generally.
Secondly, communities do need immune systems. If you don't enforce some set of norms, everything goes downhill quickly. I don't know about you, but I don't like it when trolls come onto Hacker News and post incendiary nonsense for the sole purpose of starting flamewars; I imagine queer fiction communities don't appreciate that either.
>>Secondly, communities do need immune systems. If you don't enforce some set of norms, everything goes downhill quickly. I don't know about you, but I don't like it when trolls come onto Hacker News and post incendiary nonsense for the sole purpose of starting flamewars, and I imagine queer fiction communities don't appreciate it either.
Where do communities come from and when does something become a community? All I've observed is that individuals, for whatever reason, build a group around a shared liking or a shared hatred, not a formal vote. In a mob, verbally attacking a person of interest is normal. In fiction communities verbally attacking a subject of interest is normal, (even if the subject is happens to be what should be considered normal). While it's important for individuals to learn not to feed the trolls, there has to be room for disagreement. Even if it's vociferous disagreement.
The trouble is of course that communities form organically, and so they frequently need to be policed organically. And I'm not convinced the line between a "mob" and a "grass roots movement" actually exists.
Just for the purposes of illustration: Were the protests in Egypt a decade ago, or in Hong Kong more recently, "mobs"? Why, and who decides?
>>The trouble is of course that communities form organically, and so they frequently need to be policed organically.
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
>>And I'm not convinced the line between a "mob" and a "grass roots movement" actually exists.
To which I agree. In their mechanics there is little difference between one group and other. Just like there's little difference between soldiers and mercenaires.
>>Just for the purposes of illustration: Were the protests in Egypt a decade ago, or in Hong Kong more recently, "mobs"? Why, and who decides?
They are mobs to people who, rightly or wrongly, wanted to discredit them (respectively the Mubarek regime and the Chinese government). A stronger set of examples you could have compared are how the American news organizations reported the more violent elements of the George Floyd protests (statue topplings, burglary, arson, etc.) and the January 6 riots.
But if you mean in an objective sense, I'm asking the same questions as you are. Those two questions are the determining factors to what a community will be immune from and what "norms" to consider appropriate. But they have to assessed on an individual level lest one creates a cult or a dictatorship.
> But if you mean in an objective sense, I'm asking the same questions as you are. Those two questions are the determining factors to what a community will be immune from and what "norms" to consider appropriate.
Right! So I think we agree. But for that reason, I don't think the situation is as simple as "stop supporting mobs", as Jiro's comment put it.
Kind of. I'm just not sure if what you mean by norms is as a moral prescription or as a non-binding longitudinal study into what makes successful group dynamics. Your original statement implied the former. Though I may have read too much into it.
> Just for the purposes of illustration: Were the protests in Egypt a decade ago, or in Hong Kong more recently, "mobs"? Why, and who decides?
They look the same, so an honest mob could be the same as a grassroots movement. My personal rule is: if you're joining others to harm someone, it's a mob. If you're joining others to risk yourself for a cause, it's a grassroots movement.
Hong Kong protests looked like grassroots movements, lynching someone, physically or virtually, is a mob. The US Capitol attack was a mob.
I have no idea how to classify flash mobs that just dance, though.
If you let those immune systems to form organically, they will be hijacked by a small number of users that will be uproarious to make up for their numbers.
Not entirely sure what to make of the ordeal. It seems pretty clear that the author has mental issues that go well beyond the shitstorm that the short story caused.
As I understand it her real identity was never actually part of the conversation, so I don't understand what stood in the way of simply getting off twitter and leaving the pseudonym behind.
It's totally reasonable to point out that the flamewar that was started by the story and revolved around the author is awful. But you don't need to own it, and it isn't new. Fiction around contentious cultural issues has always created controversy and trashing, and Twitter is just about the biggest cesspit there is on the internet.
When the article ties the online behaviour to her suicidal thoughts and her being institutionalized and at the end her having abandoned transitioning, it goes too far because it implies that the former is responsible for the latter. It is not. As harsh as it sounds if an artist puts something out there, it might receive feedback in the crudest, dumbest, and harshest form possible. That is just how it is and you have no control over it.
> As I understand it her real identity was never actually part of the conversation, so I don't understand what stood in the way of simply getting off twitter and leaving the pseudonym behind.
She couldn't stop herself, which I can relate to after she'd poured her heart and soul into the story.
>> “I sought out and read everything written about the story. I couldn’t stop,” Fall says. “It was like that old nightmare-fantasy. What if someone gave you a ledger of everything anyone’s ever said about you, anywhere? Who wouldn’t read it? I would read it; I would go straight to the worst things.”
And then there's the whole gender identity thing making it even harder:
>> One criticism above all got to her: that Fall must be a cis man, because no woman would ever write in the way she did. And because this criticism was so often leveled by cis women, Fall felt her gender dysphoria (the gap between her gender and her gender assigned at birth) increasing.
>Fall wanted the story to be titled “I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter,” and when she eventually retitled it “Helicopter Story” as a vague gesture of goodwill, many people assumed she had been pressured into doing so. Fall wanted the story taken off the internet, and when it was, many assumed she had been “canceled.” Both narratives framed Fall as an unwitting puppet of forces beyond her control.
How are the above not examples of Fall being coerced into doing things she did not want to? No one thinks that when an Internet mob causes someone to pull a blog post that that mob actually logged into the author's account and pushed "Delete". It doesn't change the fact that Fall was forced/coerced/strongly encouraged to do something the author would not have done otherwise.
(Reading further) Ah, I see. Fall isn't against cancel mobs in general, and believes that one just happened to accidentally throw a glancing blow at one Isabel Fall, powerless (and thus someone undeserving of any Internet mob's wrath, unlike those with actual power) author in this case.
>“The story was withdrawn to avoid my death,” she says. “It was not withdrawn as a concession that it was transphobic or secretly fascist or too problematic for publication. When people approve of its withdrawal they are approving, even if unwittingly, of the use of gender dysphoria to silence writers.”
>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
and
>So what’s the worst that might have happened if, somehow, the “Attack Helicopter” detractors were right and the story was a secret reactionary text?
Why did this matter? Why does this matter? I find peculiar and dangerous the idea that the author's biography matters. A story speaks to its reader, or doesn't, regardless of whether Isabel Fall or Adolf Hitler or Donald Trump or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or Bernie Sanders or Isaac Asimov or Robert Heinlein wrote it, or what motivated them to write it.
To my knowledge (and and all encountered uses), "apache attack helicopter" is not transfobic, but a reactionary meme against the "I identify as wolf-dragon asexual demi-boy with insert_list_of_self-diagnosed_psychological_conditions_here and pronouns t'ghe/t'gheyu'r," and similar "snowflakeisms") that's arose in the "tumblrsphere" of the 2010s... i.e. gender(change) is not the issue; the obvious bovine (drac[on]ian?) excrement is.
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[ 122 ms ] story [ 2069 ms ] threadSimilarly, depending on the conference, naming your talk "Make X great/Y again", even ironically, may be grounds for a ban from the conference, under the same rubric: normalizing hate speech.
We must fight bigotry and hate, by being intolerant and disavowing the principle of charity! It is better that ten innocent persons "face consequences" than that one hateful person speak freely.
I’d rather be a part of a community that gives folks the benefit of the doubt/charitable interpretation despite sometimes being duped by bad actors, than one which shuns and demonizes anyone who says anything that could be taken the wrong way despite their true intentions.
Unfortunately, co-opting slurs is hard. You'll get push back. It was the headline, and many people don't read past headlines. She wasn't normalizing hate speech, but she was reflecting hate speech, very much in public.
It's easy to call that a mistake in retrospect, and easy to say that as somebody who wasn't prepared for the consequences she should have shied away from it. That puts the blame on her and misses the bigger picture, that almost anybody can get caught up in forces far beyond their expectation or ability to handle that.
I don't know how to fix that. There's not much advice I can offer. I wish I could offer her some comfort, but probably the best thing I can do is leave her alone and hope that she can recover.
Even if that was the case (and do note that the claim that the "attack helicopter" phrase is hate speech is by no means uncontroversial), how does this excuse the Twitter trolls who hurled far greater amounts of hate speech at her? Is this the sort of moral code that the "woke" would want to universalize on our society in their inerrant pursuit of perfect social justice - lex talionis on super steroids? Come on, even on its most charitable reading this makes absolutely zero sense.
Actually, I'm pretty sure she used the slur as her writing prompt, which is far more interesting! Particularly as it generated a genuinely good story!
It's the most actively looking for the opportunity to regurgitate shallow canned complaints kneejerk reaction to the title in isolation.
If you haven't read the story, you should. It's an interesting one that explores in a smart way how the military and government might exploit the concepts of gender and sex in pursuit of ever-more-effective warfighters.
"author chooses not to publish more stories following criticism"
And
"Woman's life ruined by internet mob"
Moreover, she didn't kill herself so I fail to see how being in a mental hospital for a few weeks ruins your life?
I'm not saying it's a good thing that happened to her, but I am saying that clearly it didn't ruin her life and the hyperbole demonstrated in the article is harmful to discussions about cancel culture.
You might have a point if Fall wrote this, but she didn't and you dont because this literally isn't her "lived experience"
It is not sensationalism, she was nearly driven to suicide. She is not obligated to summarize her trauma into bullet points for you so it meets your requirements for being described using certain words.
Just consider empathizing rather than antagonizing as a first response to something you personally don't understand or agree with.
If you tell someone they're ugly you're a dick and if you tell someone they're ugly and they go home and shoot themselves you're still a dick but you're certainly not responsible for their death.
Apparently we aren't mature enough to have a discussion about reasonably expected consequences here though.
Did you read this article?
>After she checked out of the hospital, Isabel Fall ceased to be Isabel Fall. “I had a few other stories in the works on similar themes, and I withdrew them; that is the most concrete thing I can say that I stopped doing,” Fall says. “More abstractly, more emotionally, I have stopped trying to believe I am a woman or to work towards womanness. If other people want to put markings on my gender-sphere and decide what I am, fine, let them. It’s not worth fighting.”
>Isabel Fall was on a path to living as an out trans woman with a career writing science fiction, and now, she says, there will be no more Isabel Fall stories. She is done writing under that name, and she now considers “Isabel Fall” an impossible goal to achieve, a person she will never be.
And the conclusion:
>“Isabel was somebody I often wanted to be, but not someone I succeeded at being,” she says. “I think the reaction to the story proves that I can’t be her, or shouldn’t be her, or at least won’t ever be her. Everyone knew I was a fraud, right away.”
It so perfectly captures the tension of gender and turns a common critique of gender transition on its head. What is it called when you fill the straw man with rebar and concrete?
I am also unsurprised that it generated controversy.
There was an article yesterday about the Cassandra project using sentiment in fiction to track social change and conflict. This piece is a great bellwether for conversations around gender.
I don't understand why people are ignoring the fact that the suicide statistics for trans people are on the wrong side of the transition barrier? They have an identity perception illness (call it autogynephilia or whatever) which they expect to fix by transitioning. When that doesn't work they commit suicide in high numbers, since now they also ruined their bodies while enriching some sociopathic surgeon who profitted of the whole endavour. I won't go into details here (feel free to Google them), but the thing that trans-women call a vagina is not something you wish on your worst enemy.
I don't expect anything from vox.com, they have no integrity whatsoever, but why is this on HN?
I am just sad that these opinions still exist. And I am more saddened that people think it is helpful or furthers the discussion to post these opinions. Suicide rates among trans people are definitly a topic to be discussed, but seeing the rest of the comment, I just cant shake the feeling that it was twisted in a way to support a talking point that was just _mean_ and ill-intentioned.
If you want to be taken with as much charity as you think you deserve, try "it's a shame that person holds that opinion" and then go on as to why. But you didn't, you went straight for "exists" and left it there.
But the depression and suicide that often happens post transition is always associated with how society reacts to their transition. After years of study on this topic, we now know the depression/suicide has nothing to do with their transition. It's brought on by the people around them who see them now that their body physically reflects the self they've always known, and reject it.
Except it doesn’t work. It is not a „treatment“. I had much less issues with the whole concept if that where the case. Why would I hate people with gender dysphoria? It is a terrible predicament.
>She cautions, however, that “like all weapons, it will do the most damage when aimed at the least defended, the isolated, those with no one to stand up for them, publicly or privately. And we must be careful with the temptation to use it inside our own houses to destroy shapes we think are intruders.”
Repeating what I said elsewhere: If you support mobs, and the mob makes a mistake and attacks you or a friendly target, that's your own fault. Stop supporting mobs. Don't say "mobs are great, as long as they attack the powerful and avoid 'our own houses'".
We know that mobs don't use nuance in picking their targets. Mobs hardly ever read what they're complaining about, and mobs freely ignore mitigating circumstances. So it really isn't surprising when the mob doesn't read your story and ignores that you're using the meme sarcastically.
Firstly, I haven't seen anything to suggest that Isabel Fall supported "mobs." In the quoted paragraphs, she was speaking about social media more generally.
Secondly, communities do need immune systems. If you don't enforce some set of norms, everything goes downhill quickly. I don't know about you, but I don't like it when trolls come onto Hacker News and post incendiary nonsense for the sole purpose of starting flamewars; I imagine queer fiction communities don't appreciate that either.
Where do communities come from and when does something become a community? All I've observed is that individuals, for whatever reason, build a group around a shared liking or a shared hatred, not a formal vote. In a mob, verbally attacking a person of interest is normal. In fiction communities verbally attacking a subject of interest is normal, (even if the subject is happens to be what should be considered normal). While it's important for individuals to learn not to feed the trolls, there has to be room for disagreement. Even if it's vociferous disagreement.
Just for the purposes of illustration: Were the protests in Egypt a decade ago, or in Hong Kong more recently, "mobs"? Why, and who decides?
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
>>And I'm not convinced the line between a "mob" and a "grass roots movement" actually exists.
To which I agree. In their mechanics there is little difference between one group and other. Just like there's little difference between soldiers and mercenaires.
>>Just for the purposes of illustration: Were the protests in Egypt a decade ago, or in Hong Kong more recently, "mobs"? Why, and who decides?
They are mobs to people who, rightly or wrongly, wanted to discredit them (respectively the Mubarek regime and the Chinese government). A stronger set of examples you could have compared are how the American news organizations reported the more violent elements of the George Floyd protests (statue topplings, burglary, arson, etc.) and the January 6 riots.
But if you mean in an objective sense, I'm asking the same questions as you are. Those two questions are the determining factors to what a community will be immune from and what "norms" to consider appropriate. But they have to assessed on an individual level lest one creates a cult or a dictatorship.
Right! So I think we agree. But for that reason, I don't think the situation is as simple as "stop supporting mobs", as Jiro's comment put it.
Kind of. I'm just not sure if what you mean by norms is as a moral prescription or as a non-binding longitudinal study into what makes successful group dynamics. Your original statement implied the former. Though I may have read too much into it.
They look the same, so an honest mob could be the same as a grassroots movement. My personal rule is: if you're joining others to harm someone, it's a mob. If you're joining others to risk yourself for a cause, it's a grassroots movement.
Hong Kong protests looked like grassroots movements, lynching someone, physically or virtually, is a mob. The US Capitol attack was a mob.
I have no idea how to classify flash mobs that just dance, though.
If you let those immune systems to form organically, they will be hijacked by a small number of users that will be uproarious to make up for their numbers.
As I understand it her real identity was never actually part of the conversation, so I don't understand what stood in the way of simply getting off twitter and leaving the pseudonym behind.
It's totally reasonable to point out that the flamewar that was started by the story and revolved around the author is awful. But you don't need to own it, and it isn't new. Fiction around contentious cultural issues has always created controversy and trashing, and Twitter is just about the biggest cesspit there is on the internet.
When the article ties the online behaviour to her suicidal thoughts and her being institutionalized and at the end her having abandoned transitioning, it goes too far because it implies that the former is responsible for the latter. It is not. As harsh as it sounds if an artist puts something out there, it might receive feedback in the crudest, dumbest, and harshest form possible. That is just how it is and you have no control over it.
She couldn't stop herself, which I can relate to after she'd poured her heart and soul into the story.
>> “I sought out and read everything written about the story. I couldn’t stop,” Fall says. “It was like that old nightmare-fantasy. What if someone gave you a ledger of everything anyone’s ever said about you, anywhere? Who wouldn’t read it? I would read it; I would go straight to the worst things.”
And then there's the whole gender identity thing making it even harder:
>> One criticism above all got to her: that Fall must be a cis man, because no woman would ever write in the way she did. And because this criticism was so often leveled by cis women, Fall felt her gender dysphoria (the gap between her gender and her gender assigned at birth) increasing.
How are the above not examples of Fall being coerced into doing things she did not want to? No one thinks that when an Internet mob causes someone to pull a blog post that that mob actually logged into the author's account and pushed "Delete". It doesn't change the fact that Fall was forced/coerced/strongly encouraged to do something the author would not have done otherwise.
(Reading further) Ah, I see. Fall isn't against cancel mobs in general, and believes that one just happened to accidentally throw a glancing blow at one Isabel Fall, powerless (and thus someone undeserving of any Internet mob's wrath, unlike those with actual power) author in this case.
>“The story was withdrawn to avoid my death,” she says. “It was not withdrawn as a concession that it was transphobic or secretly fascist or too problematic for publication. When people approve of its withdrawal they are approving, even if unwittingly, of the use of gender dysphoria to silence writers.”
The level of copium Fall displays is over 9000.
and
>So what’s the worst that might have happened if, somehow, the “Attack Helicopter” detractors were right and the story was a secret reactionary text?
Why did this matter? Why does this matter? I find peculiar and dangerous the idea that the author's biography matters. A story speaks to its reader, or doesn't, regardless of whether Isabel Fall or Adolf Hitler or Donald Trump or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or Bernie Sanders or Isaac Asimov or Robert Heinlein wrote it, or what motivated them to write it.
This is not censorship. This is the heckler's veto.