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  1. You must read the article before you can comment on it.
    • skrt2 years ago

      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.

      “I don’t know what I meant to do as Isabel,” she says. “I know [that publishing “Attack Helicopter”] was an important test for myself, sort of a peer review of my own womannness. I think I tried to open a door and it was closed from the other side because I did not look the right shape to pass through it.”

      Wow.

      • Karenz2 years ago

        Another great read on Readup which brings me so much that’s beyond my own sphere. I didn’t even know the title was a meme but it certainly drew attention. The biggest takeaway for me is that an apparently very talented writer was silenced and almost self-destructed thanks to people’s paranoia on all sides.

        • SEnkey2 years ago

          I was really struck by how people's responses were driven more by what they thought the author might be doing than by the story itself.

    • Pegeen
      Top reader this weekReading streakScoutScribe
      2 years ago

      This seems so tragic on many levels.

    • jeff2 years ago

      Here's to reparative reading! First time I've heard that term. I love the contrast with paranoid reading. An excellent analysis through and through.

      • Jessica2 years ago

        This is also the first I've heard of reparative reading, and I love the way it was described here. It's definitely a more compassionate and human way to approach reading (or consuming any kind of story).

      • Karenz2 years ago

        I agree, Jeff. I’d never heard of reparative reading either but it sure beats reading with a hatchet in your hand!

    • Jessica2 years ago

      Everybody I talked to in the course of reporting this story said some variation on “I hope Isabel is okay.” And she is. Sort of. In the months I’ve spent emailing Isabel Fall, she’s revealed herself to be witty and thoughtful and sardonic and wounded and angry and maybe a little paranoid. But who wouldn’t be all of those things? Yet I’m emailing with a ghost who exists only in this one email chain. The person who might have been Isabel has given up on actually building a life and career as Isabel Fall. And that is a kind of death.

      At the end of the article, I also was wondering how Isabel is doing, and hoping she is doing okay. Wow, this is incredibly nuanced reporting. This is both a though-provoking and heartwrenching read.

    • chrissetiana
      Top reader of all time
      2 years ago

      She died, even before she managed to live 💔 I read of the struggles trans people go through, but this one is just so sad and raw.

    • Alexa2 years ago

      This is a remarkable story, and heartbreaking in it's own way. I tend to be drawn to stories that show the machinations of the internet at work, especially the dark side, and this one is a beautifully written and engaging story of how it ate this woman up for daring to publish her art.

      Wow, indeed @skrt. That about summed up my response too, uf. Worthy read though. I read the book "Detransition, Baby" recently and it was fantastic, this hits home thinking of the beautiful works of art from other trans authors like Isabel that will be muted by this mass uproar of woke outrage, or whatever it was.

      But what this story really symbolizes is the fact that as we’ve grown more adept at using the internet, we’ve also grown more adept at destroying people’s lives, but from a distance, in an abstracted way.