This article summarizes and references events and external texts that deal with: abortion/miscarriage, animal cruelty/death, body transformation, child sexual abuse, death, murder, rape and/or sexual violence, sexism/gender discrimination, shaming, suicide, transphobia, and violence.
According to Polish law, a stillbirth certificate should contain information about the child’s sex. Only then can the parents bury their child, receive parental leave and funeral allowance. If it is impossible to determine the child’s sex visually (genitals usually develop around the sixteenth week of pregnancy), the parents need to pay for genetic testing which provides information about the child’s chromosomal sex.
As in other parts of the world, the rise of far right and religious fundamentalist organizations has reignited the debate around abortion in Poland. In October 2020, the constitutional court controlled by the current right-wing government ruled that abortion due to fetal defects (one of three cases where abortion had been allowed previously, the other being when the pregnancy is a result of a criminal act or when the carrier’s life or health are at risk) is unconstitutional. This led to the largest protests since the fall of communism in 1989. At the same time, the streets of Polish cities have been flooded with billboards with pro-life messages in a coordinated action costing millions of Polish złoty.
The debate around abortion often revolves around the question of humanity: when does a fetus become a person? When it develops a nervous system? A heartbeat? The answer, at least according to Polish law, was there all along: a fetus becomes a person when it can be assigned a gender.
This will not be surprising to trans people, whose humanity is frequently denied because their identity is at odds with the gender they have been coercively assigned by normative institutions. But perhaps on some level it is felt and understood by cis people as well. Perhaps this is the reason for color-coding children with pink and blue clothing and for the “gender reveals” which have, to date, caused property destruction, bodily harm, and a wildfire lasting a week: an assertion of the child’s humanity as forceful as the gender binary itself.
Many trans writers have tackled themes of personhood, embodiment, and violence in trans experience through the lens of science fiction. These pioneering efforts have sometimes been fraught undertakings. In her essay “Never Be New Again,” writer, artist, and activist Morgan M. Page writes about the dangers of celebrating “trans firsts”—the milestones of trans discovery and achievements. “In order for trans people to be constantly discovered,” she says, “we must always and immediately be cast off, forgotten.” This act erases the historical lineage of trans people—in the context of SFF, writers like Roz Kaveney or Rachel Pollack. It also isolates newcomers to the community. To be the first is always, if only for a brief moment, to be alone: cut off from networks of support and from a wider context that could give one meaning. Queer people know the dangers of being first, of being only: the vulnerability that comes from standing alone in the spotlight. This essay is an attempt to trace this current in trans writing, to see the similarities and, perhaps more importantly, the differences in what each example might express about trans experiences and how they do it.
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In March 2018, Porpentine Charity Heartscape published “The Maximum Softness Capable of Being Exerted by All Machinery” in The Interjection Calendar 004. The story follows an android assassin, referred to only as “the weapon” or “she,” as she struggles to fit into civilian society after the end of an unspecified war.
At first the weapon is simply a tool, although a tool that “dreams names and goes to them when she wakes.” Brief, sometimes paragraph-long sections composed of brief, sometimes sentence-long paragraphs offer glimpses of the conflict (“A storm of furious gunmetal violence, forever, until”). With time, the weapon gains awareness through updates that make her more and more human-like, a process that is primarily connected to empathy, the ability to feel what the weapon's human targets are feeling, especially fear and pain. The measure of one’s humanity is the ability to be hurt. Consciousness is traumatic. But the trauma eventually becomes too much: “her brain was too messy and organic at that point to really forget, everything just got more confusing and fragmented.” The weapon can no longer fulfill her original purpose, can no longer be a cog in the machinery of war.
Eventually she ends up on a world where “the official policy towards weapons is integration.” “How lucky she is,” the narrator remarks, and the bitter irony of that statement is soon laid bare, as a person she meets at a job center seemingly jokingly asks the weapon not to blow their head off. The outwardly well-meaning, but actually incredibly fraught or patronizing remarks continue in other contexts, too, as the story depicts the subtle ways in which the weapon is abused and dehumanized by society at large and the individuals she encounters.
Though human-like in appearance, on a closer inspection the weapon sticks out: “tall and bony, anthropocentric ball bearings and jutting framework” and her body is simultaneously a source of fear and fascination. An artist the weapon meets at a party talks about being intrigued by “[her] kind,” compares her disarmament to castration, and expresses a wish to record her body. A woman at a mall complains to a security guard about feeling threatened by the weapon’s presence; when he asks her for “something specific,” she has no problems coming up with outright fabrications because she understands that they “live in a liberal age where [they] must establish pretext.” The official policy only serves to cover up the tensions beneath a veneer of politeness.
A plot thread interwoven with these episodes is the weapon’s relationship with a human woman who starts talking to her in a chat for weapons. It is never made clear what the woman is doing there, but it can be surmised that she is a chaser: someone who has a fetish for weapons. As Julia Serrano notes in Whipping Girl, for instance, fetishization is one of the strategies of objectification, and therefore dehumanization of trans women. At first the woman seems to be fascinated by the functions of the weapon’s body, which despite having some of its lethal functions disabled, is still a nonnormative body: one that stands out in a line to a women’s toilet, making the weapon feel out of place; one that doesn’t need food, one that emits black oil and nerve poison. At the same time, the woman jokes about the threat that the weapon poses and patronizes her just like the other people in the story. Despite her fascination, the woman doesn’t understand that the weapon’s needs are different to her own (“She asks her girlfriend if they can go somewhere less crowded but her girlfriend doesn’t seem to really understand”) and expects her to conform to the norms of human behavior. When she fails, the initial fascination turns to disgust.
Not that the weapon doesn’t try: she stocks food in her fridge despite not needing it, buys a couch and hides the “anaerobic coffin” in which she recharges from view, gets a pet goldfish. But it does nothing to help her be treated with respect or have her actual needs met; the microaggressions continue to pile up, sometimes disguised as benevolence (“I thought about telling my friend that I didn’t know you. But I want you to know I did the right thing.”) Throughout all this the weapon remains passive, desperately trying to project a non-threatening aura, which only enables others’ abuse of her. The story is written in a detached third person, with the weapon’s words for the most part reported in indirect speech. She’s passive and voiceless unless she’s apologizing or assuring someone she’s not a threat. Jimena Escudero Pérez argues in her article “‘An AI doesn’t need gender’ (but it’s still assigned one): paradigm shift of the artificially created woman in film” that artificial women tend to fall into one of two categories: “the promiscuous, dangerous and aggressive doll” or “the Victorian angel in the house figure.” This dichotomy accurately describes the double bind that trans women frequently find themselves in, as represented by the weapon: demurely agreeing to their subjugation and abuse for fear of being painted as aggressive and abusive themselves. It’s only when the weapon stealthily downloads a patch that restores some of her functions that she’s able to articulate her anger at her mistreatment, repeatedly asking her girlfriend “Like me now?”, as she changes shape, physically altering herself to fit expectations.
The girlfriend reacts with hurt (rhetorically reversing victim and oppressor being a well-recognized tactic of the latter), and so finally the weapon, having no one to turn to and no one to acknowledge what she’s going through, shoots herself in the head. But as the bullet pierces the aquarium and the pet goldfish struggles without water, the hole closes up and the weapon gets up to save the fish. In an earlier part of the story, designating “an artificial environment […] in which a form of life much lower in the hierarchy of sentience is sustained […] outside its natural habitat” is a mark of normalcy (ironically, given that everyone seems to treat the weapon like a lower form of sentience, but the habitat in which she is housed is blatantly unable to support her). In the end, taking responsibility for another being that is unsuited to live in the conditions in which it finds itself becomes a mark of true humanity, which the weapon displays in spades, even though it’s something she didn’t receive herself.
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The binary is a complex construct, but for the purposes of this essay the following aspects are important: (1) It is coercive. The individual has little or no say in the initial assignation of the gender category. (2) It is totalizing. It simplifies a spectrum of traits which may or may not be correlated for a given individual into two discrete categories usually based on nothing more than the shape of their external genitalia. Despite that it pretends to be rooted in objective biological reality and derives its power and authority from this assertion (as Jules Gill-Peterson demonstrates in her book Histories of the Transgender Child, even the concept of gender was created by the medical establishment in response to the inability of defining sex in a plausibly scientific way). (3) It is essentializing. On the basis of one’s genitals it assigns a specific social position as well as a number of traits, from which the most relevant is that those classified as “men” are active conquerors, and those classified as “women” are passive objects of conquest.
The pro-life campaign in the autumn of 2020 was not the first conservative undertaking of that year. Polish journalist and activist Klementyna Suchanow reveals in her book To jest wojna [This Is War] that Poland—like other countries in Europe and across the world—has been targeted by the concerted efforts of fundamentalist organizations such as the World Congress of Families to roll back sexual and reproductive freedoms. As outlined in a leaked document titled Restoring the Natural Order: an Agenda for Europe, they aim to suppress abortion rights, same-sex marriage, the right to divorce, and a host of other liberties. Their attempts take different forms depending on country (the creation of LGBT-free zones and a drive to restrict sexual education in Poland, restricting access to legal name change in Hungary, restricting access to trans healthcare in the UK, banning trans people from sports and bathrooms in the USA), but as Katelyn Burns notes, they come from a similar playbook and sometimes derive inspiration from one another.
In June 2020 the streets of certain Polish cities were overrun with vans bearing posters and blaring messages via speakers that equated homosexuality with pedophilia. One of the vans that formed part of the campaign parked next to an anarchist squat, harassing its occupants with a constant stream of homophobic propaganda. A few activists emerged from the squat. They slashed the posters on the van and its tires, and tore off a side mirror and a registration plate. The driver attempted to film the activists, which resulted in a scuffle. One of the activists, Małgorzata Szutowicz, also known as Margot, threw him to the ground. She was publicly arrested on 7 August, an event which sparked a spontaneous demonstration of support in the course of which the police brutally arrested forty-eight more people.
Margot is a non-binary person who uses a traditionally female name and feminine pronouns. Her arrest was a major event that brought awareness of non-binary people into the public discourse (which unfortunately also sparked a trans-exclusionary radical feminist movement in Poland). Many took issue with the perceived discrepancy between the linguistic expression of Margot’s gender and her physical presentation; some cited the lack of legal or medical transition as grounds for misgendering and deadnaming her. And yet, at the same time as some sought to assert the objective nature of the binary as something existing beyond an individual act of self-declaration, others were revealing how arbitrary it truly is, how quickly the categories can shift if the shift can be used for cruelty and control: on the night of Margot’s arrest, Jacek Wrona, a retired police officer and expert at the government-controlled public television TVP, tweeted that he hoped that “the charms of Miss “Margot” would be appreciated by her fellow inmates.” Feminine names and pronouns were enough for misogyny and rape culture to be unleashed against a political activist fighting against queerphobia.
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In May 2018, Katy Michelle Quinn published Winnie as part of Eraserhead Press’s New Bizarro Author series. The novella is prefaced with a brief editor’s note commenting on its themes.
The titular Winnie is a sentient gun, in love with her cowboy owner. Unlike the weapon in The Maximum Softness, Winnie is self-aware from the start and tells her story in the first person, drawing the reader in and grounding them among the more outlandish elements of the story. In the beginning the focus is on Winnie and Colt’s relationship. Despite being unable to communicate with him, Winnie is entirely devoted to Colt, accompanying him everywhere during his day and deriving a lot of pride from accurately shooting animals for him during a hunt. The relationship is also erotically charged, as can be seen in the very first chapter, where Colt’s cleaning of Winnie ends with her discharging and him ejaculating in his pants. But for all the seeming happiness, it is a fundamentally unequal relationship (if it can be called one at all), with Winnie remaining an object to Colt. This is perhaps best demonstrated when a stranger starts flirting with Colt in a bar and Winnie, unable to voice her jealousy, discharges on her own, killing the woman.
In true bizarro fashion, the story mixes strangeness, humor, genuine warmth, and violence, and this scene, perhaps more than any other, demonstrates the risks of treating such fantastical scenarios as one-to-one allegories for trans experiences. It’s not difficult to interpret Winnie’s feelings for Colt as an essentially transfeminine desire to be with him as a woman, but if read straightforwardly, the killing of Mildred would be really troubling—a metaphorical reinforcement of trans women’s supposedly violent, male natures, from which cis white womanhood needs to be defended. But read non-literally, the episode reveals some truth about hierarchical systems, built on subjugation and violence. Winnie’s choice is between being the tool of violence or its victim, her communication with Colt is only possible through it—and so violence is what she resorts to to make herself heard.
But Winnie dreams of being “warm and soft and wet and more [herself] than walnut and blue steel could ever be” and one day her dream comes true: she wakes up as a human woman, completely flesh and blood outside of a small piece of gun barrel sticking out from between her legs.
This moment reveals the truth of Winnie and her relationship with Colt, who is not made happy with Winnie’s transformation. He no longer has any use for her, and he’s not going to accept her as she is because he’s not interested in her as an equal, a partner. He wants her to remain a tool at his disposal, something he controls. Even in the brief moments when he acknowledges what happened, he accuses Winnie of selfishness: “You can’t just do this like it’s not gonna affect me!” Later on, however, the abuse becomes much more blunt and physically violent than that depicted in The Maximum Softness: Colt simply denies the reality of Winnie’s change and continues to treat her as an object. He carries her over his shoulder through the forest and tries to shoot with her, ignoring her protests and attempts to communicate. This treatment culminates with a horrific scene in which he attempts to clean her insides with a rifle cleaner—a scene that bears more than a passing similarity to corrective rape. This forces Winnie to confront the facts: that she “never wants to be a gun again” and that “everything that has ever been said between [her and Colt] was a chopped, screwed, sugar-dipped interpretation [her] mind has fed [her].”
With the way things were no longer an option, Winnie makes her escape. As she stumbles through Ghost Town (the place where she and Colt used to live), she encounters other citizens living there and, to her bafflement, everyone continues to treat her as a gun—a useless one at that, since she won’t perform the function that’s expected of her (which leads to a bleakly hilarious scene in which a man puts bullets in her mouth then covers it with his, in an attempt to commit suicide). The tension between who Winnie is and who she is perceived to be is impossible to resolve in the small conservative community somewhere in the Rockies—she’s simply subjected to more and more violence until she loses consciousness and is transported to Lovely Bubble Gum Town.
Lovely Bubble Gum Town (or LBGT for short) is vibrant and full of life, and populated primarily by people rejected by their previous owners upon transformation. Some still bear marks of the violence they’ve been subjected to. Nevertheless, Lovely Bubble Gum Town is a place of joy and healing, in marked contrast to Ghost Town, whose stifling, patriarchal norms sap the life out of it and result in its decline. The citizens of LBGT “speak words instead of shooting bullets,” and so they are able to live peacefully as themselves.
Which is not to say they are completely free of violence: in the climax Colt invades the town and drives his pickup truck through a festive parade (echoing the far-right terrorist attack in Charlottesville on 12 August 2017), killing some of the citizens. He promises to leave with Winnie, claiming he “just want[s] [his] rifle back”—an abuser who tries to get his victim back. But he is rebuked, with the citizens telling him that “There are no rifles. Only people.” Their solidarity breaks the power of Colt’s posturing machismo, reducing him to what he always was: a little lost boy, who drinks beer “not sure he likes the taste, but he likes how it makes him die inside”—a victim of patriarchy who tries to cope by turning its violence against someone else. Interestingly, the book ends on him, in a break from the first-person narration. While Winnie finds love and autonomy, he’s stuck repeating the same cycle.
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In May 2021, after a period of fighting in Gaza which resulted in thirteen casualties on the Israeli side and two hundred and forty on the Palestinian side, influencer Natalia Fadeev posted a TikTok video in which she poses wearing cat ears and a uniform, with a caption that reads: “I proudly served as a Military Police officer [sic] for 3 years in the IDF now tell me, do I look like I could harm innocent civilians?”
This is another side of the essentializing, binarist thinking: men are aggressors and predators, and therefore guilty by their very nature, whereas women are passive and innocent, and therefore morally pure. This thinking forms the bedrock of various forms of transphobia, including the trans-exclusionary or “gender-critical” feminism. Trans men were assigned the role of “women,” and so they are portrayed as innocent victims of a craze that leads them to mutilate their pristine bodies (the cover of Abigail Shrier’s book Irreversible Damage features a picture of a girl with a hole in her lower abdomen, where her uterus should be); trans women were assigned the role of “men,” and so they are presented as aggressors who try to infiltrate female spaces to rape women. This division, however, obscures the fact that trans-exclusionary feminism is motivated primarily by a revulsion at nonstandard bodies, and an opposition to the self-determination of gender. This is demonstrated by a British gender-critical feminist, Posie Parker, who suggested in a since-deleted YouTube video that armed men should patrol women’s bathrooms to protect them.
The invocation of the innocence of cis white femininity can be used to call for violence against an Other. It can also be used to hide women’s own capability for harm and abuse: in January 2020, Margot Szutowicz published a lengthy callout post in which she described her experience of psychological, economic, and sexual abuse inflicted by Klementyna Suchanow.
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In January 2020, Isabel Fall published a story titled “I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter” in Clarkesworld Magazine. Two weeks later, the story was pulled from publication at the author’s request, after the initially positive reactions turned increasingly critical and suspicious of Fall’s identity. In a subsequent statement, editor Neil Clarke explained that the story was a reclamation of the transphobic meme invoked in the title; that Fall herself was a closeted trans woman and not a TERF or a neo-Nazi (a claim made because her birth year was listed as 1988 in her author’s bio).
Many people have written about the situation, about whether Fall was right to publish the story and use that title, about whether people were right to criticize her; about the obligations of marginalized authors writing about difficult topics relating to their oppression. For a while it seemed all that would remain of the story would be the situation it created. A memory of an event, an echo. A bomb crater with the blast reverberating across the Internet—a hole where a story and its author used to be. Then the story was republished quietly as a limited-edition ebook under the title Helicopter Story. In April 2021, it was announced that the story under its new title was nominated for a Hugo Award for Best Novelette. Perhaps the story will survive in some way—and so it might be worthwhile to try and engage with the text itself instead of sadly or gleefully or angrily reacting to the discourse it created.
From the opening paragraphs the narrator of Helicopter Story asserts the primacy of gender over sex. But they do so in a less-than-straightforward manner, stating a claim, then exposing it as a lie, then asserting its fundamental truth after all (to honor the letter, if not the spirit of Fall’s request to have the story removed, there will be no direct quotations from it in the essay). There are a few other moments like this in the story: when the narrator compares an attack helicopter’s desire to fight to the way women and men want to be a certain way, then follows that with comparisons to a queen, a lesbian, a demiwoman, splintering the gender binary; or the one where the narrator—addressing the part of the readership who might be hostile to the very idea of gender—asks why they uphold gender norms if the biological reality of the body should be enough to classify someone as a man or a woman.
But the opening is also representative of the narrator’s attitude, of how the story will interact with the reader. The first-person narration of Winnie was designed to ease the reader in; the first-person narration of Helicopter Story is designed to alienate the reader and keep them at a distance; to evade straightforward answers, frequently breaking for asides that sketch out the setting or muse about gender; to provoke with direct addresses and questions, not to solicit sympathy.
(Which might be one reason for the reactions the story received.)
The narrator is Barb, formerly Seo Ji Hee—a pilot whose gender identity has been rewired from “woman” to “helicopter” (unfortunately Fall doesn’t specify what pronouns might a helicopter use; this essay will use a neutral “they”). The relatively sparse plot concerns a mission Barb and Axis—the gunner working in tandem with Barb—undertake to bomb a school on enemy territory, and a subsequent attempt to safely return home. The narration frequently detours from that, however, to offer digressions which flesh out the setting as well as Barb’s backstory and thoughts on gender.
Helicopter Story takes place in a post-apocalyptic setting, where the ravages of climate change caused the United States to devolve into hundreds of local governments, subsumed eventually by the Pear Mesa Budget Committee—a credit union managed by a powerful AI. In the story’s present, the federal government wages war against the Pear Mesa Budget Committee in an attempt to regain control of its territories. There are some recognizable allusions to imperialist wars waged by America (the terms “bycatch” and “normalizing the target” as equivalents of “collateral damage” and “neutralizing the target”), that sometimes veer into the absurd (legislators having to find a constitutional framework for declaring war against a credit union, which brings to mind the manufacturing of reasons for invading Iraq). For better or worse, this way of approaching imperialism avoids depicting its real targets—but then the story avoids depicting any victims of the school strike, aside from noting that there probably were victims. It can be read as evasiveness, or simply a desire not to engage in a pornography of destruction. But this removal into the abstract also highlights the way in which systems as vast and complex as a super-powerful AI—or an empire—operate in a way that evades logic. Every action is determined by so many factors, affected by so many elements, that the output cannot always be rationally explained. There’s just blind self-propagation, a planting of trees or flags (significantly, there is a mention that America has its own AIs who pick the bombing targets, mirroring the United States and the Pear Mesa Budget Committee even more).
Gender is also one such system—or simply a part of one, since the binary intersects with other systems of social hierarchy: capitalism, racism, imperialism, and in Helicopter Story Fall traces the intersections of those systems and how unified they are in designating an Other and subjecting them to violence. The Other can be another nation or social system (the reason for declaring war against the Pear Mesa Budget Committee is that its AIs cannot be integrated into the US’s obviously superior framework and so endanger the people under their care—that which cannot be assimilated has to be destroyed), or it can be a race, a sexuality, or a gender. Sex assignment is arbitrary, and ignores both the existence of intersex people and the ways that sexed diversity problematises any easy definition of sex. The violence that people assigned as women in particular face under the binary is therefore symbolic—stemming from the coercive assignation of the role of a “woman”—but also entirely literal in forms such as domestic abuse or sexual assault. This is the basis of the central conceit of Helicopter Story, in which the adaptive traits generated in response to an assigned gender role, such as the ways women (or “women”) anticipate and avoid the violence they encounter, can be repurposed for combat.
Barb chooses to undergo this procedure. This is a significant departure from the previous stories, which traced the transition of a weapon into a person. Barb, on the other hand, willingly becomes an instrument of violence because at some point they came to resent womanhood and want to be something new. It’s difficult to say if this means that Barb is trans, exactly (and this is a fraught sentence, given the speculations about Fall’s own identity in the aftermath of Helicopter Story’s publication). They certainly don’t fit the dominant narrative of “being born this way” (not least because one cannot be born wanting to be an attack helicopter)—they talk of having been a woman once, but also wanting to be something else. If it is transness, it’s transness as described by Andrea Long Chu in her essay “On Liking Women”: one predicated on desire, not identity. Yet the contents of Barb’s desire are ones that will be intimately familiar to women themselves, too: for control and autonomy, access to the means of self-determination and self-expression; for power. But just as access to technology is mediated by giant corporations, access to this sort of power is guarded by other powerful institutions (one only has to mention the medical gatekeeping that in many parts of the world regulates access to contraception or HRT and gender-related surgery). Barb theirself doesn’t offer an answer as to what exactly about being a woman they hated, so both readings are plausible. Perhaps they felt tired of being prey to the patriarchy (this would make sense of the otherwise unelaborated on detail of Barb being Korean, Asian women being stereotypically thought of as gentle and demure), and so they chose to serve the US military in return for becoming something powerful, something lethal, and being rewarded for it (as they say in one of the few moments where one can imagine Fall herself speaking through them, being able to be yourself well is the best feeling in the world). In Jimena Escudero Pérez’s terms, it’s the natural “angel of the house” choosing to become an artificial dangerous doll. But it’s also the well-known trope of monstrosity as a source of empowerment, except stood on its head: the monster becomes a figure of the status quo, because that’s where power resides.
Barb is a difficult character: fully aware of and willing to be complicit in war crimes, unapologetic and unsympathetic. But there is another character who’s arguably the heart of the story and inarguably trans: Axis. Barb’s gunner is revealed to be suffering from gender dysphoria—the biggest source of tension as Barb wonders what it means for their partnership and for safely completing the mission. It’s an affecting depiction of the pressures that familial, romantic, and other relationships can exert on trans people to remain in the closet. And significantly, it’s Axis’s dysphoria that leads them to see what Barb doesn’t: that the war will probably not end any time soon, despite what they are told. It points to a political and existential dimension of queerness as something that can make people ill at ease with the world, and thus notice what’s wrong with it. The story ends on a fairly optimistic note, as even Barb theirself thinks that even though they personally cannot feel it, perhaps Axis’s queerness, the queerness that resists strict classification and co-option, is necessary if the systems of power are ever to be dismantled. In this way, the story preemptively responds to those who speculated about the identity of the author and demanded disclosures about it.
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In July 2017 then-president Donald Trump announced that trans people would be banned from serving in the US army—a move that seemed to come as a surprise to the military itself. The ban went into effect in 2019.
Trans people in the USA are twice as likely to serve in the military as the rest of the population. The reasons for it vary; psychiatrist Dr George Brown suggests that joining the military represents a “flight into hypermasculinity”—trans women try to suppress their identity and prove to themselves that they are “real men.” There are also economic factors, such as underemployment and the pay gap: a recent report by the Human Rights Campaign reveals that trans men and non-binary people typically earn 70 cents to the dollar earned by a “typical worker”; for trans women it’s 60 cents. The army provides opportunities that might otherwise be unavailable, including healthcare (the US army, tellingly, blames “a strong economy” for failing to meet its enlistment quota in 2018). Logan Marchant writes about their decision to join the military after high school: “In hindsight, it is no surprise that I gravitated to the military. I wanted out of my home town in Greenleaf, Wis. I wanted to go to college. I wanted to learn a trade, because skilled labor inevitably finds employment. I wanted something that would force me to be straight and gender-conforming. In some idealistic way, I was searching for respect.” The last sentence feels crucial. Oppressed and ostracized, trans people search for a way to be valued as members of society. What better way than the glorified service?
Trump’s ban was a signal that trans people will not be valued even as an instrument of the state. President Joe Biden’s reversal of it in 2021 is a surface change at best, given the wave of state-level legislation that aims to make it impossible to exist as a trans person. As the prospects for trans people to exist in public dwindle (which seems to be the goal of the anti-trans legislation introduced in the USA and elsewhere), the army might turn out to be even more enticing. But valuing trans people only as instruments of the state is not that much better than not valuing them at all.
This is one example of how queerness can be instrumentalized in the service of empire. Another is Cara Daggett’s 2015 article “Drone Disorientations: How “unmanned” Weapons Queer the Experience of Killing in War.” In it the author argues that drone warfare, by not conforming to the traditional masculine ethos of combat as something that is done directly and away from home, offer possibilities of “uprooting the main roads of killing in war.” Queerness as a category is repurposed here to make drone warfare more palatable—it’s not difficult to imagine it might have served as an inspiration for Fall. The article was criticized for its callous attitude towards the victims of war, perhaps best exemplified by this: Daggett never specifies what the possibilities mentioned above might be exactly. She does, however, take the time to thank an anonymous reviewer for asking whether dying by drone might also be queer.
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In January 2020, S. Qiouyi Lu published My Gender Is Classified on aer website. The story was prefaced with an author’s note explaining that it is Lu’s response to Helicopter Story, aer own take on the core idea, and that ae decided to publish it independently to keep any resultant conversation to the trans community itself.
The story starts out from the same premise as Helicopter Story: the US army using neurobiology to reroute the gender pathways in the brain for combat purposes. The narrator is also of Asian descent (they are Rita Chen, alias Pave, a Chinese American). But that’s where the similarities end. Pave is a different narrator to Barb: more cocksure, less detached. They tell the story more straightforwardly, without the second-person addresses to the reader that kept intruding in Helicopter Story, openly voicing their feelings where Barb was more opaque (“They call it ‘transitioning into’ TACGENPRO, a term which manages to be both incredibly apt and incredibly tasteless”—a similar term, tactical-role gender reassignment, is used in Helicopter Story, but goes completely unremarked upon). And where Fall depicts the state subverting the gains of queer activists for their own ends, and using the ways in which existing in a gendered society shapes the brain, Lu has it wield “TERF tactics and ideology” concerning the biological basis for gender.
Where Lu truly makes the story aer own is in exploring the intersections of Pave’s identity as a Chinese American agender person, which leads to an in-depth engagement with the racial and ethnic aspects of American imperialism. Pave comes from the family of a Paper Son: a Chinese immigrant coming to the USA with forged documents at the time of the Chinese Exclusion Act. When China attacks Los Angeles, Pave speaks of the complex feelings of people in diaspora: the grief that comes with being attacked by their country of origin and fears of retaliatory strikes by the USA; and Pave’s private resentment at having their loyalty questioned. Meanwhile Lambda, Pave’s love interest, is a Californio: a descendant of the Spanish colonists who settled the land before the USA existed, and who eventually “found themselves saddled with a new nation and in service of a new empire.” They both become servants of the empire (albeit unwilling ones, in another significant departure from Helicopter Story) that excluded or subjugated their ancestors, because that is the only available way out from a life lacking other prospects.
And yet, despite the empire’s promise of liberation and occasional moments of euphoria when flying an aircraft (“I transcend gender, just as I transcend race, class, religion”), Pave’s life is stuck in a holding pattern. “I’m deployed eight out of twelve months of the year, and sometimes I choose to stay the rest of the time anyway,” they say. They’re focused only on survival: getting through the next mission, not forming attachments to their teammates. They are haunted by their gendered experiences of abuse and subjugation: their mother’s real estate client who taught them to fly and molested them, having a man in a bar tell them “he finds Asian girls cute, how he wants to take [them] home—ignoring the fact that [they’re] not a girl, nor some kind of pet to adopt.” Those experiences keep evoking a fight-or-flight response, and they serve as constant reminders that a gendered society will never see Pave as who they are; that they will keep being coercively assigned “woman.”
This violence and the traumatic responses to it are depicted not just through Pave, but other characters as well, including men—in various ways, gender is violent to everyone. One of the pilots drops out of a training exercise when the smell of fumes triggers a flashback to the aftermath of his rape. And then in the climax, during an extraction mission after a retaliatory strike against China, one of the F-16 fighter pilots becomes overwhelmed after learning that they’re extracting a friend who had an affair with his girlfriend—the hurt, shame, and wounded pride causes him to open friendly fire.
Where gender acts as something of a positive force is in Pave’s attraction to Lambda. Not that they necessarily see it that way, because of their rule of not dating coworkers: “No one lasts long under the demands of TACGENPRO, but the fighter pilots burn out fastest, and they often take others with them.” And yet despite their rules, “everything that Lambda does to show that he’s a man” keeps drawing Pave in. Eventually, after a brush with danger in the climactic mission, they agree to a dinner date with Lambda. It’s a sweet ending, even if the respite from war that it promises is fleeting, even if there are still forces constraining the two characters. But what seems most important is that in that moment, Pave decides to stop sheltering theirself, to pursue goals other than survival and think of theirself as something more than a machine. It’s a sweeter ending than Helicopter Story, though the happiness it promises feels more fleeting.
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In May 2010, Chelsea Manning was arrested for leaking information to WikiLeaks. She was sentenced to thirty-five years in prison—the longest sentence ever issued for leaking classified information to the public (the sentence was commuted by Barack Obama after seven years). Manning has been described as a whistleblower: someone who draws attention to an improper action out of concern for the public good and to restore the offending institution to its proper functioning in the service of the people. But this is something of a misrepresentation of what Manning did and her motives for it. When asked why she released such a vast trove of information instead of going for a more selective, strategic approach, Manning said that there is “this notion by the more liberal discourse, in which it’s about bad apples, whenever it’s, like, the entire barrel is, like, the problem … it’s about structures of the entire system. It’s really not about one thing, it’s about everything.”
As Lida Maxwell argues in her article “Truth in Public: Chelsea Manning, Gender Identity, and the Politics of Truth-Telling,” Manning’s leaking of classified information is impossible to separate from her transness—her experience of being in the army under the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy as formative to her outlook as witnessing the US army’s complicity in the rounding up of political dissidents in Iraq. The leaks were an act of rebellion against a system that rendered her powerless to speak, whether through the soldier’s ethos of obedience and duty or through “harassment, ridicule, and ostracism by her fellow soldiers” that designated her as “improperly gendered, queer, and out of place.” Maxwell writes that “the disconnect felt by Manning—between who she is and who others see—is not produced by the actual invisibility of her sexuality and gender, but rather by others’ construction of that sexuality as illicit, deviant, and best kept to herself.” In response, Manning chose an “open-ended practice of truthfulness,” revealing both herself and a certain truth about the world with the hope of finding a receptive audience—one that would see her as who she is and be willing to engage in a dialogue about the state of the world and how it might be transformed.
Manning described the state of being suppressed—ridiculed and at the same time unseen as who she truly was—as feeling like a “ghost.”
Which is the same word Emily VanDerWerff used to describe Isabel Fall.
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In May 2020, Neon Yang published “A Stick of Clay, in the Hands of God, is Infinite Potential” in Clarkesworld Magazine. Yang became a focus of criticism that tipped into outright harassment in July 2021, when they were quoted in Emily VanDerWerff’s article on Fall (and subsequently published a since-deleted thread in which they expressed regret at the hurt on all sides), and in December 2021, when they were announced as part of a lineup of a queer mecha anthology published by Neon Hemlock Press. Yang is described as having been “publicly critical of the story on Twitter,” which eventually led people to call them a ringleader of the campaign against Fall and attribute all sorts of motives to them, including professional jealousy. Judging from the available evidence (presented, for instance, in Doris V. Sutherland’s post On Neon Yang’s Toxic Reputation), they are not any more culpable for what happened than other people who voiced similar sentiments, cannot be said to have led any sort of campaign against Fall, and do not deserve to be singled out for their role. Nevertheless, their criticism of Helicopter Story as well as the choice of publication venue make "A Stick of Clay" a story worth including in the discussion.
In contrast to the intimate scale of the previous stories, “A Stick of Clay” offers an interplanetary scope and heightened emotions. The story is set amid a religious war between a Church and its apostates, with both sides using mecha. The protagonist, Stick, is a bioengineered pilot of one of the mechas, paired with Versus, a sigil (i.e., a human power source for the mecha). Together with three other duos they fight for the Church.
Structurally, this is one of the most complex stories discussed here, switching between third- and second-person narration for most of its length (and then utilizing first person in the final section) to represent Stick’s state of mind. Stick starts out as a big believer in the Church’s doctrine, saying of the apostates, “They needed to die … We have an objective, and they stood in our way. Therefore they had to be eliminated … In war, anything that obstructs us from our goal is an enemy,” to the shock even of its comrades. In this respect the story follows the trajectory of “The Maximum Softness” and Winnie: although less literally, Stick is also a weapon who eventually learns to become human. Even its choice of pronoun reflects that Stick thinks of itself as a tool in the hands of others; an instrument of God’s will. In contrast to those stories, the presence of dysphoria is marked from the beginning: “Every moment spent in the Phoenix is a chance to be something else. A chance to live and act with precision and direction. A chance to be in a body that fits. Only here does the pilot feel like an embodiment of the promise it was meant to be: perfection made flesh.” The third-person narration expresses the highest degree of depersonalization, as Stick can forget itself and focus on the simplicity of its mission: to smash, rend, and destroy—at least until the unit finds one of the apostates’ planets evacuated by a group of conscientious objectors to the war, which makes Stick doubts the Church’s depiction of the apostates as bloodthirsty animals.
Outside of the mecha, Stick is more unsure of itself, assaulted by questions and doubts, and in these sections the narrative switches to the second person, but unlike in Helicopter Story addressing Stick, not the reader. It desperately clings to the teachings of the Church even as they make it more and more miserable and as the events on the battlefield make it realize that not everything is as it seems. Given how often religious rhetoric—in phrases like “God doesn’t make mistakes”—is used to suppress trans identities, the choice to make this war a religious one is a savvy one on Yang’s part, as it throws light on yet another institution that reinforces the gender binary.
Part of Stick’s faith lies in Versus: dubbed “God’s perfect weapon,” she is the chosen one who is supposed to triumph over the forces of the apostates (including their mecha, the Beast). Stick’s idealization of Versus blinds it initially to the fact that she harbors her own doubts about her gender and her role in the Church, and in fact plans an escape from it together with other pilots and sigils. This makes Stick feel even more alienated. Though Versus pulls it into the group and makes it a part of their plans (significantly, their plotting takes place in a space Stick has come to think as “the girls’ bathroom”), there are also passages like the following, where there is a sense that it is an ill-fitting, not-quite-accepted element of the group:
Of course it was Rosa creating trouble. It was Rosa, after all, who objected to you at first. Not you, necessarily. Not in so many words. But it was her who went to Versus and said, I can’t bear to call your pilot an it. That’s not—That’s awful. I can’t. Can’t they pick something else? Can’t we use they?
Versus said, those are the pronouns it uses. I’m not bothered by them, what’s the problem?
The problem, Rosa said. The problem is that the people who thought they owned me used to call me an it. I heard it, every day, for years, as a child. And I’m sorry, but I can’t hear it now without thinking of them. I’ve tried so hard to forget. Please. It’s such a loaded word. You can’t possibly be okay with this idea. Are you?
I’m sorry, Versus said. I didn’t know. That’s awful, I’m sorry. I’ll bring it up.
In the end, a compromise: no pronouns, just Stick in place of it/its, which everyone, even Versus, takes a little too readily to. And it works. It’s not what you asked for, but on the other hand, no one’s unhappy.
It’s a subtle depiction of intra-community tensions, at how expressions of identity are limited to what is acceptable (there are echoes here of the debates around the use of the word “queer,” for instance, or indeed the “it/its” pronouns) and the ending of this passage feels bitterly ironic.
And so Stick faces a choice: to leave, to stay, or to die. And once again it is Versus who pulls it along, who stops it from dying by its own hand, and convinces it that there are possibilities for it outside of violence. It’s an affecting scene of supporting someone at a point of crisis, even if the dialogue gets very earnest: “They made you a weapon, just as they turned me into one. They fed us sweet lies to keep us happy at our jobs. But we aren’t weapons, Stick. We aren’t objects, no matter how much they want us to be. We don’t have to stay the way they made us.”
The conventions of the mecha story lend the characters a much greater degree of power and agency within the systems in which they function, which leads to perhaps the most optimistic ending of the stories discussed here: the pilots and sigils make their escape, taking the mechas with them and weakening the Church, and start a peaceful life on an idyllic planet. Stick picks another name (although is still sometimes called “Stick” by the others, which it puts up with because “they’ve earned it”)—and the narration switches to first person, in a sign that although its process of figuring itself out is still ongoing and open-ended, Stick has finally become itself.
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Art is not truth in the same way as classified information. It is not facts. But it is a kind of truth nevertheless: a record of the way one sees, and thinks, and feels—a personal kind of truth. If anything, in art the reveal of one’s self and something real about the world are even more intimately connected. And likewise, art depends on finding a receptive audience to engage in dialogue with, and hopefully to transform the world. Isabel Fall sought to transform the world and herself.
The effect of art, however, can often be visceral—and audiences are not always co-operative. In the case of Helicopter Story, for example, some among its audience turned hostile and accused the story—or even just its title—of being directly harmful to them, echoing the debates around reclaiming the word “queer.” Gretchen Felker-Martin interrogates this notion in her article “What’s the harm in reading?”, asking “what does ‘harm’ mean in the context of a short story posted on a magazine’s website?” and pointing out that an artist cannot control the way each reader feels when reading the story. Lee Mandelo makes similar points in their Twitter thread (collected here): “Other trans folk who have different experiences of gender and the world might be deeply seen by the art that you think is morally bad and harmful personally.” He also points to Eve Sedgwick’s distinction between paranoid and reparative reading: the first focusing on everything that’s problematic in a work of art, the other assuming a baseline of good faith.
It is not, however, difficult to understand why trans audiences might be predisposed to what Sedgwick would characterize as paranoid readings, given that a large part of the world is intensely trans-hostile and that virulent transphobia is frequently couched in euphemisms and dogwhistles, framed as “reasonable concerns.” It is tempting in such a world to shelter oneself from further hurt, to look warily around, and to strike at the merest provocation. The story of Isabel Fall is not the first trans woman to whom this happened. In May 2015, Porpentine Charity Heartscape, the author of “The Maximum Softness” published “Hot Allostatic Load”—an essay in which she details her own experience of abuse and ostracism. In it she writes, “An entire industry of curation has sprung up to rigidly and sometimes violently police the hierarchy of who is allowed to express themselves as a trans or queer person. The LGBT and queer spheres find it upon themselves to create compilations of the ‘best’ art by trans people, to define what a trans story is and to omit the rest. Endless projects to curate, list, own, publish, control, but so few to offer support and mentorship.”
Transfeminine people, she says, are especially disposable, because, “No one cares what happens to us.” Trans women are seen to be capable of doing harm, and not of being harmed—and perhaps as long as that lasts, they will not be seen as fully human. “Blame feels like a resting state for the world’s attitude towards us,” writes May Peterson:
It wouldn’t be so bad if the blame weren’t coming from so many sides. The TERF activist that vilifies trans women draws her power from the echo of this vilification across society. It agrees with cis bros that rage at the thought of us tricking them into ~gay sex~ with us. It agrees with conservatives who say we’re brainwashing their daughters and destroying their values. It agrees with transmisogynist queer and trans people who blame us for their oppression, as if everything would be easier for them if trans women would just shut up for five minutes.
The story of Isabel Fall is perhaps SFF’s most prominent object lesson in the way transmisogyny operates, as well as in what might happen when paranoia is the default setting of interacting with the world: a harm that goes way beyond feelings. She decided (only for now, hopefully) not to transition after all. Just like the short stories discussed in this essay, what happened to her points to the necessity of openness and vulnerability, of embracing the risk and possibility that comes with laying down the weapons and armor. Only then is it possible for the fighting to end. Only then is it possible to be human.
Nick Montgomery and carla bergman, the authors of Joyful Militancy would call this attitude joy. They use that term in the sense borrowed from Spinoza: joy is the capability to affect and be affected—an openness to experiences which might not be pleasant or comfortable, but which hold the potential for connection and transformation.
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On 18 December 2021, before the Hugo Awards 2021 ceremony, attendees were invited to have a red carpet photo taken by the event’s sponsors, Raytheon Intelligence & Space—part of an aerospace and US defense conglomerate producing drones and missile systems. Helicopter Story came fifth in the Best Novelette category. While not the first SFF story to tackle questions of personhood, violence, and complicity, the themes Helicopter Story shares with that wider ecosystem of trans work continue to haunt science fiction.