"I Sexually Identify As An Attack Helicopter" is one of the best science fiction stories I've ever read. Isabel Fall uses military settings and values like a scalpel to cut a cross-section of large and timeless issues right as they intersect our current society. It's simultaneously intellectual and visceral, complex and sparse. Not only in the story and how she speaks about gender, which I found myself screenshotting to remember particularly poignant sentences for later discussions about the topic, but also in her comments for the Vox article about how the backlash ruined her life. In this article she discusses to usefulness of mass-shaming, and of organizing into mobs generally, as a tool that has existed and had a legitimate use for as long as there have been disempowered people who have to band together to be heard:
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.”
Emphasis mine. Her seamless use of simile, evoking the knot of fear that might lead to us discharge a weapon inside our own homes in the dark of the night, like some kind of trans Rod Serling, is even more poetic because it is invoked to describe her own Twilight Zone-esque experience (The Monsters Are On Maple Street is my nomination for comparison episode).
As for the story itself, The Vox article summarizes it well:
As a story, “I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter” explores three separate but interconnected ideas: gender as an innate part of the self, gender as a performance for society, and gender as a (literal) weapon of the state. The story’s complicated exploration of gender identity doesn’t work for everyone, but it hits others with almost laser-targeted precision.
If we cheated ourselves out of a long career's worth of speculative fiction from this author by turning on her so viciously, we may deserve it but we will also be in a worse position for learning how to be more ethical, more judicious, and have better foresight in using our evolving cultural and cognitive capacities as weapons.
