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CORA STAUNTON HAS been included in the 2021 AFLW Team of the year after another impressive campaign with the Greater Western Sydney [GWS] Giants.
The four-time All-Ireland winner is named among the forwards who made the shortlist, averaging 10.3 disposals, and kicking 10 goals for her club this year.
Staunton, 39, who first joined the Giants in 2017, has consistently been a standout performer since her move Down Under. She capped off her debut season by picking up the Giants’ Goal of the Year award.
She then suffered a career-threatening triple-leg-break injury in 2019 but managed to make a full recovery the following season and has continued to make a vital contribution for the Giants.
The https://t.co/FJ7UMYhaFF Team of the Year has been settled 👏#AFLW
— AFL Women's (@aflwomens) April 6, 2021
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Dublin 6-15
Waterford 2-12
HANNAH TYRRELL MARKED her return to inter-county football in style this afternoon as the Irish rugby international hit 1-5, as reigning All-Ireland champions Dublin convincingly defeated Waterford in Parnell Park.
In a game that was dubbed a dress rehearsal for the championship, Dublin welcomed back Olwen Carey, Siobhan Killeen, and fresh from their endeavours in Australia, Lauren Magee and Niamh McEvoy.
Waterford did get off to a quicker start and dominated early possession, Maria Delahunty hit one from play and converted a free. Early Dublin efforts skimmed wide of the post but they opened their account for 2021 with a Sinead Aherne free after Niamh Hetherton was fouled.
As Dublin upped the intensity, Tyrrell proved her worth hitting four first-half points. The first was a beautiful effort after a long range exchange with Niamh Hetherton, and Tyrrell was again on the scoresheet twice more minutes later.
Aherne converted her second free from 30 yards before Lyndsey Davey opened up a six-point gap when she found the net after a sweeping team move involved Hetherton and Siobhan Killeen.
Hetherton’s first-half efforts were rewarded with with a point of her own, while returning Killeen and Tyrrell also pointed leaving nine points between the teams at the water break, 1-8 to 0-2.
Michelle Davoren of Dublin in action against Laura Mulcahy, left, and Rebecca Casey of Waterford.
Making her senior debut, Abby Shiels was comfortable in goals while Orlagh Nolan and Leah Caffrey bolstered a Dublin defence that proved difficult to break.
Dublin’s second goal began as a sweeping team move down field and with Aherne in an inch of space, the captain offloaded to Hetherton, the Clontarf player made no mistake finishing to the net to open up a 12-point lead.
Waterford steadied their ship and Eimear Fennell (2) and Delahunty brought the Munster side back into contention. The teams traded scores before the break, with Aileen Wall finding space and Delahunty firing over from short range. However, a brace of Aherne frees ensured Dublin took a nine-point lead into half time, 2-10 to 0-7.
The third quarter was a tighter affair, although Dublin did have to cope with two separate yellow cards, Aoife Kane just before half-time and Caoimhe O’Connor before the second water break but it had little impact on the champions.
Aherne raised a green flag of her own when Hetherton found her in space and as the substitutions rolled in, the scoreboard continued to tick over. Aherne (3) and Tyrrell raised white flags while Delahunty and Kellyann Hogan converted for Waterford.
The game finished in a goal frenzy with five goals inside eight minutes. Orlagh Nolan and Tyrrell found the net for Dublin inside a minute, Aileen Wall and substitute Kate McGrath raised green flags for the visitors. Caoimhe O’Connor signed off on the win for Dublin when she converted from the penalty spot.
Scorers for Dublin: S Aherne 1-7 (0-5f), H Tyrrell 1-5, N Hetherton 1-1, O Nolan 1-0, L Davey 1-0, C O’Connor 1-0 (1-0 pen), L Collins 0-1, S Killeen 0-1.
Scorers for Waterford: M Delahunty 0-7 (0-4f), A Wall 1-1, K McGrath 1-0, E Fennell 0-2, C Fennell 0-1, K Hogan 0-1.
DUBLIN: A Shiels; O Nolan, L Caffrey, O Carey; M Byrne, A Kane, L Collins; L McGinley, H Tyrrell; C O’Connor, S McGrath, L Davey; N Hetherton, S Killeen, S Aherne (captain).
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Subs: H Leahy for M Byrne (28), M Davoren for N Hetherton (42), L Magee for S McGrath (45), H O’Neill for S Killeen (45), J Egan for S Aherne (48), N McEvoy for H Tyrell (52), L Kane for O Nolan (55), C McGuigan for L McGinley (55), S Loughran for L Davey (55).
WATERFORD: M Foran; A Mullaney, L Mulcahy, R Casey; C Fennell, K McGrath, M Wall (captain); C McGrath, M Dunford; R Tobin, A Wall, K Hogan; E Fennell, M Delahunty, K Murray.
Subs: K McGrath for R Tobin (39), A Murray for E Fennell (46), L Cusack for A Mullaney (49), B McMaugh for K Hogan (49), N Power for M Wall (56), C McCarthy for C Fennell (56), R Dunphy for A Wall (56).
Referee: Kevin Phelan (Laois)
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IN THE 50th minute of Sunday afternoon’s game, Páidí Fitzpatrick was summoned to the sideline at Semple Stadium.
The Clare defender gestured with his fist as he ran off, saluting David McInerney who was coming on as a replacement. The message was clear.
He had put in a huge shift to help establish a winning platform for his team as they were nine points clear.
Now the focus shifted to supporting the rest of the team as they attempted to finish the job.
Ultimately Clare were successful by four points. It was a victory to savour for their team to kick-start the 2021 ambitions but for Fitzpatrick it held a deeper meaning, this was an experience that he had waited some time to share in.
A first senior championship start for Clare at 30 years of age, seven weeks shy from his 31st birthday.
It was almost 13 years exactly, since he had previously started a championship game of any description for a Clare team.
On 25 June 2008 he featured in a Munster minor semi-final against Tipperary.
On 27 June 2021 he featured in a Munster senior quarter-final against Waterford.
It was a notable journey from one point to the other. His maiden competitive senior appearance for Clare arrived on Sunday 1 March last year. He acquitted himself well in a nine-point league win over Dublin in Ennis but any aspirations for channelling that momentum were soon wrecked. The country shut down 11 days later and the pandemic ripped up everyone’s plans.
Source: Bryan Keane/INPHO
Well done to Paidi Fitzpatrick who made his competitive debut for Clare in the National Hurling league versus Dublin in Ennis at the weekend. Joined by club mate Cathal Malone as the other wing back. #clareseniors #paidifitz #sixmilebridgegaa https://t.co/J9WwzPxMYT pic.twitter.com/CRAwWBSiRE
— Sixmilebridge (@SMBClare) March 2, 2020
When the 2020 inter-county programme of games resumed, Fitzpatrick made the bench for Clare’s four winter outings. He got pushed into the action in Portlaoise last November, a championship milestone arriving in the 60th minute of their triumph over Wexford.
2021 brought league starts against Wexford and Dublin before the big chance arrived on Sunday. He seized it, blotting out the threat of Waterford’s Jack Fagan to announce himself on the senior stage.
“It’s an amazing story,” admits Syl O’Connor, the Clare FM GAA commentator and Sixmilebridge club-mate of Fitzpatrick.
“Páidí would have been looked upon as one of the best man-markers in the county at club level. No question about that.
“Some of his greatest battles were marking Conor McGrath, when he was in his prime. The ‘Bridge and Cratloe were very prominent for a period, playing each other. Conor was one of the top players, Páidí always got the task of marking Conor.
“He probably has a unique style as well, he’s a real man-marker. He’d probably never run 100 yards and pop it over the bar. But the man that’s on him, won’t do that easily either.
“He’s a massive player from the ‘Bridge point of view. Very influential and very well got with the team.”
Back in 2008 he moved from club underage ranks to fill the centre-back spot for the Clare minor hurlers in a team powered by the inside attacking duo of McGrath and Darach Honan. It was a campaign where they made a rousing start by beating Cork but were then knocked out by Tipperary.
Fitzpatrick was on the fringes of the county U21 squad in 2010 and 2011 without ever managing to break into the first fifteen.
Then followed a long spell away from the inter-county game yet his hurling never declined. He focused on his work with the club and prospered.
When Sixmilebridge lifted the Canon Hamilton Cup last September, it ensured Fitzpatrick would pick up his fifth Clare senior hurling medal since 2013. He had started in all five final wins, captaining them in 2017, while covering a range of positions including full-back, wing-back, midfield and centre-forward.
Source: Lorraine O’Sullivan/INPHO
In his homeplace they appreciated his worth as a golden age for the club was enjoyed.
“I’d often think of the example of Shane Prendergast in Kilkenny,” says O’Connor.
“Came in the first year and won the All-Ireland (in 2015), he was captain the next year for the All-Ireland and was gone the following year. He was 29 when he came in.
“Look, everybody would be surprised to see you make your senior championship debut at 30 years of age. There’s no doubt about that. But you’d have to look at it and say, how did that happen?
“I think he’s come into the scene now, based on the type of player that I believe Brian Lohan looks for. Big men and trying to get power into the team. Páidí has fallen into the category then of making his championship debut at 30 years of age.
“That half-back line is a massive unit with himself, John Conlon and Diarmuid Ryan. The size of Páidí is a big plus and his man-marking ability.”
Playing club hurling at an elite level gave him a strong grounding, to the fore for a dominant side in Clare, then testing himself in Munster against heavyweights like Na Piarsaigh and Ballygunner.
His older brother Stiofan was midfield on the Clare minor team that lifted the All-Ireland crown at the expense of Clare in 1997. His father PJ has been a club coach of renown in the county, a long-serving principal in Clonlara National School where he was one of the early influences in the hurling careers of current Clare stalwarts Colm Galvin and John Conlon.
Cathal McInerney and Páidí Fitzpatrick in the 2019 Clare county senior final.
Source: Lorraine O’Sullivan/INPHO
Fitzpatrick spent some time travelling as well, switching careers around 2016 from chartered accountancy to mobile and web development.
On the day of the 2019 All-Ireland hurling final, he was lining out at Treasure Island in San Francisco to help Na Fianna win the senior hurling final against the Tipperary club. Wolfe Tones player Rory Hayes was a team-mate that day, now they are both part of the Clare defensive unit.
And this week they’ve a Munster semi-final to prepare for.
Back in 2006, Munster’s U16 inter-divisional hurling tournament culminated with East Clare pipping Mid Tipperary by a point in the final. Páidí Fitzpatrick was on the winning side, Noel McGrath on the losing team. Given their general positioning, they’re likely to renew acquaintances on the pitch next Sunday.
McGrath’s inter-county career exploded to life after that game 15 years ago, Fitzpatrick’s has taken a bit longer to take flight.
“It’s unusual nowadays to be starting so late,” admits O’Connor.
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“But then again there’s nothing unusual nowadays about a fella blazing a trail of glory at 18 or 19 and then he’s gone. Maybe for a change, it’ll go the other way for a while.
“He stuck at it. The worst thing you can do is stand beside Páid Fitzpatrick, you’d only be looking up at him. He’s a massive lad.
“And if there’s a job to be done on the hurling pitch, he’ll do it.”
– First published 06.00, 29 June
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MORE IRISH PLAYERS have earned new Australian Football League Women’s [AFLW] contracts as the focus switches to next season.
Mayo and Cavan stars Sarah Rowe and Aishling Sheridan have committed their immediate future to Collingwood, putting pen to paper in recent days.
Yesterday, Rowe was one of six players to have a new deal announced, signing on until 2023. The 25-year-old recently completed her third AFLW campaign, playing seven goals across an injury-hampered season, while kicking one goal.
Having undergone shoulder surgery as the curtain came down on the 2021 season, Rowe stayed on in Australia to rehabilitate, missing the Green and Red’s league campaign. The Kilmoremoy forward returned to home soil in recent days, though, so the race is now on for her championship involvement.
Her immediate focus will be on Gaelic games matters, though her new two-year deal will see her head back Down Under afterwards to continue to “live the best of both worlds,” as she so often says.
Sheridan’s status of being on a two-year deal was also confirmed this morning, as she officially penned a contract extension until 2023.
The Mullahoran ace lit up the AFLW last season, enjoying a stunning individual campaign with goals almost every week as she established herself as one of the Pies’ main forwards in her second year at the club.
24-year-old Sheridan has been back in Ireland for some time now, returning to inter-county duty with Cavan through their Division 2 league campaign, as they now prepare for an Ulster championship meeting with Donegal.
Elsewhere, Rowe’s Mayo countywoman Aileen Gilroy has re-signed for North Melbourne.
Gilroy in action for North Melbourne.
Source: AAP/PA Images
One of 24 players retained from the Kangaroos 30-strong 2021 AFLW list, Gilroy sparkled once again in her second season and has subsequently been rewarded with a longer stay.
The 28-year-old has excelled in Australia of late and has been touted as “one of the most exciting Irish talents” over there, though has opted out of the Mayo ladies football set-up for 2021.
A former underage soccer international with Ireland, the Killala native missed most of the 2019 ladies football season with a devastating cruciate injury, before announcing her comeback with a stellar debut season Down Under.
She returned to line out in the Green and Red’s midfield last autumn, but has decided against it this time around.
“Aileen’s not one to half-arse anything,” as manager Michael Moyles recently said. “The last year or two, she’s struggled with it so she needs to take a year to get things around her. And that’s fine, no problem.”
Tipperary’s Premiership champion Orla O’Dwyer, Melbourne’s Dublin duo Sinéad Goldrick and Lauren Magee, and Adelaide Crows’ Ailish Considine have all had their respective returns for the 2021/22 season confirmed in recent days, with further announcements expected.
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The42 understands that several other Irish players — 14 were involved in the 2021 season — are on two-year contracts, and will return for another campaign.
The league is set to expand over the coming seasons, with the 2022 edition — season six – due to begin in December 2021 and the Grand Final to be held in mid-March, before the men’s season begins. The competition will increase from nine rounds to 10, plus three weeks of finals.
Over the past few years, the AFLW campaign opened in late January and ran until mid-April, allowing for the Irish contingent — much of whom play inter-county ladies football — to return to these shores for the tail end of the league and for the entire TG4 All-Ireland championship.
Covid-hit 2020 aside, they normally travelled Down Under in October/November for pre-season, so it’s expected that will be earlier this coming autumn, throwing up the potential of code clashes.
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REIGNING CORK SENIOR hurling kingpins Blackrock will take on last year’s semi-finalists Erins Own after this evening’s draw for the 2021 club championships in the county.
On the day that adult club players received the green light to resume training in pods of 15 from Monday 10 May and can play games from Monday 7 June, the championship draws for the year ahead took place in Cork.
In the hurling Blackrock, who ended an 18-year wait last October for senior hurling glory, will meet Erins Own along with city rivals St Finbarr’s and last year’s senior A winners Charleville in their group.
Last year’s beaten finalists Glen Rovers will take on Douglas, Newtownshandrum, Bishopstown.
The remaining group will feature the East Cork trio of Sarsfields, Midleton and Carrigtwohill – who won five counties between them in the 2010-2014 period – and city team Na Piarsaigh.
In the football, last year’s premier senior final is still to be played but the two sides in contention, Castlehaven and Nemo Rangers, do know who they will take on in the group stages this year.
Castlehaven will meet fellow West Cork teams Carbery Rangers and Newcestown, along with the winners of the senior A final involving Éire Óg and Mallow, that is still an outstanding fixture.
Nemo Rangers will face Valley Rovers, Douglas and Carrigaline. Then it’s 2018 champions St Finbarr’s up against Ballincollig, Clonakilty and Ilen Rovers in the remaining group.
2021 Cork Championship Draws
Premier Senior Football
- Group A – Nemo Rangers, Valley Rovers, Douglas, Carrigaline.
- Group B – Castlehaven, Newcestown, Carbery Rangers, Mallow/Éire Óg.
- Group C – St Finbarr’s, Ballincollig, Clonakilty, Ilen Rovers.
Premier Senior Hurling
- Group A – Glen Rovers, Douglas, Newtownshandrum, Bishopstown.
- Group B – Sarsfields, Na Piarsaigh, Midleton, Carrigtwohill.
- Group C – Blackrock, Erins Own, St Finbarr’s, Charleville.
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Senior A Football
- Group A – O’Donovan Rossa, Bandon, Béal Áth An Ghaorthaidh, Dohenys.
- Group B – Bishopstown, St Michael’s, Kiskeam, Winner Knocknagree/Kanturk.
- Group C – Fermoy, Loser Mallow/Éire Óg, Clyda Rovers, Bantry Blues.
Senior A Hurling
- Group A – Kanturk, Bandon, Fermoy, Blarney.
- Group B – Ballyhea, Bride Rovers, Ballymartle, Mallow.
- Group C – Fr O’Neill’s, Newcestown, Cloyne, Killeagh.
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Rachel Cusk’s new novel Second Place — her first since the breakaway success of her Outline trilogy — is a lovely and vicious piece of work. It is vexed and questing, in search of some missing piece, some object that will bring meaning to the world but is utterly inaccessible; it fairly seethes with discontent.
Cusk has patterned Second Place loosely after Lorenzo in Taos, a memoir by the artist’s patron Mabel Dodge Luhan about the time D.H. Lawrence came to stay in her artists’ colony in Taos, New Mexico. “My version,” Cusk writes in a brief author’s note, “is intended as a tribute to her spirit.” Like Lorenzo in Taos, Second Place is addressed to a figure called Jeffers; Luhan’s Jeffers was the poet Robinson Jeffers, while Cusk’s remains a mystery. And it deals with a woman we know only as M, who narrates, to us and to the unknown Jeffers, how she happened to bring the famous painter L to come and stay with her in 2020, as the pandemic spread.
M is a middle-aged writer who lives with her husband Tony on a marsh in rural France. M has suffered enormous pain in her life — she writes obliquely of a withholding mother and a cruel first husband — and so she lives in a state of constant uncertainty, catastrophizing every tiny setback. If she were 20 years younger, she’d have an anxiety diagnosis and an SSRI prescription. “If you have always been criticized, from before you can remember, it becomes more or less impossible to locate yourself in the time or space before the criticism was made,” Cusk writes, with devastating simplicity: “to believe, in other words, that you yourself exist.”
M sees the quietness and peace of her life with calm, unyielding Tony as an antidote to the terrible glittering outside world. She is never certain that she herself exists, but she is certain Tony does, so she can anchor himself to him. All the same, she craves art, M explains, and outside eyes. So she has made a habit of inviting artists to come and stay in the little cottage she and Tony have fixed up on their land, their second place.
M invites L to stay at the second place with high hopes, telling him that she wants to see her beloved marsh through his eyes. She’s seen some of his paintings before, and she has found that when she looks at them, a phrase reverberates through her mind, a phrase she has trouble holding on to or believing in other circumstances: I am here.
What M wants, really, is to see herself through L’s eyes. She wants him to paint her, so that at last she can believe that she truly exists, so that she can see herself and think I am here. But when L arrives at M’s second place, he seems to want to paint everyone but M: Tony, M’s daughter, the girlfriend he brought with him. And when M at last confronts L about why he won’t paint her, he tells her quite callously, “But I can’t really see you.”
The moment is both rudely funny and devastating, which is the tone most of The Second Place strikes. And it’s especially devastating because M appears so certain that she and L have a deep artistic connection. Just moments earlier, she has told L intimate secrets about her experience of psychoanalysis. She has informed us of “the sense of intimate familiarity I felt with L from that very first conversation, an intimacy that was almost kinship, as though we were brother and sister” — and now we find that this intimacy is entirely one-sided.
M’s relationship with L is that of a viewer before an artist, or a reader before an author. She has looked at his art and has felt recognition, and now she wants to feel the same flicker of recognition or affirmation for herself. But L has no particular use for M, despite his willingness to stay at her second place and avail himself of her hospitality during a time of global chaos. He has in fact a contempt for her, a contempt that seems to be wound up in the fact of her femininity and her middle age.
And so every time M throws herself before L, she finds herself reenacting the peculiar sort of disappointment women feel when they go looking for themselves in the novels of great male writers and are met with only hatred. She has fallen in love with the way he sees the world, only to find there is no place for her to exist within that vision. Like reading Philip Roth all over again.
Still, M persists in pursuing L, certain that she can, eventually, find a way to make him see her, until this attempt seems to have become her project for the summer of quarantine. All the characters seem to have such a project underway, and Cusk is often very funny about them: At one point, the boyfriend of M’s daughter performs an impromptu and unsolicited two-hour reading of his fantasy novel-in-progress, not ending until 1 o’clock in the morning. (“It’s really far too long,” L tells him.)
But it’s M’s ceaseless, ravening want that animates this novel, swirling under the surface of every immaculate sentence. Dwight Garner calls Cusk’s prose “hot-but-cold,” which comes as close as any descriptor could to summing up the exact quality of her sentences: They are detached, but also passionate; they writhe with furious wanting; they analyze all wants with ferocious mistrust.
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When M writes to L to ask him to come stay with her, she includes a description of the marsh she would like him to paint. Most artists, she says, “miss the point of it entirely,” so that whenever they try to paint it, “what they end up painting is the contents of their own mind.” She herself thinks of the marsh as “the vast woolly breast of some sleeping god or animal, whose motion is the deep, slow motion of somnambulant breathing.”
M, like all the artists she disdains, has painted out the contents of her own mind. That deep, slow, unceasing breath pants below her entire narration. It’s the movement of her desires: of a mind striving, endlessly, to manage to say of itself, I am here.
Ordinarily, the death of a 99-year-old man wouldn’t raise much suspicion. But because Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, isn’t your typical long-lived man, his death on April 9 provides a window into the recent woes of the British royal family — and the media’s fixation on its contentious relationship with Meghan Markle.
Prince Philip was hospitalized for a full month in February, reportedly for treatment of a preexisting heart condition. As he was nearing his 100th birthday, his death is hardly a surprise. According to the royal family’s official statement, His Highness “passed away peacefully this morning at Windsor Castle.”
It didn’t take long, however, for anticipation to spread throughout social media that the press would find a more disruptive cause for Prince Philip’s death than illness or old age. Amid the many memes that began circulating online once the news broke, a prominent theme emerged: British media placing the blame on Meghan Markle.
Markle has spent the last year mired in controversy, first for formally resigning her royal duties along with her husband Prince Harry and second for a March 7 interview with Oprah Winfrey in which the couple spoke out against the family’s treatment of her. Among the most shocking revelations to come out of that interview were the couple’s statements that the family had professed “concerns” over the color of their unborn child’s skin, had refused to provide the couple with a security detail in violation of protocol, and had refused to help Markle seek treatment after she became suicidal — in part due to a barrage of racist harassment from the press.
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It’s no secret that the British media, particularly tabloid journalism, has lost little love for Markle since she became the latest member of the royal family. From the moment she began dating Prince Harry in 2016, Markle has faced racist and sexist backlash, criticizing everything from her perceived unlikability to her “exotic DNA.”
And in the aftermath of the Oprah interview, Piers Morgan, in particular, has led the charge of many British journalists in accusing Markle of, essentially, lying about everything — pushing an unsubstantiated idea of “fakery” that led to him walking off and ultimately quitting his news show Good Morning Britain. Hence the nearly immediate assumption that the British press would find a way to shift the focus off Prince Philip and onto Markle.
Sometimes the predictions that a narrative around “Meghan and Harry’s Oprah interview contributing to Prince Philip’s untimely death” were uncanny in how they bore out.
It didn’t take long, for example, for the Daily Mail to trot out a piece that emphasized Prince Philip’s “tough final year” and the way the end of his life was marred, in part, by “bitter fallout from ‘his favourite’ grandchild Harry and Meghan’s decision to quit ‘the firm.’”
Notably, however, it was American outlet Fox News that seemed to get there first.
The predictability of this response by certain media outlets, particularly conservative ones, cannot be overstated. It suggests that, at least where the royal family is concerned, a uniformly monotone kind of coverage has been established: Foment outrage and fear, attack, repeat. The fact that memes anticipating precisely this kind of news coverage preceded the coverage itself suggests that racist press coverage of Markle has been both transparently flimsy and largely ineffective as a form of persuasion to the average media consumer — whether they’re thoroughly informed or only half-paying attention on social media.
Markle and Prince Harry, by giving such a momentous interview to Oprah Winfrey, explicitly engaged the American public in the broader debate over the family’s treatment of them. One result is a clear assumption on the part of many observers worldwide, and Black observers in particular, that any and all coverage of struggle or tragedy within the royal family will somehow involve a return to implicit racism toward and perpetual attacks against Markle.
The “Meghan is to blame” memes — and the overall tone of the other snarky, cynical, and critical memes that have emerged — also suggest a distinct breakdown between media coverage of Prince Philip’s death and the popular impression of it.
While plenty of news outlets have struck a more typical tone of somber respect, social media has largely been full of irreverence, with users across various platforms employing memes and general insouciance to remind us that Prince Philip came from a family with Nazis in it (though he opposed Hitler), to imagine Princess Diana greeting him in heaven with animosity (in fact they were very close), and to recall his long history of alleged racist remarks — with the kind of bluntness the press has largely eschewed.
For example, one BBC obituary glossed over the issue of Prince Philip allegedly making racist comments by framing them as part of his “tendency to be forthright” and offering other euphemistic spins — which led to criticism of both Philip and the outlet.
Along with mournful “RIP” threads, Twitter has been rife with people celebrating Philip’s death on behalf of Black citizens presumably offended by his treatment of Markle.
The levity isn’t all related to politics: On TikTok, memes about Philip’s death have been circulating for the past few weeks, with the jokes largely centering on the prince’s suspected immortality — or suspicions that he actually already died weeks ago. But that more typical flavor of online humor has been vastly overshadowed by the recent royal family brouhaha. It’s a reminder that the family is no closer to figuring out how to handle strong, independent women in its midst today than it was during Diana’s ascendance.
TikTok’s take on the topic seems closer to the truth than that of the tabloids: The Duke of Edinburgh was 99 years old. Any efforts to place blame for his death reveal far more about the state of the media than about Meghan Markle.
“In a war zone, it is not safe to be unknown. Unknown travelers are shot on sight,” says Isabel Fall. “The fact that Isabel Fall was an unknown led to her death.”
Isabel Fall isn’t dead. There is a person who wrote under that name alive on the planet right now, someone who published a critically acclaimed, award-nominated short story. If she wanted to publish again, she surely could.
Isabel Fall is a ghost nonetheless.
In January 2020, not long after her short story “I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter” was published in the online science fiction magazine Clarkesworld, Fall asked her editor to take the story down, and then checked into a psychiatric ward for thoughts of self-harm and suicide.
The story — and especially its title, which co-opts a transphobic meme — had provoked days of contentious debate online within the science fiction community, the trans community, and the community of people who worry that cancel culture has run amok. 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. When she emerged from the hospital a few weeks later, the world had moved on, but she was still scarred by what had happened. She decided on something drastic: She would no longer be Isabel Fall.
As a trans woman early in transition, Fall had the option of retreating to the relative safety of her legal, masculine identity. That’s what she did, staying out of the limelight and growing ever more frustrated by what had happened to her. She bristles when I ask her in an email if she’s stopped transitioning, but it’s the only phrase I can think of to describe how the situation appears.
Isabel Fall was on a path to becoming herself, and then she wasn’t — and all because she published a short story. And then her life fell apart.
In the 18 months since, what happened to her has become a case study for various people who want to talk about the Way We Live Today. It has been held up as an example of progressives eating their own, of the dangers of online anonymity, of the need for sensitivity readers or content warnings. 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.
Sometimes, the path to your personal hell is paved with other people’s best intentions.
Like most internet outrage cycles, the fracas over “I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter” was enormous news within the bubble of people who cared about it and made barely a blip outside of that bubble. The full tale is amorphous and weird, and recounting its ins and outs is nearly impossible to do here. Just trying to explain the motivations of all involved is a task in and of itself, and at any rate, that story has been told many times, quoting others extensively. Fall has never spoken publicly about the situation until now.
Clarkesworld published Fall’s story on January 1, 2020. For a while, people seemed to like it.
“I was in awe of it on a sentence level. I thought it was beautiful and devastating and incredibly subversive and surprising. It did all this work in a very short amount of space, which I found completely breathtaking. It had been a long time since I had read a short story that I had enjoyed and that also had rewired my brain a little bit,” said author Carmen Maria Machado, who read the story before controversy had broken out.
In the first 10 days after “Attack Helicopter” was published, what muted criticism existed was largely confined to the story’s comments section on Clarkesworld. The tweets that still exist from that period were largely positive responses to the story, often from trans people.
But first in Clarkesworld’s comments and then on Twitter, the combination of the story’s title and the relative lack of information about Fall began to fuel a growing paranoia around the story and its author. The presence of trolls who seemed to take the story’s title at face value only added to that paranoia. And when read through the lens of “Isabel Fall is trolling everybody,” “Attack Helicopter” started to seem menacing to plenty of readers.
“Attack Helicopter” was a slippery, knotty piece of fiction that captured a particular trans feminine uncertainty better than almost anything I have ever read. Set in a nightmarish future in which the US military has co-opted gender to the degree that it turns recruits into literal weapons, it told the story of Barb, a pilot whose gender is “helicopter.” Together with Axis — Barb’s gunner, who was also assigned helicopter — Barb carried out various missions against assorted opposition forces who live within what is at present the United States.
Then, because its title was also a transphobic meme and because “Isabel Fall” had absolutely no online presence beyond the Clarkesworld story, many people began to worry that Fall was somehow a front for right-wing, anti-trans reactionaries. They expressed those fears in the comments of the story, in various science fiction discussion groups, and all over Twitter. Fans of the story pushed back, saying it was a bold and striking piece of writing from an exciting new voice. While the debate was initially among trans people for the most part, it eventually spilled over to cis sci-fi fans who boosted the concerns of trans people who were worried about the story.
Neil Clarke, Clarkesworld’s editor, pulled the story on Fall’s behalf on January 15, replacing it with an editorial note that read, in part, “The recent barrage of attacks on Isabel have taken a toll and I ask that even if you disagree with the decision, that you respect it. This is not censorship. She needed this to be done for her own personal safety and health.”
Fall, reeling, checked into the hospital. She has since retitled her story “Helicopter Story,” and under that title, it was nominated for a 2021 Hugo Award, one of the most prestigious honors in science fiction.
“How do I feel about the nomination? I don’t know,” Fall says by email. “It’s a nice validation to know that some people liked the story enough to nominate it. But it’s also dreadful to know that this will just mean reopening the conversation, which will lead to a lot of people being hurt.”
I started emailing with Fall in February, just over a year after “Attack Helicopter” blew up. I had been working on a completely different piece about the short story and wanted to invite her to share her version of events, which thus far have been defined by voices that are not her own. Clarke put me in touch with Fall, and she agreed to speak with me on the condition that we only correspond over email. I am the first journalist she has talked to about what happened. I do not know her legal identity, but I have confirmed that she is the person who wrote “Attack Helicopter” from looking at earlier drafts of the story that Fall shared with me.
When Fall published “Attack Helicopter,” she was not yet ready to be publicly out as a trans woman, but hoped that writing it for a niche publication in a community that is frequently friendly to queer writers would be a good way to get her feet wet.
She had at least some reason to expect that the complete vacuum of personal information about her — the short author bio attached to the story said only that she was born in 1988 — wouldn’t be questioned. Trans spaces, both online and in real life, have a long history of allowing an anonymity that paradoxically hides within one’s true identity.
If you want to attend a support group meeting and say your name is Isabel and you use she/her pronouns, you will be treated as such, no matter how you look or what name is on your driver’s license. Gatekeeping in a trans space usually involves loosely enforced rules that focus on giving those who exist within them a safe place to explore their identity. Those rules almost never attempt to determine that someone is “trans enough.”
But anonymity isn’t always welcome on the internet, where an anonymous identity can be weaponized for the worst. That gap — between the good-faith anonymity assumed in trans spaces and the bad-faith anonymity increasingly assumed online — was the one Fall wandered into.
“I sexually identify as an attack helicopter” is a “copypasta” (a snippet of text that is copied and pasted across the internet, sometimes with alterations, sometimes word-for-word) that dates to 2014. It most likely originated on the forums for the game Team Fortress 2 before making its way to Reddit and 4chan, where it became a meme used to mock and demean trans people who spoke earnestly about their experiences and identities. The meme is transphobic on its face, because it suggests that one’s gender can be decided on a whim.
Fall’s story tries to take the meme seriously. What would it be like if your gender was actually “helicopter”?
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.
At its core, “Attack Helicopter” is about the intersection of gender and American hegemony. On that level, it has plenty to say even to cisgender people. After all, if all gender is on some level a performance (and it is), then it can be co-opted and perverted by the state. But if it’s also innate on some level (and it is), then we are powerless against whatever it is that enough people decide gender performance should look like. We are constantly trapped by gender, even when we know we are trapped by it. You can’t truly escape something so all-pervasive; you can only negotiate your own terms with it, and everybody’s terms are different.
The conversation around gender “is dominated by those who can tolerate and thrive in it. It is conducted by the voices of those who are able to survive speech and its consequences,” Fall says. “But it is a conversation that is, by necessity, reductive. We need teams and groups and identities, not just to belong to, but as mental objects to manipulate and wield. If we tried to hold 10 million unique experiences of gender in our mind they would sift through our fingers and roll away.”
Such a conversation around gender is not particularly conducive to those who are figuring out their gender in public, as all trans people must do eventually. It’s especially not conducive to artists who are exploring their gender in their art, under even greater degrees of public scrutiny. Which is to say: That conversation is not conducive to people like Fall.
“We make boxes that seem to enclose a satisfying number of human experiences, and then we put labels on those and argue about them instead,” she says. “The boxes change over time, according to a process which is governed by, as far as I can tell, cycles of human suffering: We realize that forcing people into the last set of boxes was painful and wrong, we wring our hands, we fold up some new boxes and assure ourselves that this time we got it right, or at least right enough for now. Because we need the boxes to argue over. I do not want to be in a box. I want to sift through your fingers, to vanish, to be unseen.”
The question many people asked when “Attack Helicopter” was published was: What were Fall’s intentions in borrowing a transphobic meme for her title?
When I came out in 2018, the “attack helicopter” meme had already mostly been ironically reclaimed by trans people, who had undercut its sting by, in essence, shouting, “Get better material!” at transphobes. (To wit.)
Fall was channeling that ironic reclamation, but readers were quick to jump to their own conclusions. Many only read as far as the title before assuming Fall was either transphobic herself or a trans person intentionally using the meme to make a point.
All they had to go on was one biographical detail: “Isabel Fall was born in 1988.” There was no Isabel Fall Twitter profile. She had never published fiction before. She was a blank space, upon which anyone could project their worst fears or biggest hopes.
“When the story was first published, we knew nothing about Isabel Fall’s identity, and there was a smattering of strange behavior around the comments and who was linking to it that led people to suspect right-wing trolls were involved in this,” says science fiction author Neon Yang. They were publicly critical of the story on Twitter. “In hindsight, they were probably just drawn by the provocative title and possibly did not even read the story. And yes, it seems like an overreaction on the part of the trans people who responded this way, but being trans in this world is having to constantly justify your right to existence at all, and when you’re forced to be on the defensive all the time, everything starts to look like an attack.”
But a lot of trans women adopt an online pseudonym before coming out publicly, including me. To come out as a trans woman in a transphobic patriarchal society that views our existence as a curiosity at best is rarely something done all at once. It requires baby steps, like becoming used to a new name that starts to feel like home.
Absent any context, “This writer is a secret troll” seems like a huge, unjustified leap to make. Within the science fiction community specifically, it’s still a huge leap, but not necessarily an unjustified one. In recent years, a neoreactionary movement known as the “Sad Puppies” has advocated for politically and artistically conservative science fiction and gamed the Hugo Award nominations, drawing ire from genre writers old and new. The Sad Puppies’ position is, more or less, that great sci-fi is traditional, usually focused on straight white guys in militaristic settings, with straightforward prose. It’s a pushback against the diversification of science fiction and fantasy writing, and though the Puppies’ influence has waned, the lasting effects of their efforts have only stirred up fear and uncertainty within the community. Thus, paranoia was the prevailing mood under which many first read “Attack Helicopter.”
A few people insisted to me that the controversy began with honest but negative readings of the story by people who felt Fall had missed the mark, before mutating into something worse. One unstated assumption made here is that only trans people should write about trans experiences, and therefore, Fall should have identified herself as a trans woman directly in the bio attached to the story. This notion is admirable on the surface but fails to account for the many ways in which trans artists explore and experience their gender in what they create. Sometimes you can only figure out you’re trans by writing about being trans.
“[In criticism], you can say, ‘This struck me as somewhat clumsy and born from inexperience.’ That’s a fair thing to say about art,” says Gretchen Felker-Martin, an author and critic who says she loved “Attack Helicopter.” “What isn’t fair to say is, ‘The person who wrote this is definitely straight, and they’ve never met a trans person.’ There’s some room for error there, when it comes to whether the person whose work you’re critiquing is some sort of famous cultural icon or something. But Isabel was not that. She’s a woman writing under a pseudonym.”
Fall remembers the sequence of events differently, and so far as I have been able to figure out, her sequence of events is the correct one: Suspicion of her motives in writing “Attack Helicopter” spurred an almost immediate attempt to figure out her real identity, which fueled suspicion that she was trying to hide something. She was accused of being an alt-right troll or a Nazi. Only when things had gone too far did the good-faith criticism start to roll in. Fall says she found some of that criticism useful, particularly with regard to the story’s treatment of Barb’s race. (Barb is Korean.) But in her telling, the good-faith criticism came after the attempts to prove she was a bad actor. By then, the damage was done.
“Framing matters. After the frame around the story was in place, it could not be shaken, and everything that happened afterwards was influenced by it,” Fall says. “I have also heard people say, ‘We deserve to know if Isabel Fall is someone with a history of writing things that divide queer communities.’ Is it now a crime to divide a queer community? Why shouldn’t queer people be divided on one issue or another?”
The mess very quickly turned nasty and personal, and it was happening where Fall could see all of it.
“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.”
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. In Fall’s story, Barb and Axis destroy the lives of people they cannot even see. Now, in a bitterly ironic twist, the same was happening to her.
“In this story I think that the helicopter is a closet. … Where do you feel dysphoria the hardest? In the closet. Or so I have to hope; I have not been anywhere outside it, except for [in publishing ‘Attack Helicopter’], which convinced me it was safer inside,” Fall says. “Most of all, I wanted people to say, ‘This story was written by a woman who understands being a woman.’ I obviously failed horribly.”
That was when she asked Clarke to take down the story. That was when she checked herself into a psych ward, so she wouldn’t kill herself in the midst of her dysphoric spiral.
“It ended the way it did because I thought I would die,” she says.
Twitter is really good at making otherwise unimportant things seem like important news.
It’s incredibly hard to imagine “Attack Helicopter” receiving the degree of blowback it did in a world where Twitter didn’t exist. There were discussions of the story on forums and in comment threads all over the internet, but it is the nature of Twitter that all but ensured this particular argument would rage out of control. Isabel Fall’s story has been held up as an example of “cancel culture run amok,” but like almost all examples of cancel culture run amok, it’s mostly an example of Twitter run amok.
“It’s very easy to do a paranoid reading on Twitter,” says Lee Mandelo, a PhD candidate at the University of Kentucky and an author and critic who writes for Tor.com. They were among the earliest advocates of “Attack Helicopter,” and they wrote a lengthy Twitter thread (collected as a blog post here) about paranoid versus reparative readings of art, in response to Clarkesworld pulling the story.
The delineation between paranoid and reparative readings originated in 1995, with influential critic Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. A paranoid reading focuses on what’s wrong or problematic about a work of art. A reparative reading seeks out what might be nourishing or healing in a work of art, even if the work is flawed. Importantly, a reparative reading also tends to consider what might be nourishing or healing in a work of art for someone who isn’t the reader.
This kind of nuance gets completely worn away on Twitter, home of paranoid readings.
“[You might tweet], ‘Well, they didn’t discuss X, Y, or Z, so that’s bad!’ Or, ‘They didn’t’ — in this case — ‘discuss transness in a way that felt like what I feel about transness, therefore it is bad.’ That flattens everything into this very individual, very hostile way of reading,” Mandelo says. “Part of reparative reading is trying to think about how a story cannot do everything. Nothing can do everything. If you’re reading every text, fiction, or criticism looking for it to tick a bunch of boxes — like if it represents X, Y, and Z appropriately to my definitions of appropriate, and if it’s missing any of those things, it’s not good — you’re not really seeing the close focus that it has on something else.”
Kat Lo, a researcher whose work tracks how information and misinformation spread across social networks, explained to me that Twitter itself is as big a part of Isabel Fall’s story as a faceless mob of the site’s users. The sheer assault of information on Twitter makes it difficult to parse, and unlike other social networks, it doesn’t really have elements that preserve any semblance of context (whereas an individual subreddit is built around a particular subject, and a Facebook feed or group is limited to posts by one’s friends or organized around one topic, at least in theory). Twitter ends up organized around what Lo calls “influencer hubs.”
For instance, if you’re a science fiction fan, you might follow a big-name author or critic in the field, and since they’re likely a bigger expert on the topic than you are, you’ll probably regard them as such. But Twitter is a platform that rewards divisive opinions, which are more likely to drive engagement (hearts, retweets, and the like). So, many influencers with the biggest reach on Twitter are also people whose core identity is expressing divisive opinions.
Where this becomes an issue is when influencers from different worlds start to cross-pollinate, which is precisely what happened with “Attack Helicopter.” Though much of the early discussion of the story was among trans sci-fi fans, and though much of that discussion was pretty evenly split between paranoid and reparative readings, the takes that were amplified by bigger and bigger names in the sci-fi world were almost always the paranoid ones, because those were the most divisive and most clickable. And the people elevating those paranoid takes were almost all cis.
“Attack Helicopter” ended up stuck in a feedback loop, as cis people circulated takes skewed toward bad-faith readings of Fall’s story, in the name of supporting trans people. “Attack Helicopter” went from a story that people were debating, to a story that was perceived as one trans people had a few qualms with, to one that was perceived as actively harming trans people, almost entirely because of how Twitter functions.
Once a Twitter conversation takes off like this, it becomes very difficult to stop, which leads to stranger and stranger levels of binary thinking and gatekeeping. I found two tweets posted within hours of each other where one insisted Fall must be a cis man and the other insisted she must be a cis woman. Both were sure she was mocking trans people.
Once a Twitter controversy has reached that critical mass is usually when you might start reading about it in the media.
“What’s on Twitter extends far beyond Twitter, because people make Twitter relevant to the rest of the world. So in a sense, they’re reproducing the chaos and social structures of Twitter, by bringing them into the rest of the world,” Lo says. “It ends up having outsize influence, because the people who are on Twitter perceive Twitter as being bigger and more representative [of the world] than it really is.”
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By the time it was pulled, “I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter” had been read by tens of thousands of people, according to Clarke, though its ultimate audience is impossible to total because archived versions of the story and pirated PDFs reached countless others. (Fall also issued a limited-edition ebook of the story under the title “Helicopter Story” last fall, to qualify for an award — not the Hugo. The ebook was not nominated.)
In the two weeks that the story was online, discussion around it attracted interest, and the story amassed a wide number of fans beyond the normal sphere of science fiction short-story aficionados. Many people who read it did so because it was controversial, but it only became controversial because it was so widely read.
Even more people came to know “Attack Helicopter” as an exemplar of the left eating its own. Most of the people I talked to for this story, regardless of whether they initially criticized or praised “Attack Helicopter,” cited articles by established pundits, including one in the Atlantic, as supercharging the discussion. Those articles launched the discourse beyond the twin niches of online trans communities and online SFF communities and sent it swirling out into the larger internet of people vaguely interested in free speech absolutism. With every new article, a new audience of people outside of the science fiction community learned about Isabel Fall, and a new wave of anger fell on everybody involved, regardless of their position, including Fall.
“There were several reporters that reached out to me right after the story came down. I remember having a conversation with one of them and saying, ‘Is [writing about] this really what you want to do? I’m not going to participate. I think that this is just going to make it worse,’” Clarke says. “And they ran with it. It brought in the whole cancel culture thing. Isabel needed that story down for her, not for them, and not for anybody else. But for her. And that’s why it came down. I tried to make that clear [in the editor’s note on the story’s removal]. But people still wanted that cancel narrative.”
“Attack Helicopter” was nominated for a Hugo Award (a prize for science fiction and fantasy works that is voted on by SFF fans) in April, under the title “Helicopter Story.” The nomination prompted a new round of criticism, this time mostly centered on Clarke and how he didn’t do enough to preemptively shield Fall before the story was published. Clarke says he’s happy to take the responsibility, but both he and Fall insist he did everything right. Clarkesworld hired a sensitivity reader. The story spent far longer in the editing process than most other stories published in the magazine. And so on.
What happened in the wake of “Attack Helicopter” being pulled is that Isabel Fall stopped being someone who acts and became someone who is acted upon. The prevailing narratives about the story erased her agency almost entirely. 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.
So what does Isabel Fall think? She takes great issue with the way cancel culture has been positioned within the larger culture, while also allowing that certain elements of what happened to her seem to fit within that framework.
“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.”
If anybody canceled Isabel Fall, it was Isabel Fall. She remains the subject of her own sentences.
“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.”
If Twitter makes it very easy for unimportant things to seem like important news, it also creates an environment where one of our deepest, most human impulses becomes almost calcified. When we hurt someone, we want, so badly, for everyone to see our good intentions and not our actions. It’s a natural human impulse. I do it. You do it. Everybody involved in this story did it, too, including Isabel Fall.
But the structure of Twitter and the way it rewards a constant escalation of emotion makes it exceedingly difficult to just back down, to say, “I thought I was doing the right thing, but I hurt somebody very badly in the process.”
Many of those who criticized “I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter” on the grounds that it was harmful operated with the absolute best of intentions. I have talked to many of them at great length. I believe them when they say that they earnestly thought the story was a false front for bad actors, because being trans on the internet turns your alarm sensors all the way up. (It’s not like the internet isn’t teeming with awful people hiding in plain sight. Why give anyone the benefit of the doubt?)
I believe the story’s detractors were hurt by the title or some of the content or the very idea of the story. I believe they truly feel that trans stories should only be written by trans people and that Fall should have had to out herself before publishing. I believe they believe — still — that they did the right thing.
They still destroyed a woman’s life.
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.
“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.”
Trans people — trans women, especially — can find their first few steps as themselves in public particularly stressful. That stress is why it’s so often important for us to have safe ways to explore who we are, under whatever veil of anonymity we can concoct for ourselves. When we’re behind that veil, we can divorce ourselves from the identities we were assigned at birth, at least a little bit. To have that veil punctured is a great violence, and Isabel Fall had her veil punctured.
Every day, the person who might have been Isabel Fall sees friends who tore down her story and speculated on her true motivations and identity go on with their lives. They are not stuck in the events of January 2020, like she is. These friends don’t know who she is. Probably. She doesn’t know how to talk to them about it, and to confront anyone about their role in the chaos would require outing herself. She says only one person has reached out to apologize, via Clarke.
“It ends up with groups of people I thought of as friends all assuring each other they did nothing wrong … and I do not even know if they know it was me,” Fall says. “Or they make vague statements about how they are thinking of everyone harmed by the mess around the story, including the author, as if that mess were an inevitable result of publishing a flawed and problematic story: as if the solution was simply to employ even more sensitivity readers, sensitivity readers who agreed with them and could change the story into something they wanted to read.”
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?
As far as I can tell, the worst that would have happened is that another piece of transphobic literature would have existed. To be clear, transphobic literature is worth protesting. I would rather have less of it. But there’s a large gap between speaking out against a work of art you find objectionable and trying desperately to sniff out an author’s true identity, with ever more horrific accusations.
It is easy for me to say this with hindsight, of course. I know Isabel Fall just wanted to write a good story. I’ve seen earlier drafts of that story. I know how hard she worked to make it exactly what she wanted it to be. I suppose that simply by talking with Fall as much as I have, I have subtly put myself on “her side.” Maybe you shouldn’t trust my good intentions either.
But in any internet maelstrom that gets held up as a microcosm of the Way We Live Today, one simple factor often gets washed away: These things happened to someone. And the asymmetrical nature of the harm done to that person is hard to grasp until you’ve been that person. A single critical tweet about the matter was not experienced by Isabel Fall as just one tweet. She experienced it as part of a tsunami that nearly took her life. And that tsunami might have been abated if people had simply asked themselves, “What’s the worst that could happen if I’m right? And what’s the worst that could happen if I’m wrong?”
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.
“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.”
Emily VanDerWerff is Vox’s critic at large. Read other essays by the author here and here.
The United States has now put out several relief packages to deal with the economic impacts of the Covid-19 coronavirus pandemic, and lawmakers are considering even more.
But a glaring hole in these economic stimulus proposals is aggressive new climate policies and targets, which are desperately needed as that crisis accelerates.
Democrats have some environmental stimulus proposals under consideration, like $550 billion for clean transportation investment. Yet at the same time, some Republican lawmakers are also pushing for bailouts of the fossil fuel industry.
In the past few months, however, cities, businesses, and governments in other parts of the world have already shown that even while fighting off a deadly virus, they can take steps to mitigate the other massive catastrophe of climate change.
With clear roads, clear skies, oil prices plummeting, businesses needing bailouts, and political capital to spend, countries like South Korea, Italy, and France have decided that the pandemic response is an opportunity to rethink energy, infrastructure, industry, and government in ways to cut pollution and reduce emissions contributing to climate change.
Writing in the Guardian on June 5, several former and current central bankers — including, Andrew Bailey, governor of the Bank of England, and François Villeroy de Galhau, governor of Banque de France — said it’s critical that countries launch a green recovery from the pandemic.
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“This crisis offers us a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to rebuild our economy in order to withstand the next shock coming our way: climate breakdown,” they wrote. “Unless we act now, the climate crisis will be tomorrow’s central scenario and, unlike Covid-19, no one will be able to self-isolate from it.”
Globally, greenhouse gas emissions are poised to decline this year by a record 8 percent in large part due to the global response to the coronavirus. Many cities have also seen major declines in air pollution. But these gains are fragile, and emissions and pollution could easily spike again as economies recover. Keeping the incidental environmental improvements from the pandemic, then, requires deliberate decisions to protect gains even after the virus fades away.
Here are some of the ways people have used the crisis and the opportunity of the pandemic to enact climate policies, set ambitious goals for carbon-heavy industries, and build clean energy infrastructure.
South Korea’s Democratic Party is using its new leverage to advance a Green New Deal
South Korea has been hailed around the world for its response to Covid-19, with a massive national effort to test people for the virus, trace their contacts, and control the spread of the disease.
So it wasn’t too surprising that South Korean President Moon Jae-in’s ruling Democratic Party of Korea won a landslide victory in the national legislature elections in April. The result was a vote of confidence for his handling of the Covid-19 outbreak in the country.
The party is now aiming to leverage that political capital to implement a Green New Deal for the country, first revealed in March. While it borrows the branding from the Green New Deal proposals in the United States, South Korea’s version is more similar to the European Commission’s European Green Deal approved last year. The plan would make South Korea the first East Asian country to commit to reaching net-zero emissions by the middle of the century. South Korea is the seventh-largest greenhouse gas emitter in the world.
To meet this goal, South Korea would implement a carbon tax, increase investment in renewable energy, and end public financing for fossil fuel projects domestically and abroad. The proposal also calls for retraining workers who may be affected by the transition toward cleaner energy.
South Korea’s Green New Deal still has to be legislated and signed into law, and it may face strong opposition from some business and industrial interests. And South Korea isn’t the only country signing onto an ambitious climate agenda. Prior to the pandemic, countries like Austria and Spain had also seen election victories for parties campaigning on a Green New Deal.
But as the last South Korean election and recent polls in the country showed, Moon has widespread support for his climate agenda. And South Korea still stands out for sticking to its climate agenda during a global health crisis.
Cities around the world are using clear streets to improve clean transit infrastructure
With fewer people driving and more people needing to walk at a distance as part of reducing the transmission of the coronavirus, some cities have begun to change how they allocate precious street and sidewalk space.
After the lockdowns began to relax, city officials in Milan, Italy, announced that they would modify 22 miles of roads to make more room for pedestrians and bicycles. Milan transport councilor Marco Granelli explained that the city wanted alternatives to car traffic and to public transit that would allow people to move around while staying apart.
“To avoid having another million cars on the streets, we will have to upgrade the two-wheel [infrastructure],” he told Radio Lombardy in April. “This is why we are putting in place an extraordinary action to create cycle paths.”
Berlin, Germany, also capitalized on the reduced car traffic from a sudden surge in people working from home during the pandemic with 14-miles and more of pop-up bike lanes. Residents in more than 100 other German cities have applied to add more bike lanes during the pandemic.
Cities like Paris, Athens, Bogotá, Philadelphia, and Denver have also expanded infrastructure for bikes. In most of these cities, some of the new lanes are temporary and some are permanent, with city officials hoping to figure out just how much their citizens will avail themselves of the new real estate.
Transportation is one of the largest sources of greenhouse gas emissions in the world, accounting for almost a quarter of all emissions from burning fossil fuels. It’s also the fastest-growing source of carbon dioxide. Vehicles are a major source of urban pollution as well. So steps to offer alternatives to cars in cities have short- and long-term environmental benefits.
Governments in Europe have used their leverage with bailouts to extract stronger climate commitments from companies
The economic crisis stemming from the coronavirus pandemic has forced some businesses to ask for government help. The aviation industry is a case in point. The collapse of international air travel during the outbreak has forced airlines to seek government bailouts.
But in some countries, those bailouts came with climate change targets. The global aviation industry causes between 2 and 5 percent of human-induced warming on the planet, and prior to the pandemic, the sector was poised to grow rapidly. That’s why some governments want to limit emissions from air travel.
For instance, the $10.8 billion bailout package for Air France-KLM included provisions that Air France must end short routes that compete with train routes. Train travel emits far fewer greenhouse gas emissions than flying over these short routes. The airline will also have to cut its emissions per passenger in half relative to 2005 by 2050.
“I want to reiterate that this support for Air France is not a blank cheque,” Bruno Le Maire, France’s economy and finance minister, told a National Assembly committee in April.
Austria also imposed sustainability requirements for its $856 million rescue package for Austrian Airlines.
Germany, however, flinched at the idea of imposing new climate targets on its national air carrier, Lufthansa, with its $9.9 billion bailout.
Meanwhile, airlines around the world are retiring some of their oldest, largest, and thirstiest aircraft because of reduced demand. The remaining aircraft in their fleets are newer, smaller, and more fuel-efficient.
Still, demand for flights is poised to grow over the long term, and aviation remains one of the toughest sectors of the economy to decarbonize. It will take more research, investment, and policy to ensure these changes endure and for emissions to decline further.