Lessons from a Cancellation

When cis people invoke Isabel Fall, they do not understand the complex trans dynamics at play

This piece is not about Will Stancil. Though he is what prompted me to write this. To give you a short recap, Will Stancil has been the subject of intense online criticism for years on Bluesky. Some of it rightfully so, some of it is more petty.

He's a guy on Bluesky that many people there just love to hate.

A recent flareup in all this happened recently when a trans woman shared a TikTok criticizing Stancil for allegedly revealing a scheme by Minnesota women on dating apps who were catfishing ICE agents to obtain operational leaks. I can't speak to the voracity of the TikTok, and frankly it's not very relevant to my overall point.

Stancil has said recently that the heat he faces online has spilled over into his personal life. He recently recounted a story of a woman that he went on a date with had been listening to a podcast when the hosts of the show brought up Stancil, disparaging him.

I take Stancil's word that what he is facing online feels overwhelming. I've been there before, myself.

But yesterday Stancil said something that really bothered me.

He compared what he was facing to Isabel Fall, a trans woman who wrote an incredible work of short fiction playing on the "identify as an attack helicopter" meme that right wingers used to mock trans people in the mid-2010s. The piece sought to use that joke to tell a larger tale about how marginalized bodies are exploited by the state and the military industrial complex.

But the sad reality of this time that we live in is that people don't read past the headlines, so most of Twitter at the time saw a piece called "I Identify As An Attack Helicopter," and jumped to the conclusion that this author who no one had ever heard of before must be a right winger pulling our leg for a bit.

Fall's essay faced an immediate and overwhelming backlash, led by several well known writers like N.K. Jemisin and Neon Yang on Twitter. The harassment campaign was so bad that not only have we not heard from Fall since then, but Vox reported that she detransitioned with no intention of trying to come out again.

The Vox explainer written by Emily St. James really is a great explainer on what happened to Fall and I recommend everyone take a read to get the full picture. We also did an episode of Cancel Me, Daddy with St. James about Fall and the piece.

Nowadays, Fall's name is invoked to describe the worst of the worst when it comes to online harassment. Her cancellation was so complete that it completely ruined her life. Her name now represents the cruelty and excesses of online cancel culture, especially when those doing the harassing are leftists.

This, at least, is how people like Stancil remember it.

Earlier this week, he claimed, quite wrongly and without evidence, that the very same people who harassed Fall had appropriated her story for themselves to justify attacking people like him.

The implication was that Fall's harassers were all leftist trans women, the demographic he perceives is leading the charge in trying to get him cancelled. He couldn't be more wrong.

N.K. Jemisin and Neon Yang aren't trans women. Ana Mardoll (who was an internet friend of mine at the time and has themselves since been run off the internet) was not a trans woman.

But Fall's fate is also all too familiar to trans women. I can think of a dozen Isabel Falls just off the top of my head, most of whose names and fates aren't remembered as some tragedy.

Marginalized people are uniquely at risk in online spaces. Nothing in this piece is meant to minimize the online risks faced by people of other marginalizations, I am speaking only from my perspective as a white trans woman.

Trans people, particularly trans femmes, are especially at risk.

We are disposable.

No one thinks about protecting us from the internet's worst impulses. If a trans femme doesn't play along, it's easy enough to cast them aside and find a trans femme who will.

I wanted to recommend an essay called Hot Allostatic Load here, but it appears the New Inquiry link to it no longer works. The essay details how trans women are exploited, intellectually, artistically, and sexually until we object, until we assert ourselves, then we are cast aside.

We are targeted because we can't fight back in many cases.

People have been trying to cancel me for years, but I am lucky to be one of those trans women with enough of a platform and enough credibility to be able to fight back. Most trans women aren't so lucky.

When I think of Isabel Fall, I see someone who couldn't fight back. She was a fresh face on the scene, with no network other than her editor backing her up. Her work was brilliant enough so that some people saw it as worth defending but the haters won.

When I think back to all of my trans friends who are no longer on the internet because it was made unsafe for them, each of them had harassers who acknowledged that harassment against trans women was especially bad but that specific trans woman deserved it.

It's a pattern that plays out on a near constant basis. We're just a month or two away from another situation in which a trans woman is bullied off the internet. "Yes internet harassment against trans women is horrific and awful, but the next tranny definitely deserves it."

Circling back to Stancil, I don't think anyone deserves harassment, but he does have the ability, like I do to fight back. He is not Isabel Fall.

Were there trans women amongst those who spread hate against Fall and her work? Yes. Were they the ringleaders? No. For Stancil to claim he's being attacked by the very same people as those who attacked Fall is simply wrong.

I wish more people would understand the underlying vulnerabilities underlying what happed to Fall before invoking her name. Her story is recognized now as one of great tragedy and a cautionary tale for online harassment run amok.

But we must not allow her name to be invoked to attack trans people. That is missing the point of her story.

(Editor's Note: I intentionally didn't link to Stancil at all because I really do not want people searching him out for criticism on this. I am anti-harassment, anti-dogpiling, and anyone I see using this piece to attack him will catch a block from me.)

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