At the bottom of this post you'll find a link to the article I shared in class last Tuesday: "How Twitter can ruin a life" by Emily St. James (formerly Emily VanDerWerff). St. James was a longtime Vox staff writer until very recently, when she was laid off alongside a large chunk of the Vox staff.
This feature follows a writer known as Isabel Fall, a trans woman who suffered immense online backlash after publishing her first short story in the online sci-fi literary magazine Clarkesworld. A social media firestorm erupted after prominent sci-fi authors on Twitter accused Fall of being an alt-right plant, a troll, and/or a man—by virtue of her sparse author bio and her story's title, "I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter" (an ironic repurposing of a common phrase used by the alt-right to mock trans people). Jarred by the massive negative reaction to her work and the associated accusations, Fall, whose bio was sparse because this was not just her first short story but her first public act under her new feminine name, decided never to come out under the name "Isabel Fall"—or as a woman—at all.
I first read this piece around the time of its release, and I think of it at least once a week since. It's a story beautifully and wrenchingly told, and it's frankly a miracle that Fall agreed to be interviewed at all, which I think is a testament to St. James's immense sensitivity in writing and communicating with sources. St. James impeccably balances a profile of Fall (especially compelling since "Isabel Fall" is a person who no longer exists, or possibly never did); an excoriation of the social media-bred impulse to attack without thinking; a discussion of that impulse as it existed pre-Internet, including literary theorist Eve Sedgwick's famous "paranoid reading" theory; her own thoughts and experiences as a public-facing trans woman; a careful dissection of the idea of "cancel culture" as actually, materially harmful to people who are already marginalized; and other Big Questions regarding agency, identity, and responsibility. To me, this article is an absolute masterclass in effective, compassionate, intellectually rigorous reporting.
https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/22543858/isabel-fall-attack-helicopter
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