In fiction, an extremely formal academic style for something absolutely made-up can be fun for writer and reader alike. Using it to try to dress up ill-sourced bigotry and hate as Very Smart Logic is such a twisting of our professional skillset, it's somehow extra-horrifying to see.
Yeah, the whiplash is real.
Everything frame as objective science in that newsletter is just another defensive mechanism and an effort of mitigate being called out on her transphobia.
This was an author I used to admire when I was first started on this path. It has been a rough newsletter to read and I urge my trans friends to not read this TERFY rambling. Way to lose people's respect by taking such pride on being a transphobe.
Really stomach-turning to see E. Lily Yu's deeply transphobic substack post, and I encourage my trans siblings, particularly trans fems, not to bother reading any of it. It's nothing we haven't heard before, and it's presented in the same smug, pseudo-intellectual, self-righteous tone as always.
Also, make your own choices, but I would not advise trans women to read the substack post. It is extremely dehumanizing and smug, and I think you can just skip it.
Everybody I know has been fairly blindsided by this, so maybe this is going to ring hollow, but I want trans women entering SFF to know that lots of us are in camp "fuck off, terfs." The transphobes don't speak for us.
It is extremely sad to see that a luminary of SFF short fiction has revealed herself to be deeply and viciously transphobic, and specifically transmisogynist. I'm just so sorry for all of us, but especially the trans people in SFF who had considered her a colleague and friend.
it has been A Week for ducking milkshakes. Hanumankind turned out hindutva, Goulet Pens is part of a homophobic church, E. Lily Yu is a terf, it's a lot