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.
I have missed something...
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.
Maybe if Lily shows somebody on the doll how the big bad Trans person hurt her she can begin to heal.
Her diatribe reminds me of something Carl Sagan wrote in "Broca's Brain". But the fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. /1
Thank you for speaking up about this, and for highlighting the specific transmisogyny. It can sometimes feel like we don’t have that many allies against things like this.
Thanks for speaking out, Lauren.
And there's something sort of Gish-gallop-like in how she wrote the essay. Like she didn't want to state her thesis outright, so she divided it among a bunch of paragraphs, didn't say the whole thing, and bulked it out by bringing in unrelated topics.
What is that bit about murder rates about? Is she saying that trans people are not actually disproportionately murdered?