I Liked “I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter,” and Here’s Why

I heard about the “cancellation” of Isabel Fall before I learned anything about her short story, “I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter.” Don’t get me wrong, with a title like that, I was rearing to cancel her myself. The “attack helicopter” meme has been a weapon in the transphobe’s arsenal for quite some time, and there was a general sense that this mysterious Isabel Fall person might be dog-whistling towards TERFs, traditionalists, and super-edgy-big-brained-skeptic-boys on YouTube.

However, when I sat down to read the story, I found that it was immune to any kind of substantive progressive critique. The ideas of the story were too nuanced, their expression too subtle and authentic, to be anything other than an earnest and imaginative exploration of the sensual component to decades of dry, metaphysical philosophy.

To translate that to human, no one knows what gender is. But we all feel what gender could be.

Yes, gender is a social construct, the ontological nature of which is embedded in discursive constitution and the commodification of the subject.

But do helicopters like fisting?

I love the tangible way Fall deconstructs gender: not as a choice and yet not as an immutable fact. Maybe gender can be both coercive, even destructive, and yet still be engaged in with enthusiasm and joy.

I won’t lie: as a person who does not identify with my assigned gender at birth, this is a bit troubling for me. It’s kind of ugly, almost shallow, to think of my gender as nothing more than an aesthetic choice. That I can perceive a basic part of myself as something forced onto me, something I need to change in order to fit.

But what’s wrong with aesthetics?

In Gender Trouble, Judith Butler discusses how the expression of gender can be both a transgression from and strict embodiment of enforced gender norms. Certain norms come about through language, people simply trying to describe the world as it is, and then this descriptive language gets prescribed onto everyone.

Norms are never natural: they are necessarily coercive.

Anything outside the set paradigm is not just maligned, it’s unintelligable. You can no more identify with it than you can name yourself using sounds you are unable to produce.

And here’s the scary bit for some trans people: this means that the validity of your gender is directly equivalent to your right to be the gender you say you are. That’s what it means to be valid.

The norms are essentially laws: Butler refers to them (building off Michel Foucault) as “The Law.”

The Law, you see, is what allows for rights to exist in the first place. In my country, we have a constitution which we have all — apparently — agreed upon and ratified (a word I still don’t know the meaning of) that guarantees a right to free speech. Another way of saying this of course is that the states (and the enforcement bodies therein) pinky-swear that they won’t use the force that they totally have to stop you from expressing yourself in a way that you see fit. If there’s no greater transcendental substance to gender, and I’m sort of betting that there isn’t, and gender is more cluster-properties that we’ve constructed importance around, and I’m inclined to think it is, then I think it’s reasonable to say that The Law really does have the ability to determine our gender for us, based on what is most efficient. This to say, Seo Ji Hee (the main character, Barb’s deadname) really was a woman who became something else.

And yet, Barb’s assigned gender at birth clearly did not fit. They say:

When I was a woman I wanted to machine myself. I loved nails cut like laser arcs and painted violent-bright in bathrooms that smelled like laboratories. I wanted to grow thick legs with fat and muscle that made shapes under the skin like Nazca lines. I loved my birth control, loved that I could turn my period off, loved the home beauty-feedback kits that told you what to eat and dose to adjust your scent, your skin, your moods.

So if gender is “discursively constituted” — a term meaning “created by the norms of language,” and one I am very proud of knowing — what’s with the need for Barb and Axis to undergo neurosurgery? Is the surgery a means of simulating the way new genders usually form? Is the idea of having the gender of a helicopter so alien to human beings that Barb and Axis could not simply have been born that way, like everyone else? Or is it simply that there hasn’t been enough time for “The Law” to facilitate the creation of such a thing?

Enter xenogender.

I’ve always been a bit uneasy about attacking the attack-helicopter meme. Transphobes will subscribe to the implication of the meme and trans folx and their allies will renounce it. No one seems to allow for the possibility that a gender that feels like an attack helicopter may actually be, you know, valid.

A while ago, I spoke to a xenogender person online. They explained, “It doesn’t really make sense to label my gender either masculine or feminine because they’re not the least bit comprehensive as ways to define myself. There are other concepts that feel more like part of me, like archetypes. So I use those to describe my gender instead, because identifying with those concepts feels like how I imagine binary folx identify with their genders.”

And that’s kind of the thing, isn’t it? I imagine that binary-gendered people have some rich fundamental alignment with their genders, but what that alignment is or how it feels isn’t verifiable. For all I know, the disconnect I experience with gender may feel exactly the way, for instance, a trans man feels about his gender. But I have other influences in me that keep me from recognizing that feeling in the way he does. I don’t really know, and neither do you.

The idea of Barb wanting to be a new gender is what I think is so radical about what Fall has written. It confronts the oppressive and coercive nature of gender while refusing to be made to feel compliant or subjugated by it.

If you’re interested in learning more about this interpretation of gender, I can’t recommend the writings of Andrea Long Chu highly enough. She states in her essay “On Liking Women” that she does her gender… because she really wants to do her gender.

I doubt that any of us transition simply because we want to “be” women, in some abstract, academic way. I certainly didn’t. I transitioned for gossip and compliments, lipstick and mascara, for crying at the movies, for being someone’s girlfriend, for letting her pay the check or carry my bags, for the benevolent chauvinism of bank tellers and cable guys, for the telephonic intimacy of long-distance female friendship, for fixing my makeup in the bathroom flanked like Christ by a sinner on each side, for sex toys, for feeling hot, for getting hit on by butches, for that secret knowledge of which dykes to watch out for, for Daisy Dukes, bikini tops, and all the dresses, and, my god, for the breasts. But now you begin to see the problem with desire: we rarely want the things we should. Any TERF will tell you that most of these items are just the traditional trappings of patriarchal femininity. She won’t be wrong, either. Let’s be clear: TERFs are gender abolitionists, even if that abolitionism is a shell corporation for garden-variety moral disgust.

If Isabel Fall ever reads this, I want her to know that not everyone hated her work or thought it was in bad faith, toxic, or in need of cancelling. It must have been really hard for her to put so much time and energy into a piece that she was clearly passionate about, and then to be harassed for it to the extent that she was. I think it’s amazing that she was able to create such a rich conversation through some genuinely great writing. I hope this story sticks around in the public consciousness long enough to be discussed more thoroughly. Maybe at a time when we’re more ready for it.

Watch the full video here

Shain Slepian is a screenwriter, script consultant, and content creator with a life-long love of animation and media analysis. Their work can be found on Medium, Left Voice, and on their YouTube channel, TimeCapsule. Shain’s book, Reframing The Screenwriting Process, is available on Amazon.