I Sexually Identify as the "I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter" Controversy

I Sexually Identify as the “I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter” Controversy

SHORT FICTION

by June Martin // Illustration by Sam Hindman

Log off? Can’t be done. Some people are online, but I am online. Every time I touch something with my fingers, I know they’re wrong. Tactile sensation should be alien to me because my hands should be posts calling Isabel Fall a nazi. She’s not, of course. I know that. But the thought of her not getting called one makes me so dysphoric I have to go cry in the bathroom, and then crying makes me feel more dysphoric because a controversy shouldn’t be able to cry.

I read the “I identify as an attack helicopter” story and it sucks. It’s transphobic, yes, but it sucks in a way that leads me to think the entire point of the story is transphobic messaging.

It’s not easy being a past event. The very temporality of my existence is all wrong, and it’s not clear how to fix it. My birthday was last week and I asked everyone there to call me “that thing that happened with the helicopter story” but they just laughed. I’m not a joke. I am not a fucking joke. They spent the whole day calling me Fiona, but I don’t have a name. I wish they’d respect that. Maybe it’s my fault because I still look like a girl to them.

I’m trying to transition. It’s not as easy as switching from girl to boy or boy to non-binary or anything like that. Yesterday I had another tattoo appointment. I already have the whole story tattooed on my chest, but I want radiating circles of posts calling it violent, an alt-right troll, triggering, and so on around it. Any time someone looks at my body, I want them to feel the pressure that Isabel must have felt as post after post rolled in condemning her for daring to write a story about dysphoria. I’ve already had my tits removed, since their presence distracted from the effect. Besides, a controversy doesn’t have tits.

Evaluating art solely by “potential harm caused”—and judging “harm caused” as a unit of moral rightness or artistic merit—is so bananas I don’t even want to dignify it with a response.

I’d love to speak to Isabel, to know her, to understand what she thinks. But I know it can’t happen. Imagine getting a phone call: you pick up, and ask “who is this?” and find out you’re being called by the worst days of your life. I’d hang up and you would too. So I have to speculate. What did it feel like when N.K. Jemisin celebrated her story’s removal because it was harmful, then admitted she hadn’t read it? I try on distress, incredulity, horror, powerlessness, but none of them fit quite right.

I never read the story itself, so I won’t comment on its content. I read the title. It was enough.

I’m going to get my genitals nulled out. I don’t need them, shouldn’t have them. No one has ever commented on what a nice pussy the Haymarket bombing has. Because it doesn’t. It’s hard to get the letters. A therapist knows who a boy is, or who a girl is, and will pretend well enough to know who a non-binary person is in a pinch, but I’ve been through five in eleven months. I’m trying my best with number six. She’ll ask me how I’m feeling today, and I’ll tell her that one of the writers who called Fall a cis man said that being a genre writer made her a marginalized person. When she asks how I feel about that, I won’t know how to make sense of the question, so I’ll say, “I feel like that happened,” and we’ll lull into silence for a second. I’m considering lying, but I worry that’s a betrayal. Not of Fall, I doubt I can do worse to her than her memory of me, but of myself. If I lie about my gender, it may cause people to interpret my events differently. I can hear them talking now, “Well, if the ‘I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter’ controversy lies about its gender, why isn’t it reasonable to assume Isabel Fall might have?” I don’t want to do that. If the actions I’m forced to take in this grotesque body contaminate the purity of my events, I will scream and puke and die until it’s fixed.

Furthermore, Isabel was not out as trans when this story was published. Various claims being made against her pressured Isabel into publicly outing herself as a defense against the attacks. That should never be the case and is very disturbing to me

My friend Tyler, one of the few who’s trying to “get it,” asked me which side I agreed with. I knew he didn’t mean anything bad by it, but that didn’t stop me from sobbing in the middle of the park. Between gasps for air—as if I wasn’t dysphoric enough before my breathing became inescapable—I tried to explain to him that I am the sides. I don’t have any more opinion on them than he has on the neurons in his brain. But it’s my fault. Even though I’ve shaved my head and cover my body in as many posts as possible, it’s not the same as being the posts. They still see my human face, and not the avalanche of a hundred people all claiming a title harmed them. The title. I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter.

Sometimes, in my imperfection, I wonder what went unsaid. I’ve done my research, for sure. I know exactly how many people vented their rage on Fall. I know how many rushed to her aid. I know how many people have said they nurse a fire in their hearts for the people who harassed her into a mental institution. But I don’t know who holds the silent grudge, who laughed as a competitor was forced offstage, who counted their likes as the number went up, up, up, or who considers it a blunder, barely remembered like all the rest. This is the dysphoria that no surgery could cure and no treatment could soften. A hard limit where my gender meets the wall between who I am and what I should be.

I’m going to come right out and say that this story does not feel like it was written by a cis or trans woman.

But there’s still room to get closer. I’ve grown silent. I tried, for a while, to just say my posts. To follow up with my replies. But carried forward, as a new utterance, these sentences which form the bedrock of my identity take on meanings they were never supposed to have, and as they do, I lose grasp of my own meaning. So instead, I respond to conversation with an open smile, and spread my arms wide. Most reject this invitation to partake of my posts, or the story at the center of them. Which is fine. I don’t expect people to know anything about me. Not all of us can be the Challenger exploding, but minor events like me still help create the fabric of history.

I’ve tried meditation, but focusing on my breathing doesn’t help me for obvious reasons. Even a total lack of thoughts feels wrong. But then I go on thinking all of these things about myself, and I know events can’t really think. So I’ve solved it. I should only think the posts. Outside and in, I will be the controversy.