Tiptree Award to be renamed after ablism outcry

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Tiptree Award to be renamed after ablism outcry

Postby cmsellers » Sat Sep 14, 2019 7:59 pm

James Tiptree Jr. was a pen name used by Alice B. Sheldon to write science fiction. She's known for three things:

1. She was a great writer, especially on topics of gender.
2. By passing as male for so long, she challenged a lot of the assumptions of the SF community about female writers.
3. At the age of 71, struggling with depression and the challenges of caring for an elderly husband with dementia, she killed him and then herself.

At the time, it was generally assumed that Tiptree and her husband had a suicide pact, but there's always been the possibility that her husband didn't explicitly agree to it, and it was a mercy killing.

Four years after her death, in 1991, the James Tiptree Jr. Award was established in her honor.

Fast forward to this year. The John Campbell Award was renamed after a recipient pointed out that John Campbell opposed her participation in Science Fiction. John Campbell was an editor who helped establish SF as a field, but he was also opposed to women, non-white, and Jewish writers, so Ms. Ng would have been doubly excluded.

As a result, disabled activists on Twitter began calling for the James Tiptree Jr. Award to be renamed, because killing her invalid husband was ablist. Three days ago, the award announced that within the next month, they'd be changing the name. The article I linked says that as an able-bodied person she can't argue with them.

So let me say this: as a disabled person, I'm appalled. Tiptree herself was disabled, both physically and mentally through depression. Renaming the award because a few Twitter activists think she was ablist marginalized her own struggles.

Moreover, while there's really no obvious connection between John Campbell and an award for new writers, James Tiptree is the most logical person to name an award about fiction that explores issues of gender. There are a few other writers whose writing on gender was similarly impactful, most notably Ursula K. LeGuin (who recently died, as it happens; if they're going to renamed it, I hope they rename it after her). But, again, Tiptree, by passing as a man, did more to pave the way for the acceptance of women in science fiction than any writer could have done simply by writing.
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Re: Tiptree Award to be renamed after ablism outcry

Postby JamishT » Sun Sep 15, 2019 1:40 am

This is one of those situations where activists just make themselves seem ridiculous to most people, but still get their way for some reason.
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Re: Tiptree Award to be renamed after ablism outcry

Postby iMURDAu » Mon Sep 16, 2019 9:55 pm

The reason is nobody wants to be called a bigot because it's hard to wash that off.

Unless you own it, then it doesn't stick at all.
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Re: Tiptree Award to be renamed after ablism outcry

Postby Kivutar » Wed Sep 18, 2019 5:34 pm

I think it would be reasonable to say "legitimate achievements and extenuating circumstances notwithstanding, we can't have an award named after someone who murdered their spouse". But going "murdering your spouse, we can get past, unless they were disabled" is a fairly absurd position.
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Re: Tiptree Award to be renamed after ablism outcry

Postby NathanLoiselle » Wed Sep 18, 2019 8:04 pm

Hold on. The disable online community has determined that mental issues are not disabilities? Wow. Talk about hypocrisy.
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Re: Tiptree Award to be renamed after ablism outcry

Postby cmsellers » Wed Sep 18, 2019 8:19 pm

They didn't explicitly say depression is not a disability; rather they appear not to have considered the issue at all, which is arguably worse. It's also, unfortunately, is a common issue with disability rights activists: they often ignore invisible disabilities to the point of not even thinking of them.

The other problem being, of course, that they impute to her ablism for killing her husband when she was no longer able to care for him. Even if it was a murder, that wouldn't automatically make her ablist, it could well be that she thought he was better off dead than trying to live without her, not because of his disability, but because of their long relationship. (Another SF writer, Thomas Disch, killed himself after the death of his partner, Charles Naylor) But given her prior statements, it was most likely a suicide pact, with Tiptree helping her disabled husband achieve what he wasn't able to himself.
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Re: Tiptree Award to be renamed after ablism outcry

Postby cmsellers » Fri Oct 18, 2019 11:28 pm

So, they Tiptree Awards committee has decided to rename the award the "Otherwise Award." Maybe I'll get used to it, but it's not very evocative to me.

I freaked out when I realized that they were posting excerpts from people who contacted them (I once wrote to another website under my real name asking a question that painted a black activist in a negative light, and they posted an out-of-context excerpt which made me look like a cranky conservative, which kind of terrified me), but fortunately they only posted comments from successful SF writers, and hopefully they asked them first.

They only posted one letter against the change, one for it, and two reluctantly accepting it. I wonder what the overall breakdown of feedback was, if this was chosen to be representative, or just all the successful writers who wrote in and let their feedback be published.
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Re: Tiptree Award to be renamed after ablism outcry

Postby Krashlia » Sat Oct 19, 2019 11:45 pm

iMURDAu wrote:The reason is nobody wants to be called a bigot because it's hard to wash that off.

Unless you own it, then it doesn't stick at all.


And this is why I admit to being all the things.
HA! Take *that* progressives!
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