Oh, you missed that?
Isabel Fall was a newly published trans author, with a debut story in Clarkesworld titled "I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter". Not a bad bit of military scifi, LGBT themes not too obnoxious, but everyone that read it enjoyed it, and for a debut story from a first time author, couldn't have asked for a better reception. For a newbie author, Fall had a ton of promise.
Enter NK Jemisen, SFWA's carefully constructed three-time Hugo winning poster child of the New Face of Speculative Fiction (TM). Jemisen led a Twitter lynch mob to have the story pulled and desperately tried to dig up any personal info about Fall, claiming they suspected Fall was actually a straight man pretending to be trans to get published. Lots of folks latched on to the crusade, including a chunk of SFWA, and in spite of a small pool of people standing up to fall - and odd alliance of LGBT authors and right-wing mil scifi authors - pressure built.
In an unprecedented move, Clarkesworld caved and pulled the story. Jemisen and the SWFA wokies spiked the football... only for word to get out that Fall had attempted suicide, and checked into psychiatric care. And to make matters worse, in a quickly delated Tweet, Jemisen admitted she'd never read the story in the first place. Until an article in Vox over a year later ran, Jemisen never so much as apologized.
Fall has given up writing entirely, goes by a different name, and is back in the closet under said name. In a way, NK Jemisen succeeded in killing Isabel Fall, and did succeed in killing her career... and until the article dropped, the biggest genre names to raise a word in her defense were the damned Sad Puppies. Despite being given a Hugo nomination out of pity, as far as I know, the only publisher to offer her anything after this was Baen, where she has a standing offer for whatever she writes next that, to my knowledge, she's never responded to.
It's why there is a growing rift between the LGBT crowd in SFWA and the Black Futurism wing of SFWA... because the poster child of the latter damn nearly killed the first actual crossover success of the former, and successfully killed her career and drove her back into the closet. That the wokies of SFWA who wrap themselves in the rainbow flag had a hand in leading a lynch mob against a trans author that was successful outside of their clique. And why all the gushing profiles, Hugos, Masterclasses and quick Wikipedia editors can't erase that NK Jemisen's biggest mainstream success is almost driving a trans author to suicide who wrote a short story with more power than every novel Jemisen's ever written.
