The administrators of the Tiptree Award are retaining the name after discussing the challenges to the name and requests for change raised in social media. Their decision is explained in-depth in “Alice Sheldon and the name of the Tiptree Award”.
They reviewed the author’s history which is behind the controversy.
Alice and Huntington Sheldon’s story. We on the Motherboard, those who remember Alice Sheldon and those who do not, have long known the story of how she and her husband, Huntington Sheldon (known as Ting), died.
Friends and family — and the science fiction community at the time — viewed this tragedy as resulting from a suicide pact: the desperate and tragic result of a combination of physical and mental illness and the Sheldons’ desire to die on their own terms. He was 84 years old; she was 71.
However, some who have read accounts of the Sheldon’s deaths more recently have pointed out a different interpretation. The story can also be seen as an act of caregiver murder: where a disabled person is killed by the person, usually a close family member, who is responsible for their support.
Both narratives fit the story. We see how much of the discussion of the Sheldons’ deaths, including our own, reflects the rhetorical tendencies identified in David Perry’s report, specifically the centering of those who kill over those who are killed. In the world outside of science fiction, Huntington Denton “Ting” Sheldon would be considered the more significant member of the couple. “Ting” Sheldon was Director of the Office of Current Intelligence of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) under Presidents Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy and is credited with building that office of the CIA.
After quoting from Tiptree biographer Julie Phillips and Sheldon’s friend and literary executor Jeffrey Smith, the Motherboard sums up:
We ultimately do not know what happened on May 19, 1987. We can’t know with certainty and we don’t see how anyone can know except the ones who cannot tell us. But we are as convinced as we can be, given the unknowability of the facts, by the evidence that Alice and Huntington Sheldon chose to die together.
We respect that not everyone who reads this will have the same interpretation. We recognize that the unconscionable murder of disabled people by their caregivers happens daily, driven both by the devaluation of disabled life and by the lack of available care and support. Therefore we do not seek to defend or exonerate Alice Sheldon, but to make sure the context of her actions remains part of any conversation about them. We are grateful to our community for raising these important issues and bringing them to our attention.
Then they review why the award is named for Tiptree:
We think it is important to understand how the Tiptree got its name. In 1991, founding mothers Pat Murphy and Karen Joy Fowler made a conscious choice to name the award not after Alice Sheldon herself but after the assumed persona –– more than a pseudonym –– under which Sheldon published fiction and participated in fandom. In its conception, the James Tiptree Jr Literary Award hoped to acknowledge and celebrate Sheldon/Tiptree’s dual gender identity, the boundary-crossing work published under Tiptree’s name, and the havoc the revelation of Tiptree’s gender wreaked on the male-dominated science fiction world of the 1970s.
Sheldon was a complicated individual, aspects of whose personal story have long been woven tightly into and through the idea and spirit of the Award. Yet the Award was not intended to reference a figure whose approval winners might imagine gaining or toward whose example they might aspire, in the way that other awards named for iconic individuals – most notably the former Campbell – appear to do.
The rationale for keeping the Tiptree Award name includes consideration of the meaning of her work:
Discussions about the naming of the award relate to broader issues that the Motherboard has been contemplating for some time. When we return to the stories Alice Sheldon wrote as Tiptree, we often find a pessimistic tendency that can seem, at times, like a horrible foreshadowing (though this is far from the only way to read them). Tiptree’s work describes the contours of gender oppression acutely and rarely, if ever, sees a way out. We have been reflecting this week on how many of our feminist icons were also women who could not see a way out. Tiptree’s stories, then and now, provide scope for multiple and complex politics. If we look at the work of our honorees, winners, and fellows, among their greatest commonalities are broad, deep, and diverse commitments to finding, or creating, ways out.
See the post for the full discussion, which is about twice as long as these excerpts.
[Thanks to Pat Murphy and Jeffrey Smith for the story.]
Discover more from File 770
Subscribe to get the latest posts to your email.
I have seldom seen as thorough and thoughtful a piece, as that one. Just as an admirer of damned good writing, I doff my hat at a job well done.
It will be interesting (to say the least) to read the responses to this decision and the reasoning.
I am happy to greet this news with a hearty BRAVO!
I got into an argument with a troll over on the Tiptree Award Twitter feed where they arguing that Alice Sheldon was nothing more than a common murderer. I wrote that she was nothing of the kind; all of the evidence shows that both she and her beloved husband had a suicide pact in the worse case scenario of ill health.
I cannot condone what she did BUT I completely understand her state of mind and her reasons why. Unlike JWC, who lived a lifetime of white privilege and racism, I refuse to condemn Alice Sheldon for the one desperate and misguided act of love on the worst day of her life. Neither should anyone else…
Chris M. Barkley says I cannot condone what she did BUT I completely understand her state of mind and her reasons why. Unlike JWC, who lived a lifetime of white privilege and racism, I refuse to condemn Alice Sheldon for the one desperate and misguided act of love on the worst day of her life. Neither should anyone else…
I’m not wiling to say that it it was either desperate or misguided. That’s implying something that we don’t know and can’t know as we weren’t there. What happened between them will never be known.
I don’t think of stories like “The Screwfly Solution” as being by Alice Sheldon. They’re Tiptree’s writing.
I’ve been following this discussion with a certain uneasiness…. I’m currently trying to care for a parent with dementia while also coping with disability; it’s not the same situation as Sheldon’s (everyone’s situation is different, if only because the people involved are different), but I think it’s similar enough for me to empathize, a bit. Living situations like that can get incredibly stressful and difficult, so much so that it’s terribly easy to get to a place in your head where you can only see one way out – or, perhaps, you can see no way out, but you can’t bear it any longer. When you’re in that sort of mental state, you can make decisions which have no relationship to rationality or legality. Right now, I’m looking at the scar where I cut my wrist open, at four in the morning one day last year. Most of the time, I regard myself as a rational person, but that wasn’t a rational thing to do.
I can only imagine what was going through Sheldon’s mind on that last day. But I’m not comfortable judging her. In times of stress, people can be driven to some awful things.
However. My personal opinion, for whatever that might be worth, is that the administrators have made the right call here – that this final action of Alice Sheldon was a private and a personal one, and doesn’t directly relate to the literary career of “James Tiptree Jr.” (Did the personal darkness inside Alice Sheldon influence “Tiptree”‘s stories? Probably… but we all have our personal darkness, perhaps more than we’d like to think.) It contrasts, though, with the authoritarian and racist tendencies of John Campbell, which absolutely were a part of his public work, as shown in Astounding editorials over a period of many years. One act of private anguish is very different from decades of public racism.
My own opinion, based on my own experience. I entirely understand if others disagree.
@Steve Wright: I was also thinking of the separation of the persona from the person — as I noticed some of the tweeters were doing.
I think they’ve made a good and thoughtful decision. Not everyone will agree; in such a difficult case as this, where we know we don’t know everything, I don’t see how reaching a decision that would satisfy everyone is possible.
I do think an overly celebratory tone is not respectful of the very real concerns of those who doubt Huntington Sheldon really consented.
This statement reads as an earnest attempt by people of goodwill. Unfortunately, they do not seem to have explicitly examined the situation for its resemblance to the two possible patterns in question: Assisted suicide vs Domestic violence murder-suicide of the abled carer/disabled dependent type.
Sometimes, disabled people do decide to end their lives. They typically do this in a certain way. Their desire for death is self-generated (they come up w/idea on their own). The disabled person confides this desire for death to loved ones independent of outside influences. It is related to pain/suffering/degeneration (eg, I’ll live only as long as I can still XYZ). It arises from a specific pain/terminal illness, where suicide is a solution, not a desire in its own right; it’s not a pattern of depression. It is self-focused (one ends one’s OWN pain, pairs are unusual). The method is typically as painfree and non-violent as possible (pills, car exhaust).
Domestic violence murder suicides follow different patterns. The abuser desires the death more than their victim. The abuser often has a history of suicide attempts, sometimes using threat of suicide to manipulate (I’ll kill myself if you leave me). Other patterns of abuse (emotional abuse, social and physical isolation) are generally present. The abuser may have threatened to kill their victim before, sometimes these threats stretch back decades. In this context, murder and suicide are desired ends in themselves. The method is usually very violent, guns are the most common.
The question is, Which pattern does Ting’s death resemble?
A decade before shooting her sleeping husband in the head with a gun, Alice writes to Robert Silverberg, “I had always meant to take myself off the scene gracefully about now while I am still me. And now I find I can’t, because to do it would mean leaving him alone, and I can’t bring myself to put a bullet through that sleeping head–to take him, too, when he doesn’t want to go…”
So, we have a decade plus history of her fantasizing about murdering him, with the method she eventually chose. We have a history of her being suicidal for its own sake. We have the classic method itself (gun violence). We have it occurring when he is asleep and literally unable to consent.
What about this pact, though?
The most, the MOST the family and friends say of Ting’s desire for death is that it was less enthusiastic than Alice’s. More tellingly, they don’t talk about Ting bringing up this desire on his own, when she’s not present; he didn’t leave a note with his own reasons, and this was not his own method. Ting does not appear to have said, ‘I hope my wife shoots me when I’m sleeping.’ In cases where people do desire these ends, we’d see some of that.
A disabled person is at the absolute mercy of their carer. It is nearly impossible to describe the level of social, physical, and emotional isolation this causes. On a personal level, we have Alice desiring Ting’s death so much that she confided this desire to her friend a decade prior. It is reasonable to assume Alice told Ting how much she wanted him to die so that she could kill herself and be free.
That kind of emotional abuse is profoundly damaging to a person’s belief in their own self worth. Couple this with the world’s view of disabled people as burdens. Take a look at the Ryman thread where everyone is earnestly arguing that writing some racist essays taints a writer’s name forever, but that killing a disabled spouse does not (!!!). Look at the commentators in these posts and articles, expressing sympathy for Alice and her situation, how burdensome caring for a disabled person is, how awful it is, and how it might drive someone to murder.
Now, ask yourself, if you were disabled and you heard all that, would you, maybe, start to believe your life was a barrier to your spouse’s happiness? I would. Especially if I was socially isolated and the person who claimed to love me the most was the one who told me that only my death would free them. Would you begin to want to die? I would.
Look. This is too long already. I don’t know what was in Ting’s heart. But I do think we should consider the broader history of Alice’s behavior and start asking some much more sophisticated questions about consent.
On a deeply personal note: All of y’all sympathizing and refusing to judge–have you–I mean, do you realize what you’re telling some of us? Those arguing that Campbell’s actions taint his name but Sheldon’s actions don’t–do you–you do get what you’re telling people like me? I could be a Ting. I’ve been entirely reliant and dependent on a carer. And I can’t be the only disabled person reading these comments who’s crushed at how very little some of y’all apparently value our lives. :/
@Venus
You’re making a lot of assumptions there. How many of them are based on the facts of THIS situation?
Venus:
You know, if you write such long comments, you should actually start with reading the text you are complaining about. They are explicitly stating that they examined the situation based on those patterns.
So please. At least acknowledge that they had done exactly what you asked them for. Even if they might have come to different conclusions.
@Venus:
I don’t have to ask myself how I would react to this or that if I were disabled, because I was born with CP-Cerebral Palsy, for those who don’t know the abbreviation.
I’m one of those who will not judge Alice Sheldon, precisely because I can see both sides. I was my mom’s principal caregiver during her terminal illness. So I’ve been a caregiver as well as needing caregiving.
There’s a LOT I could say here, but I’ll limit myself to pointing out the following:
Huntington Sheldon was a vigorous, accomplished and successful man in his own area of expertise. As I watch my friends and family begin to age and find themselves dealing with things I’ve had to deal with for decades, I hear, repeatedly, “I now understand what you’ve lived with and I don’t know if I can live this way”.
I hear it most often from people who have been active and successful, driven to be very good at something, who now find their lives narrowing-and, frankly, it scares them.
Is it really that hard for you to believe that a man who was the second director of the Office of Current Intelligence at the CIA and served under three presidents over a ten year span, a man who briefed three presidents personally, as he lived a life rapidly telescoping down to near-blindness and permanently confined to his bed, would not have his own thoughts turn unaided to the most obvious means of escape and to eventually want that end?
It isn’t hard at all for me to believe that.
@Venus: I notice you don’t even begin to address one of the post’s main points: that the award is not named after a (troubled) person but after a construct that mocked the gender limitations of SF-as-it-was.
ISTM that you are also insisting on the worst possible construction of events which we’ll never know enough about to come to general agreement. This contrasts with the cases of two award faces, one of whom was always an overt racist (even by the standards of his time) and the other someone who constricted the entire field.
Some more minor points: Disabled people are by no means all dependent on a carer. Many of us are independent. I would ask that a different phrase be used for those who are dependent than just “disabled people”. Also, I don’t know that Ting was isolated. He might have been, but I can’t tell that from what was described. And I didn’t read Alli’s words from a decade before as saying she desired Ting’s death. She desired her own.
This is not to say that I know what happened, because I don’t. It is, at least, tragic, and may have been worse than that. I hope not, but I can’t tell from here.
I respect the decision of the Tiptree Motherboard right now, and I think the discussion will continue.
I confess to a great deal of uneasiness about this decision, not least because I have seen anger and frustration expressed by many disabled people about it.
The circumstances seem murky, certainly tragic. And yet, it must be considered that there is no positive evidence whatsoever that Huntington Sheldon desired his own death. All the stories about it being a mutually agreed-upon pact seem to lead back to Alice Sheldon alone. The only actually verified witnessed statements we have from Huntington are that he expressly did not wish it.
What is certain is that Alice Sheldon took Huntington Sheldon’s life while he was sleeping, then took her own in a murder-suicide.
And people with disabilities have been watching the sff community fall all over itself to make sympathetic excuses for her.
It’s quite distressing.
@Peace
Depression is disabling – it can make you not think clearly, it certainly can make things look worse than they really are, and it has a long, long record of causing people to make bad decisions, frequently involving death for at least one.
But what Alice Sheldon did is not the reason for the award, which is the Tiptree. Can you separate her writing as Tiptree from her actions as Allie Sheldon? (Most of us can.)
@Peace
You seem to have misunderstood these points completely. The “only actually verified witnessed statement we have from Huntington” was a comment not by him, but by Alice years earlier, so that is what “leads back to Alice Sheldon alone.” The “stories about it being a mutually agreed-upon pact” years after that quote lead back not just to her, but to Huntington’s friends and his own son. (Alli had no children; Ting had three.)
This doesn’t have to change your opinion, but it’s important to base opinions on correct information.
@Jeff Smith
Perhaps so. It certainly distresses me to move against the tide when so many people I like and respect see it differently.
And yet, when I speak to my disabled friends, they tell me that what they see is a disabled man who never spoke of his readiness to die, whose only actual statement on record says the opposite, who is then murdered by his caretaker.
They tell me they see this man silenced, not a verified word from him to anyone that he wants this, only assertions by those speaking around him, speaking for him. They see his voice overwritten in this narrative. There’s no one on record even saying that he personally confirmed the suicide pact to them, just people quoting his caretaker – his killer, recall – describing him as agreeable to it, or else they say it was common knowledge.
And then my disabled friends tell me they see large numbers of people speak of how terrible disability is, how worthless it makes life, how understanding and sympathetic and compassionate they are to the poor exhausted murderers.
A quote from an advocacy foundation:
The Tiptree case looks like a classic example of caregiver murder of a disabled person, except for the added claim that the victim consented. And yet clearly, painfully, there is no evidence anywhere that the victim consented save hearsay from others, none of whom spoke directly to the victim.
When you look at the facts of this case they’re dodgy as hell. And yet so many in the community still try to justify what happened, to excuse it, to minimize it.
That’s what my disabled friends see.
Iirc, one of the last times this topic came up here someone referenced a witness statement shortly before her murder-suicide where Ting expressed fear and concern that she might do what she ended up doing. Can anyone find the link to it? I can clearly remember it happening but my google-fu is letting me down, and now I’m wondering if I’m clearly misremembering it.
Aside from that, I don’t find the idea that the Tiptree being named for her doesn’t honour her particularly persuasive. If it were just the Tiptree, maybe, like the Hugos are just the Hugos, but using a full name, however pseudonymous, tips it over the line as far as I’m concerned. I’m ambivalent (if unhappy and generally grumpy about it) about whether to change the name, but that argument: Meh.
The discussion around it has been very disappointing, but then it usually is, whenever disability comes up.
Honestly, I’m very angry and upset about the discussion more than I am about anything to do with the actual award. People have been falling all over themselves to make it clear that even if they think he didn’t consent – and certainly the evidence that he did is not strong – then it still wasn’t really a murder because he was in pain, he was disabled, he needed care, it was a mercy killing, she wanted what was best for him, she couldn’t go without him, on and on and on and you know what? I am in constant pain, I am disabled, I need care. So now I know how many people, including people I care about and consider to, generally speaking, enrich my experience of this community, might not consider it to really be murder if I was murdered, which is a whole damn lot of people. A little bit terrifying.
We are still, as a majority, as a society, making excuses for caretaker murder in 2019, and I don’t see any change over the horizon. And that, however symbolic of this the award’s name is, is a heck of a lot more distressing to me than what an award is called.
No, Julie Phillips, Sheldon’s biographer, said in her recent Twitter feed that she had confirmed that the pact had existed for years with two of Tiptree’s husband’s Ting’s close friends and his son. One of his friends says “They were quite open about it.”
https://twitter.com/jcfphillips/status/1168267581708546049
@jayn
I’m reporting what my disabled friends see.
They see a man whose voice never agrees to this.
They see a caregiver who repeatedly asserts that there is a suicide agreement with her disabled partner, which is echoed by family and friends, but never that partner.
They see that the disabled partner is described as not wanting to die, that the only reliable citations of his actual words are that he expressly does not wish to die.
From their perspective this is a nightmarish situation where a man’s wishes are described only by his eventual murderer and no one ever checks with him to confirm, and when he is murdered they nod and agree that it was what he wanted.
And they see the sff community seemingly closing ranks to ignore the voices and fears and commonplace genocidal reality of people with disabilities in favor of a soothing narrative of not-murder.
Hitchcock himself could not have made it sound more sinister.
Other commenters are pointing to the places where Ting’s friends and family confirmed that there was a pact and that Ting openly consented to it and acknowledged it. And other commenters are also mentioning the wellness check the police made when Sheldon’s lawyer called them concerned about her plan. According to that story the police checked in with both Ting and Alice. Are these Ting’s words? Do they count? These are sincere questions, not a trap.
It is true that Ting’s words on this aren’t recorded verbatim (so far as anyone knows anyway?). I’m not sure a suicide pact is something outsiders can expect to find a lot of documentation for. But I’m not going to try to argue anyone out of their position, least of all people with disabilities who already feel as if they’re being made to argue for their right to live.
I think when this discussion started I seriously underestimated how important it is. A few days ago I thought Tiptree’s writing was good enough to “balance” her final actions, like the people saying that Sheldon’s final actions aren’t what her writing represents (and commonly presented in contrast to Campbell and his editorials). That’s already a pretty embarrassing perspective to me personally. The Motherboard’s most compelling argument to me at this point is the name-recognition one, Tiptree’s name has weight and the award as named does too, but I hope they’re serious about continuing to discuss and question because it didn’t take me long to realize I didn’t feel comfortable on that side of the argument.
@Peace
What citation was this?
@Meredith
I finally found my copy of Phillip’s Sheldon bio: is this what you’re referring to?
Meredith, I absolutely do believe that if Sheldon was clear-minded enough to understand that Ting was not agreeing to enact their pact that night and decided to carry it out against his wishes, that was murder. I know that to use the word “if” at all may seem cruel, specious, and discounting of the victims of caretaker murder…but I don’t think we should leave it out altogether.
Severe mental illness as a cause of legally diminished responsibility in crime has a bad rap these days, especially with bad-faith people in the U.S. using it as an excuse for every mass murder committed by a white man. But in an actual court, pleading insanity is almost never successful – even in cases when it patently SHOULD be, like the Andrea Yates case.
I work with people who are mentally ill. I even have a mental illness, that in my case has never been severe enough to be disabling. And over and over, I’ve seen people with truly severe illness told by society, by their families, by the government when refusing disability or other support that it’s all in their heads, not a REAL disability, that if they don’t take up their duties that society allots them – their study, their wage earning, their newborn and child care, and so forth – they are just malingerers, bad people. This same attitude can carry over to ignoring steps needed to prevent actual tragedy…as when Andrea Yates was left by her husband alone to take care of her five children (one a newborn) under the age of 7, even though she had postpartum depression, a history of postpartum psychosis and previous suicide attempts, because her husband had made up his mind that she should be recuperated by now and needed to start pulling her weight. The jury agreed and condemned her for murder in her first trial, even though she was genuinely actively delusional at the time.
To me, the trial of Andrea Yates was a miscarriage of justice, over a totally predictable and preventable tragedy. It’s textbook psychiatry never to leave a woman with postpartum psychosis alone with her child, or she could kill the child. This was ignored. And to me, the case of Sheldon was also a horrifying mismanagement of a psychiatric emergency. The police should have hospitalized her and confiscated the guns that night when they received the report of what she was contemplating, instead of just accepting her and her husband’s reassurances (they apparently spoke to both of them).
It may seem wrong of me to insist on saying there should be some thought and analysis before we call Sheldon a murderer outright. She herself is beyond caring. But saying “mental illness is no excuse” as a blanket global principle basically brushes aside the entire concept of mental illness as a cause for diminished responsibility. This puts in danger people like future Andrea Yates, and blunts society’s motivation to work on prevention and support of people with mental illness to KEEP such things from happening. After all, if you’ve made up your mind that people with mental illness who plead they are breaking down are just being melodramatic or malingering, why should you spend resources and thought on alleviating burdens that are their proper responsibility? The US government is espousing that attitude more and more over the last few years (though they have simultaneously loosened the legal barriers against people with severe mental illness to get guns, good God…)
@Meredith, I just wanted to clarify that I don’t think YOU’RE saying “mental illness is no excuse” above. It’s just that I was smacked with that sentiment a lot when I went into the Twitter discussion.
@jayn
That looks like what I was looking for, thank you.
I agree that the McNaughton standard is deeply inadequate as a standard for not guilty by reason of insanity, but that’s for legal trials. This isn’t one.
I’m far more interested in whether Ting Sheldon was murdered than whether, if someone had sat down Alice Sheldon in the time between shooting her husband and shooting herself, they could have extracted incontrovertible evidence that she truly did not understand that she’d murdered him. It seems to me very likely that he was murdered, that his life was taken from him without his consent, not at a time of his choosing, by the one person on whom he was particularly reliant and should have been able to trust, and that he was murdered because of his disability and because of his care needs, by someone who feared physical disability.
I care that a lot of people have been making an awful lot of excuses for why his disability and care needs and pain justify his murder. Make it not really a murder at all. That taking someone’s life against their will and without their consent isn’t as bad so long as they have a disability. That disabled people are such a burden that it’s really perfectly understandable that a caretaker might snap one day and murder their family. That it was really a “mercy killing”. That her disability and her value as an author and a figurehead justifies carefully brushing him and his consent out of the story of his own murder.
Her depression – her disability – likely was a contributing factor, but probably not as much as people are arguing, because it’s perfectly clear that a lot of people agree with her actions. And that is very upsetting.
ETA, wrt “no excuse”: I have long been of the opinion that a crime can be committed against an individual without the intent of the perpetrator matching the crime. So you can have a murder (or rape) victim without necessarily having a murderer (or rapist) – but while that is certainly an excellent reason to break down crimes in a court of law and sentence accordingly, it doesn’t make the victim any less murdered or any less raped. So I’m fairly confident in calling it a murder suicide, and him a murder victim, but waffle back and forth over whether to call her a murderer.
I haven’t seen people making the “mental illness is no excuse” argument.
What I have seen is a lot of upset people with disabilities who see these facts:
Alice Sheldon said she had a mutually agreed suicide pact with her husband Huntington.
Huntington Sheldon did not say this. The only person who ever said out loud in front of witnesses that Huntington agreed to die was Alice Sheldon.
Many friends and relatives of the Sheldons agree with Alice Sheldon’s claim.
… But none of them actually witnessed Huntington actually confirming it. None of them will confirm that Huntington said out loud, in their presence, that he consented to this. And most of them seem to have avoided talking to him about it.
The only citations of what Huntington actually said are that he expressly was “not ready” to die yet.
Alice Sheldon murdered Huntington Sheldon and then committed suicide.
Those are the facts on the ground.
Please try to understand how damning and dismissive this looks to people with disabilities.
The disabled are more likely to die at their caregivers’ hands than from their disability. According to the Autistic Self Advocacy Network, in 2017 three disabled people a WEEK were murdered by their caregivers.
It’s not a matter of Alice Sheldon’s mental state. It’s a matter of looking at the facts on the ground, of who said what and who did not, and who did what.
The whole situation looks terrible.
Just to be clear, if Alice Sheldon shot her husband Huntington Sheldon without his aware and informed consent, that is murder.
I generally don’t prefer naming awards after people, precisely because no one is a saint and these types of discussions are thus all but inevitable. The nature of the Tiptree, the circumstances of the nom de plume in this instance and the stated intentions at the time of the award’s creation make the naming of the award apt. The board can do as it wishes, so far as I’m concerned.
As a lifer in the ranks of the disabled, I don’t need a perceived callousness with regard to an award being named after the pseudonym of an author who shot her disabled husband and herself to indicate to me an, at best, ambivalence towards people like me in fandom specifically, let alone the world in general.
To get that impression, all I need to do is go to a convention.
To me, worrying about the Tiptree’s implications is like complaining about a low-grade fever while gangrene is eating my leg.
@Meredith: If I have contributed to your difficulties with this discussion, I am truly sorry and apologize profusely.
By which I mean, I guess, is not that mental illness is no excuse, because it absolutely is a mitigating factor, but that mental illness doesn’t make it not murder. And that established societal norms are such that we more or less drag carers down the path, make excuses for their actions when they get to the end, and erase disabled people from being victims at all, which makes it all a lot less to do with mental illness distorting thought and a lot more to do with both the entirely inadequate support we give to family carers and how society views disability&disabled people.
@Robert Reynolds
Well, I won’t say I don’t prefer it when we’re in agreement, but I don’t think you in particular have said things I found especially upsetting.
I think perhaps the differences in our relative experiences of disability matter in this case. Mine is genetic, but while there were, in retrospect, signs thoughout my childhood, it wasn’t obvious until I was in my mid-late teens. So I know very well the experience of going from an apparently able-bodied person to struggling with pretty much everything, and feel quite strongly about how we (as a society) should be making it clear to people that you can adapt, that it will be, if not exactly what your life was, still a good life once you’ve got yourself acclimatised. That becoming disabled isn’t a death sentence or a misery sentence and that you will be okay if you give yourself a chance. (Ideally, also making resources available to ease that transition, both in terms of making adaptations and adaptive technology available sooner and providing general information and support.)
And he wasn’t ready to go. He was, as far as he was concerned, whatever others might think when they see “pain” and “blind” and “needed care”, doing okay. So it’s a very sad thing to see people trying to take that away from him.
(Also, speaking personally, I think one of the worst things you can do to a lot of disabled people is to take their remaining choices – so much of what many of us get to choose is curtailed by what we have to do to manage ourselves – away from them, and there’s no more permanant way to do that than by killing someone. So there’s a particular horror, for me, to that particular act, even beyond the violation of trust.)
Also, my problem is less with the award, and an awful lot more with what it makes clear about how people think about is, through the discussion that surrounds it. A symbol of the problem, if you like, so I think we more-or-less agree that the award itself isn’t the biggest potato. But it sure does expose some of those bigger potatoes and force discussion of them, and there’s value in that exposure and discussion, although it’s upsetting for me.
I’m not sure I’m making much sense at this point.
You’re making perfect sense.
You’re correct-it makes a significant difference in one’s worldview if you’re born disabled and know nothing different. I’ve been largely either invisible or an object to either be marveled at or pitied since as far back as I can remember. It colors my perceptions.
I hadn’t intended to do anything but follow the discussion. But I, perhaps unwisely, responded to a drive-by.
May this find you happy and healthy.
You’re ignoring the people who said this out loud to Julie Phillips, people who had talked to Ting.
I need to say something here. I understand where the disabled community is coming from. I probably didn’t before, but I’ve been listening now.
But I need to speak up for myself. I knew Alli and Ting. They were both wonderful people. I knew Alli better, and she was someone I loved. Ting took me to dinner at his club — I felt like I was the only non-spook there — and we talked for hours. (This was to give Alli a break, because she was always “on” when she had company, even me, and she could relax and recharge while we were out of the house.) We didn’t talk about suicide pacts, because why would you?
When I would sit and talk with them, whenever one of them spoke the other would watch and drink it in. I loved being in their company.
It is so painful to me to hear people devaluing her, calling her a murderer. Yes, she shot her husband and herself. But calling someone a “murderer” makes that action the most important part of their life.
That was not the most important part of her life. That is not how she deserves to be remembered.
There aren’t many of us left who knew her. Ursula is gone, Joanna is gone, Vonda is gone. Gardner Dozois. David Hartwell. Virginia Kidd.
But for the sake of me and the rest of the people who loved her, please don’t villainize her. I understand this conversation is painful to a lot of people, but one of the people it’s painful to is me. And as I said above, most of the people I could share memories about her with are gone. I have friends who have been calling me to see how I’m doing, just like thirty years ago when it happened. But without the other people who were her friends there for support, it’s pretty lonely here. I’m trying to be respectful of the people who are upset about all this; please try and be respectful of my feelings, too.
Thank you.
(This article isn’t even on the front page anymore, so I don’t know how many people will see me pouring my heart out here. Maybe just as well.)
I think Jayn has the gist of it. We shouldn’t argue about if murder is acceptable. We should argue about why people knew of a suicide pact, but we don’t get any information about what people did to unburden the suicidal person, to give her help and care and in the same way make sure that she and her husband could have a decent life without only themselves to care for each other.
I have not read Tiptree, I have never followed the award, so I do not really care about its naming. With both a pseudonym and suicidal depression as a factor, I think it gives factors so you can argue any way whatsoever.
I get why we focus on discussions about rationale of the murder, because in a way we are talking about if Shelton was a bad enough person to have the award withdrawn. But it is a question of wording.
We can discuss if a person with sucicidal depression thought the murder was reasonable. But we have to be bleeding careful about not letting that slip into it talking as if it was being understandable in 1987 with that kind of murder in that kind of situation. The question isn’t if she did an understandable thing. It might well have been for her. It doesn’t have to be for us.
If we are going to discuss the situation about the murder, then the real question is: What did people do to make she and her husband see alternatives and to alleviate their burden?
EDIT: And I do not mean this as a personal attack. I can understand how hard this kind of thing is and how easy everything looks in hindsight and even more from the outside.
@peace
It’s sure nice you don’t know anyone with depression to the point of suicidal thoughts. Many people can now get real help before it gets that bad, or before they act on those thoughts – but that help wasn’t available back then, and people did, and do, still kill themselves with or without also killing members of their family. (See also “suicide by cop”. Which happens.)
The Tiptree Award Motherboard decided to clarify today:
Update: Wednesday September 4, 2019.
We’ve seen some people discussing this statement and saying we’re refusing to rename the award. Of course it’s easy to read what we’ve written in that way; our apologies. While this post focuses on the reasons why we have not immediately undertaken to rename the award, our thinking is ongoing and tentative, and we are listening carefully to the feedback we are receiving. We are open to possibilities and suggestions from members of our community as we discuss how best to move forward. You can contact us at [email protected].
This is a difficult conversation for me. I may not have been on File 770 much lately, but I was a regular poster for quite some time and remain fond of many of the regulars here.
@Jeff Smith
Alice Sheldon’s good qualities are not coming across then. It is difficult to give a nuanced portrait of someone under the best of circumstances, and highly understandable to close ranks around a beloved friend who is accused of doing something extremely ugly.
For what it’s worth, I stayed as a guest in Virginia Kidd’s house and knew David Hartwell. Ursula LeGuin gave a hand diapering my first baby. Gardner Dozois was a mentor of a family member.
I recall how fond everyone was of Alice Sheldon and how saddened by the circumstances of her death.
But I have also come to realize how much what she did slots into the dehumanizing narratives used to justify killing the disabled.
And it seems to me not enough is being done to address that.
@P J Evans
I am not sure where you got the impression that I know no one with depression and I am sorry if I gave it. I do not condemn Alice Sheldon for not getting help for depression in an era when such was essentially unavailable.
What I have been focusing on is not Alice Sheldon’s mental difficulties, but how her actions look in the context of caregivers murdering the disabled, which is depressingly common.
While granting that she was in painful and difficult circumstances with little meaningful social support, surely it can also be accepted that what she did was wrong, and that there are people with good, valid reasons to be angry and upset about the way her actions are being portrayed.
Peace Is My Middle Name:
You’re not forgotten, even if I failed to say welcome back. I was very glad to see you commenting again (even if the subject is hard). You have always been one of the voices I have appreciated to hear here.
Peace Is My Middle Name: You’re welcome and certainly remembered — I even referenced you in my final Puppy roundup post of long ago.
@Peace:
I recall you fondly as well. I enjoyed your contributions here very much. I hope all is well with you.
Thanks, folks. It’s good to be back among you.
I am as opinionated as ever, for good or ill. Life is, as is often the case, complicated, but in many ways improved on what it was a few years ago. My family is thriving, although certain good friends are facing some health issues. My TBR pile is no smaller than it was.
I’m glad you’re still here.
I’m glad to see you back, Peace. Your insightful thoughts and incisive commentary have been missed. 🙂
My understanding is that Alice Sheldon had been seeing a therapist for some time, and had got benefit from it. Which is not a cure all or even automatically a cure anything, but mental health care wasn’t entirely non-existent.
@Peace
Remembered very fondly, and certainly I’d be delighted to see you around more often. I’m glad things are going well for you!
@P J Evans
I do not see any reason to make that assumption from Peace’s comments, and frankly, I’m really unhappy to see this accusation/assumption continue to come up in discussions about the Sheldon’s, because this really isn’t the first time. People shouldn’t have to preemptively disclose theirs or their loved ones mental health histories in order to be allowed to disagree about Alice Sheldon’s actions.
@Jeff Smith
I’m sorry this discussion is painful for you, and I can understand why it is. I hope you can find somewhere or someone to share happier memories with. Other threads might even be a good place for that, some other time, I’m sure fans of her work would love to hear them.
@meredith
I wasn’t trying to argue that, but that using current options to judge past actions is a bad idea.
(As someone with a multi-generation family history of bipolar/unipolar – I know what deep depression does up close and really personal.)
Treatment for depression was definitely a thing in 1987. My father was diagnosed in the mid-1980s, and was successfully treated with medication (some form of lithium, I believe).
I’m just confused, bewildered really as to how anyone could possibly be defending the actions of Alice Sheldon especially after the Metoo movement which has exposed how power can be abused.
First off, I would like to say that I am disabled so to hear all these semi justifications for why what she did was if not right then understandable is disheartening to say the least, and the idea of mercy killing is in fact repugnant, yes it does happen sometimes but not as often as people would like to think.
@jeff Smith: but surely that’s the point, that an average ordinary person can resort to murder because they genuinely believe it’s the right thing to do, because they don’t want to see the person they love suffering and how much a society would agree with them in that decision, I’m sure Alice Sheldon was a lovely person but we don’t expect abusers to look like monsters.
Just consider how many people have stated that those men who abused in the Metoo movement could not possibly have done what they did because they seemed like perfectly nice, decent chaps and her talking about their crimes is very painful.
Whenever we have discussions that affect a particular group or community, we should seek to listen to the views of the people in that community so I would like to ask that people who are disabled comment on this thread with their views, whether they’re happy about the decision or not and that people with able-bodied privilege should listen.
@Peace Is My Middle Name:
What should be done?
@ John A Arkansawyer
Listen to those with a stake in the argument. Respect the voices of people on the business end of caregiver murders. Do not dismiss people’s fears out of hand because they paint someone important to you in a bad light.
Pay attention to the greater context of the issues. Apply the Golden Rule. If something is intolerable when it is done to one group it is also intolerable when done to another (women who kill their small children before committing suicide tend to be pilloried in the press – unless their children are disabled).
Be aware that in every community there are always more nuances than outsiders can see. This is obvious to us in the case of the science fiction community and the lives of the people within it whom we know or know of. Remember it is also the case within other communities. If an issue important to some other community intersects with your own, try to understand why.
The community of disabled people, it should be said, has its own internal ambivalence towards death and euthanasia. I ran across a thoughtful analysis from a disabled person which included this observation:
Disabled people are routinely written out of human discourse and their voices are not heard. I was recently brought up short by a video of a dog, paralysed in the back legs, who was ecstatic when she was fitted up with a wheelchair so that she could move about. And someone had commented (paraphrased), “Why do people recognize this is wonderful for a dog, but when it’s a HUMAN in the wheelchair they think it’s a tragedy?”
This is an opportunity to expand our understanding of what is and isn’t acceptable behavior and how it impacts groups we may not have thought much about before. As the recent WorldCon demonstrated, accessibility issues impact everyone. The more we pay attention to the concerns of people whose lives are directly impacted by things we may not have examined, the better we can make human society for all the humans in it.
.
And now everyone please excuse me. In an hour or two I’m going in for a routine surgical procedure and I shall be incommunicado for some time.
It took me a while to come to terms with my feelings about renaming/not renaming the award. Mostly, the things I felt so conflicted about is that I admire a person who has killed a person in her care. How can admiration for her work and despising that she killed someone work together?
For that, I had to go back to when I was 17 and my grandmother passed away whom we had cared for in our family while she succumbed to dementia. I think caring for another person puts a huge burden on everyone. My family and I had to deal with a lot of nasty things my grandmother did in our care because nasty is what she became. It’s the thing I remember the most about her because it happened during the last 2 years of her life. We all were stressed out about it. Everyone was angry all the time because we felt so helpless and couldn’t understand how this lovely, caring person had become this nasty person we cared for. When she passed, neither of us knew how to deal with it. We cried at her funeral. We cried when we cleaned out the room she had lived in. What we never talked about is how relieved we all felt. That was a feeling it took another 3 years to accept as part of grief. Another 3 years because then my dad died all of a sudden. We were in shock. We felt sad. But the doctors told us that if he had survived, he would have needed full time care. So the relief came again as an unwelcomed feeling because we didn’t know what to make of it. My mum and I went to get counseling to come to terms with how we felt. The worst part about feeling relieved was that we felt bad and guilty, as if feeling relief wasn’t allowed to be felt. It took a long time of counseling to accept that, yes, relief can be part of the grieving process and it is okay to feel it.
So yes, my conflicting emotions here are of the same pattern. I felt guilty and bad for admiring James Tiptree and the work she has done. But you know, it is okay to admire her for her work. But at the same time, if the award was renamed I wouldn’t mind at all because I understand where people are coming from. I understand that the award being named after her makes people uncomfortable because of what she did. Since it is unclear if there ever was a suicide pact, just out of pure consideration for disabled people who have voiced their concerns, I would second that the name of the award be changed.
A lot of able bodied people, myself included, say that they cannot imagine continue living after an accident that leaves others to care for them. And it is easy to say that from our point of view because we cannot envision what life is like for people who need that care. We cannot envision what it means and whether life is still worth living. But this also means that we consider the lives of disabled people less worthy. And that, we definitely shouldn’t do.
As an abled bodied person I am privileged that changing the name of the award doesn’t affect me at all. It doesn’t make me feel uncomfortable if it continues being named after Tiptree. It certainly wouldn’t make me feel uncomfortable if the name got changed.
But I have read many disabled voices here and on other platforms and I think that they have the right to be heard.
In the initial decision statement it was said that they have been reflecting on many of feminist icons could not see a way out. But there is a difference between a person committing suicide and a person committing suicide and also killing another person in their care. And that difference should matter.
@bill: Certainly there was medication for severe depression. Lithium did work, but since it was (and is – it is still much used) dangerous in overdose, its use was limited for maintenance therapy to people whose doctors are sure they won’t try to OD on it. (Long-term use can damage the kidneys too, so it needs careful monitoring by regular blood tests). There were antidepressants, which were about as effective as today’s are (which is so-so), but prior to 1987 (the advent of Prozac) all antidepressants on the market were ALSO especially deadly in overdose, which also limited their use. Not to mention that antidepressants can kick patients with bipolar disorder (which Sheldon apparently had) into mania (not a good thing).
There was ECT (electroconvulsive therapy) which was most effective, but it had a bad reputation as damaging the memory (a fear now known to be overblown).
Aaand that was it, except for psychotherapy, IIRC. It was really a rather bleak prospect.
@Peace Is My Middle Name: I agree fully with your last comment. But I would also like to add that people with mental illness also have a stake in this argument.
@jayn – If you are saying that there is /was no cure for depression, and treatments had side effects / problems as well, I agree.
But I was responding to Peace’s comment “I do not condemn Alice Sheldon for not getting help for depression in an era when such was essentially unavailable.” Help was available. Further, Ting was a retired Federal employee with access to very good health insurance, so the Sheldons had fewer barriers to access than most people would.