I’ve mostly hermited the past two weeks or so, having gone directly from Dragon*Con into a short week at my day job which generally means twice the work and twice the intensity and urgency of every. little. thing. all compacted into three days before you get a small breather before the normal end of week shenanigans begin.
Which is why I haven’t said anything on this yet. First, let me state that, Jeannette Ng’s speech was a thing of awesome and I am so happy and proud that they finally renamed the award to Astonishing. It’s been a long time in coming and I am happy to have been able to see it happen in my lifetime.
The renaming of the Campbell Award to the Astonishing Award has brought back up the possibility of renaming the Tiptree Award.
Now, straight up, I will tell you right now that as a SFF writer and reader, I love what the award stands for. I will also tell you that as a disabled person, the idea that this award is named for Alice Sheldon/James Tiptree Jr is overwhelmingly abhorrent. Before you click further, I will let you know that the explanation involves some sensitive topics, primarily murder by caregiver.
There is a great deal of evidence that Alice Sheldon murdered her husband while he slept before killing herself. Her dependent disabled husband for whom she was the sole caregiver. For whom she hadn’t made plans for his care if/when she predeceased him.
There is a HUGE problem with this. Death by caregiver is a real and present danger for too many people right now.
And this isn’t something new. This has been a known thing for quite a while – from a 1987 newspaper article about her death comes this:
And before you jump into the comments of this post or at the thread on Twitter or Facebook with the line of “oh there was a murder-suicide pact.”
Please understand me when I tell you that’s a great way to get blocked and that it was well understood that Mr. Sheldon DID NOT want to die.
According to Julie Phillips, author of the Sheldon biography James Tiptree Jr.: The Secret Life of Alice B. Sheldon, this is what the lawyer she called the night of said murder-suicide stated:
People have said that it was understood that they had agreed on this. I call bullshit on that. We do not have anything from Ting himself to support this – we have him saying he did not want it, that he was afraid she would kill him. Sheldon’s own words above confirm that the night of, Ting did not consent to her plans. He was asleep. He didn’t want this and she knew that and then did it anyways.
So let me bring you into my reality.
I am a disabled woman, who is damn lucky to be mostly self-sufficient at this point in both my life and the conditions I have. However, I do rely on my housemate on bad pain days. I have curated my workspaces and living spaces to be me-accessible whether I am able to walk to my bathroom or whether I have to wheel myself to it. My current abilities to move under my power are not guaranteed and between the chronic pain disease and the auto-immune conditions, it is highly likely that there will come a day where I won’t be able to get around without crutches or a wheelchair. That I won’t be able to function because of the pain and with the way this country treats women and also pain management. That I will require permanent help just to keep going on.
And I am going to keep going on until the very last possible second that I can. Because I am a stubborn asshole who genuinely loves life.
In order to do that, I will have to depend on people. I will have to trust people a whole hell of a lot. The idea that someone I trusted with my own self would do a fraction of what Sheldon is reported to have done makes me want to scream and then bend all my spell slots and spoons towards hastening the robot takeover so I can get my reinforced exoskeleton and therefore won’t have to worry so much about leaving myself open to this kind of vulnerability.
Because of things like this. Because of the lengths that people will go to in order to excuse this sort of behavior when the victim is one of us. You see this all the time when another case of parents murdering their disabled children makes the rounds. There is a reason why we have a Disability Day of Mourning (cases there stretch back to 1980).
The kicker is that everywhere that the Sheldon/Tiptree award renaming is being talked about? There is someone or several someones making the argument that “nobody is advocating that caregiver homicide is okay.”
And as a disabled person? That just isn’t true. At all.
You’ll see where conversations veer sharply off course as people stumble all over themselves trying to come up with literally anything but the idea that killing a disabled person because you don’t think their life is worth living is wrong.
You do, however, hear a lot about how hard it is for the caregiver, how they’re just under a super tremendous burden and really won’t someone please think of them?
Their burden isn’t any heavier or more difficult than that of the actual disabled person, I’ll tell you that right now. These conversational pivots do nothing to distract from the fact that there are a whole host of people who think that what Sheldon did was the right thing to do.
One of my amazing tribe members once said something that’s always stayed with me. “You never stop doing the math.” It was used then in the context of how things are more progressive and that holding hands or kissing in public for non-straight relationships isn’t immediately a death sentence or worse.
It is no less true for disabled folks. We never stop doing the math on whether we’re worth the effort expended on us, whether we’re too much of a burden on those we love, or if it would be better if we just removed ourselves from the equation. Justifying our existence in a complicated kind of cost-benefit calculus, trying to weigh what we can contribute vs what it takes to keep us alive.
And it never ever stops. You never stop doing the math.
The choice to end your own life is not the same as taking someone else’s.
And that’s what Sheldon did. By her own words, that is what happened.
Rename the award. It’s time.