Wait, James Tiptree murdered their disabled husband?

[lokifan]

(Using ‘they’ as I hear from a reliable source that Tiptree may’ve had dysphoria.)


WHAT THE FUCK

What????

How have I never heard this?!?! And the Wikipedia entry is weirdly on Tiptree’s side! And there’s a biography that discusses this and somehow ends up on Tiptree’s side!

The husband, in the week before his death, TALKED ABOUT his fears that they would kill him! And (according to someone who’s read the police report) he’d clearly tried to get away! This happened in 1987 and I’ve NEVER heard about it what the actual fuck

In all the discussions about problematic people awards are named after, no one ever mentioned HEY JAMES TIPTREE DID A MURDER-SUICIDE?

Like, people clearly just have no idea. But that invisibility 100% speaks to a shocking ableism, because a famous feminist murdering her husband then killing herself would be the kind of narrative that gets remembered for obvious reasons (feminists are crazy man-haters! And then people arguing against that) except I suspect it’s like EH TIPTREE DIDN’T WANNA BE A CARER ANY MORE AND WAS HIS LIFE REALLY WORTH LIVING ANYWAY. People are upsettingly sympathetic to carers who murder their disabled family members, news at 11.

I just

???????????????!!!!!!!!!!!!

Comments

[lunabee34]

I was really surprised to learn this as well. I hadn't known until a couple days ago.

[lokifan]

Yeah, I feel like I'm hearing that from a lot of people. Which makes me feel both a bit better (I'm not just crazily out of the loop) and significantly worse (I think it reflects a lack of value placed on disabled people's lives.)

[lunabee34]

*nods nods*

[trepkos]

I had never heard of this author for some reason. Now, I never need to read anything they wrote.

[lokifan]

Haha!

They're a pretty big deal in old-school sci-fi, but their name is mostly big these days in the context of the Tiptree Awards, which are for basically speculative fiction doing interesting things with gender. Hence my shock at never having heard about this - sci-fi fandom has had extended conversations about awards named/fashioned after #problematic people in the last few years.

[khalulu]

I'd never heard that either, and yeah that is shocking - the fact and the way it's reported - just like you said. Someone wants out of caretaking, or wants to die, that's one thing - and carers should have more support, it shouldn't be all on one person taking them to the breaking point - but that person doesn't get to decide "he won't have anyone after I'm gone so I have to kill him," no.

[lokifan]

Yeah, quite. And I keep hearing people talking about the lack of support for carers, and who knows how much support he would've had once Alice killed themselves, but DISABLED PEOPLE THEMSELVES VERY RARELY DECIDE THEIR LIVES AREN'T WORTH LIVING.

[cahn]

Hmm. I discovered Tiptree in the mid-90's as an awkward teenager (so as far from clueful as possible; also this was before the internet) and I found out about this very early on; it was the second thing I knew about Alice Sheldon. It was common knowledge then if I knew it, is what I'm saying. And then of course it was a thing when the bio came out a while back. I guess I assumed everyone knew this -- it may fall into that uncanny valley where people who know it assume other people know it, but other people actually don't.

The wikipedia article, I agree, is AWFUL and ableist, UGH. The Phillips bio I agree with some of your assessment, but not all. [I will use Alli and Ting in the following because that's what Phillips does.] I came away from it thinking not "Alli was Totally Justified in killing her husband because he was Disabled" but rather "wow, Alli was really messed up mentally and that was what led to Alli thinking a double suicide pact was the way to go even though Ting was NOT OKAY with this" (and for what it's worth, I feel that the bio makes this very clear).

(tidbit from the bio: Alli called their lawyer night of, who immediately called the police. The police went and were like "eh, seems fine." GAH.)

Where I do agree with you on the bio is that it does end on Alli's side, and sort of ignoring the whole thing where Ting was, um, MURDERED, in a way that strikes me as icky. I'm not sure I'm convinced it's an ableist thing so much as it's that Tiptree was "one of us" ("us" being SF fandom) and Huntington Sheldon was not, and Phillips being kind of a Tiptree fangirl, and I suspect the book would have been fairly similarly written if Ting had not been disabled but the murder-suicide had happened anyway.

I wonder if people don't really want to have the hard conversations about how mental illness and physical disability and caretaking interact. Yes, Alice Sheldon clearly had problematic ableist viewpoints about when life was worth living that contributed largely to this. But her longstanding depression and bipolar (? I read the bio quite a while ago so don't remember whether a diagnosis of bipolar was given or whether this is Phillips' surmise) and other mental issues contributed at least as much, probably much more. (One only has to read some of Tiptree's last stories to know that there was something seriously off.) And I don't think anyone knows how much of the mental issues corresponded to the viewpoints about when life was worth living (though Phillips speculates it's a lot). It's a lot easier to think that life isn't worth living if one is depressed, in general, regardless of physical disability.