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“The Screwfly Solution” Captures the Violence of Our Current Moment

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Published on October 4, 2022

Photo: Juan Carlos Fonseca Mata (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Photo: Juan Carlos Fonseca Mata (CC BY-SA 4.0)

In the final paragraphs of the 1977 short story “The Screwfly Solution” by Raccoona Sheldon (aka James Tiptree Jr, aka Alice Bradley Sheldon), the world has succumbed to an apparent plague of violent misogyny, leaving the story’s protagonist, Anne, the last woman alive. Scuttled away into hiding by one of the few men immune to the “femicidal” wave sweeping humanity, Anne cuts her hair, dirties her face, and disguises herself as a boy. She only ventures into society when she absolutely must, often gambling on whether she passes well enough to slink by the detection of a store clerk when she purchases supplies. The threat of discovery hangs heavy—Anne’s safety, her life, balancing on the gendered expectations of a man she doesn’t know.

As a trans woman, I know this threat. It’s a feeling I’ve felt in gas stations in rural Oregon on the mornings when I forgot to shave. It’s a feeling I’ve felt whenever I enter the women’s room in a rest stop off I-94. It’s a feeling I’ve felt when my girlfriend reminds me to let her do the talking when we check into a hotel in Wyoming.

Few stories have rattled me the way “The Screwfly Solution” did the first time I read it this summer. I encountered it on the morning after yet another mass shooting, during a season punctuated with anti-trans legislation and the stripping away of reproductive rights. I was syllabus-building for a course on speculative fiction and the gender binary and had already filled the reading list with most of the heavy hitters and personal favorites like Le Guin, Butler, Delany, Anders, Fall, and Gimpelevich, but I knew that Sheldon/Tiptree had to make an appearance. “Screwfly” was at first one of many potential stories, but after my first read and the long, unsettled hours that followed, I knew that this was the story I needed to teach. The story that felt fundamentally of this moment.

Sheldon’s story chronicles the rapid spread of a seemingly untraceable pathogen which triggers men into violent acts of misogyny. Dubbed a “femicide,” by the United Nations, this social contagion reaches an unstoppable groundswell that meets with little resistance. As even former male allies fall into murderous thoughts, the few remaining women seclude themselves from society. Our protagonist Anne becomes the only person on Earth to learn the truth: This social contagion wasn’t natural. It was orchestrated by seemingly angelic otherworldly beings as a way to clear the planet for invasion and colonization—a revelation underscored by the story’s title, which is a reference to sterilization attempts used to control insect populations.

“The Screwfly Solution” frightened me not only its graphic images of femicide or the cosmic horror of its final twist, but in Sheldon’s depiction of a culture that permits the catastrophe to happen. The worldwide wave of murder starts in a Georgia cult operating under the name “The Sons of Adam.” Preaching a supposedly divine message that God will reward the men who “purify” the world, this cult is originally allowed to exist and operate under the pretext of religious freedom. As the infection intensifies some Red Cross centers are erected and a UN summit is called, but the response amounts to little other than a handful of policy suggestions that go ignored. When the Pope is questioned about the religious nature of much of the violence, he only rebuts the specific Christian dogma of the cults in question but refuses to condemn their murderous actions. A protest organized by women’s groups outside the White House is criticized for its lack of a permit and illegal burning of an oil drum, but its message is dismissed. All the while women’s bodies litter the seas in such huge numbers that coastal shipping becomes hazardous. The violence continues on its churning, bloody trajectory, and the world lets it happen.

While some of this inaction can be contributed to the body chemistry-altering warfare conducted by the story’s mostly unseen invaders, the femicide ultimately reaches its apocalyptic conclusion through a dangerous mix of patriarchal indifference and social numbing. As one character notes in the early days of violence, “When one man kills his wife you call it murder, but when enough do it we call it a lifestyle.” It’s hard not to see this numbing effect reflected in our own times. School shootings and racist murders blend together, becoming grim constants of life. A single transphobic bathroom bill in North Carolina may be met with nationwide protest, but a steady stream of laws from around the country becomes a matter for public debate. In the last decade, we’ve continually seen this shift from outrage into numbness and eventually complacency. Those preaching violence, or at least the indifference to violence, redirect our attention. We don’t listen to the protesters, don’t hear their message; instead we debate whether they should have lit a fire outside the White House.

And while our own wave of gendered violence may not be orchestrated by aliens looking to colonize an empty world, there are undeniably those pulling the strings and stoking the fires for their own benefit. The Alliance Defending Freedom has made the eradication of trans* people in public spheres a key part of their restrictive view of an American future. Their political talking points have subtly worked their ways into school boards, right-wing media, courts, and the mouths of elected officials. Even in a culture where the vast majority support trans equality and the protection of reproductive rights, organizations like the ADF have made gendered fear and oppression a political and social reality all the same.

And like the Sons of Adam and their worldwide spinoffs, this current moment of gendered violence is also couched in conversations of faith and appeals to Christian purity. Politicians like Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene call for an embracing of Christian Nationalism while also submitting bills that would ban care for trans* minors on the federal level. The same Supreme Court that overturned the constitutional right to an abortion has also made it clear that the lines between church and state are much more permeable than previously thought. Like “The Sons of Adam,” some members of the Christian Nationalist wing of the GOP also preach of a divine mission of national purity with the enactment of right-wing social policy being a key factor in proposed holy future for the United States. The consolidation of political power through gendered violence veiled in faith may not quite be as apocalyptic as a hostile alien takeover, but the results are undeniably just as damaging.

The violence inflicted on women in “The Screwfly Solution” is front and center from its start, but in one of the story’s smartest turns, women aren’t the only victims of the femicide. Chillingly, in one of Anne’s final notes to her friend Barney, she remarks that boys have begun to disappear as well. Even when Anne passes as a boy, a store clerk warns her that the woods will be filled with hunters soon. Only a certain kind of male purity is safe from the crusade and when women are no longer a target, it’s the weak links of masculinity that fall next, starting with children before moving on to men who fail to achieve the socially-prescribed goals of masculinity.

We see this in today’s gender war too. Cis girls are subjected to the violating exams designed to catch suspected trans girls of participating in school sports. Studies show that one in five men have had a partner who has had an abortion and that those men are four times more likely to graduate from college than men whose partners carried their children to term. The Andrew Tate’s of the world spout a violent form of self-regulated masculinity in the form of the Manosphere, a purity of manhood that is close to unattainable to all who attempt to reach it. Adherence to a gender purity, one generated for malicious purposes but held up through ideas of purity and spirituality, is a scorched-earth campaign, one that annihilates all in its path.

There is a poignancy in the fact that Alice Bradley Sheldon, unsure of whether her brand of writing could reach readers in a genre dominated by men, rose to prominence by publishing under a male penname, James Tiptree Jr. Like Anne in the final days of humanity, she found safety by taking on the guise of a man. Thankfully, Sheldon didn’t feel the need to hide her identity for her entire writing career. Science fiction, like all realms of publishing, slowly began its stumbling evolution into a more inclusive space. And while there are still gatekeeping movements attempting to curb forward momentum and there is absolutely more work to be done, the current SFF ecosystem is undoubtedly a much more equitable, diverse, and boundary-pushing place than the one in which Tiptree made their career.

It’s in this slow march of progress that I at least see some hope. Unlike the femicide of “The Screwfly Solution,” our current crisis isn’t triggered by an extraterrestrial change in the atmosphere. We know the causes, a deadly cocktail of class animus, racial prejudice, weaponized religion, and political cynicism. We aren’t fighting against the clock trying to unlock some mysterious biological puzzle as our exterminators wait patiently for us to fail. We know methods of deradicalization, of education, and of building equity. But, they are active responses. Difficult actions that must be taken against violent tides of normalized dehumanizing hate. It can be done and it has been—maybe not in times as uniquely fraught and volatile as ours, but our own screwfly solution isn’t a foregone conclusion. We can’t let it be.

Nic Anstett is a writer from Baltimore, MD who specializes in the bizarre, spectacular, and queer. She is a graduate from the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Workshop, University of Oregon’s MFA program, and the Tin House Summer Workshop where she was a 2021 Scholar. Her work is published and forthcoming in Witness MagazinePassages NorthNorth American ReviewLightspeed, Bat City Review, Sycamore Review, and elsewhere. Nic is at work on a collection of short stories and maybe a novel.

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