“Lady Author”

It’s very telling that you’ll get people saying, again, “author and lady author are just true facts,” but then getting angry when you say that fine, if they want divisions, it needs to be “male and female author.” No! Male is the default the norm the baseline of human experience! How dare you imply anything different!

I, and roughly fifty percent of the world’s population, would like to beg to differ. It’s just that women get forced to understand men if we want to enjoy media and tell stories, while men are allowed to treat women as these weird extraterrestrial creatures who can never be comprehended, but must be fought. It’s like we’re somehow the opposing army in an alien invasion story, here to be battled, defeated, and tamed, but never acknowledged as fully human.

Does that seem like a lot to get out of the phrase “lady author”? It kinda is. But that’s what happens when the background radiation of your entire life is a combination of “men are normal, human, wonderful, admirable, talented, worth aspiring to,” and “bitches be crazy.”

— Seanan McGuire, “Sexism, the current SFWA kerfuffle, and ‘lady authors.’“