World Fantasy Convention 2026 lists political affiliation as a protected category in its Code of Conduct, placing it alongside race, religion, and disability as grounds for a harassment complaint. The policy, published ahead of the October 22-25 gathering at the Oakland Marriott City Center, also includes a section titled “Free Speech and Artistic Freedom” that explicitly shields “the educational, political, artistic, or literary expression of members in fiction and public Venues.”
Codes of conduct in science fiction fandom have functioned as a weapon since Gamergate. Organizers draft vague harassment language, then apply it selectively against writers, artists, and fans who fall outside the industry’s political consensus. The accused rarely see a specific charge. They see a public statement, then a ban.
World Fantasy Con takes place this year in Oakland, a city where the political minority in a room full of science fiction professionals is far more likely to be conservative than progressive. A harassment policy that names political affiliation as protected, in that setting, functions as protection for the side that has historically lost these fights, not the side that has been running them.
Before we get too exuberant, however, the same document undercuts its own neutral framing a few paragraphs earlier. Before the harassment categories appear at all, the policy opens by saying WFC2026 is “cognizant that the current state of affairs in the United States calls for additional safety features,” instructs attendees they are not required to give “citizenship, gender, sexuality, or political standing” to anyone claiming to be a law enforcement representative, and tells members to route any federal or state agent to convention leadership instead. That framing answers one side of the current immigration debate, not both. A policy that names political affiliation as protected in one clause and builds an entire preamble around distrust of federal enforcement in another definitely causes problems for the idea of lack of discrimination or harassment over political affiliation at best.
The irony of the one-sided jab compounds with the location. The most recent full-year FBI Uniform Crime Report ranks Oakland 9,834th safest out of 9,896 American cities, with a total crime rate more than 330% above the national average. That is the record of a city governed by an extreme left coalition the convention’s preamble seems to be signaling toward, not away from. People should be more concerned about basic safety in Oakland because of crime than any law enforcement or immigration officials statistically, if that was their true concern. SFSFC is worried enough about hypothetical federal agents at a hotel ballroom to write a section instructing members how to handle them, in a city where actual robbery and burglary rates run multiples of the national number.
It’s important to note who runs this convention as well. San Francisco Science Fiction Conventions, Inc. is listed in WFC2026’s own Applicability section as part of the community bound by the policy. SFSFC is the same corporation that ran Worldcon 76 in San Jose in 2018.
SFSFC banned this esteemed journalist from Worldcon 76 in 2018. The organization published a statement implying he “intended” to violate its code of conduct and would not clarify what he had actually done nor intended to do to warrant it. Multiple attempts had been made in advance inquiring about safety since death threats had been made against me, ironically those threats coming because of political affiliation, and they went unanswered. Attempts to get convention organizer Kevin Roche on a phone call to ask what the problem was were completely ignored as well.
A defamation lawsuit followed, as many who read this blog know. In February 2019, a court dismissed four of the five causes of action but let the defamation claim proceed. Worldcon 76 spent more than $100,000 defending the case before settling in 2021. Under the settlement, SFSFC paid damages and published a statement acknowledging that its original announcement “might have led people unfamiliar with Mr. Del Arroz and his work to infer that he is or was a racist.” The statement apologized for it.
That is the institutional network now publishing a policy that names political affiliation as a protected class in one section and telegraphs a specific political anxiety in another. Whether the political-affiliation language reflects a real shift in judgment or just better legal counsel after a six-figure defense bill, it is on the page. Whether the enforcement will match the language on the page is a separate question.
World Fantasy Con has not yet had a political-affiliation complaint test this policy, and some of the same people who sat on the board during the 2018 ban remain active in SFSFC’s other conventions. If a conservative writer or artist gets harassed in Oakland this October, will WFC2026 enforce the rule it wrote, or will political affiliation turn out to be a protected category in name only?
I will be purchasing a ticket and seeing what happens!
Six books. One unforgettable world. The Adventures of Baron Von Monocle is steampunk adventure with the kind of worldbuilding and heart that made you fall in love with fantasy in the first place. Start the series on Amazon.
These days, when you host a con and invite artists, you just get con artists.