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The Hugo Awards (or more fittingly, the Women In Speculative Fiction Awards) are an interesting case study in skin-suiting and how it operates in practice.

The quoted tweet is an infographic of winners which demonstrates that right around 2016 something shifted, with nearly every award going to women and mostly to queer-themed books from then on. OP attributes this to a rule change following the sad-puppy affair, which has some truth to it but I think mostly misses the mark and misunderstands the dynamics of the sad-puppy movement and how it failed.

For those not in the know: from 2013 to 2017 a minority of Hugo voters organized a slate of what we would now call "anti-woke" nominees to push back against what they saw as creeping left-wing influence in the nomination process. For some reason they called this movement the sad puppies and later the rabid puppies (no idea where the name came from). They had limited success until 2015, when their slate made it onto the ballot in many categories, meaning that Hugo voters only could vote on one of the "anti-woke" nominees in those categories. This caused a major scandal, as many prominent voting members were locked into nominees they didn't want to win. Voters can also vote for "no-winner" in any category, and that's what won most of the categories where the puppies got their slate in place. After this disappointing outcome, Hugo changed the rules, basically to nerf slate tactics. Because there are hundreds of published works every year and only five nominees per category, a small minority of voters acting as a bloc can get their 5 books on the final ballot. To counteract this, they changed the nomination process so that every nomination ballot gets 1 point distributed among all nominees on that ballot, which has the effect of diluting slate bloc votes.

So that's the background. Men used to win most Hugo awards, and now win basically none. Queer-themed books have more or less taken over. The sad puppies attempted a coup, were beaten back, and the trends they tried to overturn have won the day completely.

There are a couple important things to understand about how this went down.

First, Hugo voting membership is open to anyone. You just pay your dues and you get to vote on the awards. The titles that are nominated and win are a reflection of who those dues-paying members want to win. There is no sinister conspiracy at play to make woke books win, just the individual choices of the thousands of voting members. Hugos are going to the titles that its membership wants them to go to.

Second, the sad puppies were themselves counter-revolutionaries to this mostly-completed takeover. They noticed that by 2013 many awards were going to books with leftist themes written by leftist authors instead of to the best books, which they thought was an injustice and a perversion of the awards. They were fighting back against a late-stage skin-suiting operation. They are the end of that story, not the beginning.

Third, the puppies were a small minority of overall Hugo voters. They were able to game the rules of nomination to get their slates on the ballot, but the fact that "no-winner" won most of these categories demonstrates that they were in fact a small minority. When the Hugos changed the rules, it wasn't a shadowy elite silencing the voice of normal people, it was them closing a procedural loophole which let a small minority dominate the nomination process.

When we talk about skin-suiting, we often imagine it in terms of warfare or espionage, of a few determined entryists managing to get inside the walls, get some amount of power, then twist the rules of the institution to bring more of their friends onboard. This is part of it, but not the main part, not most of the time. Most of the time, it's the boring ordinary process that happened to the Hugos: anybody can be a member (for a small fee), and the people who cared more joined in larger numbers and got their way. The very term "entryist" assumes some measure of subterfuge, of some amount of gatekeeping to prevent such malign influence. But typically this isn't true. The gate is wide open.

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