Rhetorical Rape

[foxgrrl]

So, last night while I was supposed to be finishing my art for Burning Man, I made the mistake of looking at Michigan Womyn's Music Festival Discussion Forums, and I get the impression that the music festival is not a safe place? Hypothetically, if I went there, would I likely be attacked? (I haven't had the time to research any of this yet, it's rather distant from my daily life. (And I seriously don't have the time for drama¹.))

But anyway, the reason why I'm writing this, is because I could not let an oft repeated statement go unchallenged. There is a common accusation that male to female transsexuals [MTFs] are men, who devote many painful years of their lives, to pretend to be women, for the purpose of raping them². And that their demand to be treated simple human respect and decency, the same as any ordinary woman, is male privilege.

As an actual, for-reals, victim of sexual assault, I find these accusations of rape highly offensive. Especially coming from people who have never experienced this. Attending a Womyn's Music Festival, just like any other woman, is not the same as someone [a man] holding you on the ground with a knife at your throat, and sticking their tongue in your mouth³. [And something else I've gotten:] Taking someone's photo, in public, without their permission is not the same as rape. It's not the same as being backed into a corner as a child and having myone's genitals fondled.

As a transsexual, I have been turned down for work; denied housing, twice!; denied medical care; denied government ID; lost friends (but not any more family than what I had already lost before); etc. all explicitly because I'm trans. (I know it's for that reason, because that's what the people doing it are telling me when they do it. It's perfectly legal to do, so why cover it up?)

As a woman, I also get people completely ignoring anything I say, or invalidating it, not believing that I can lift heavy objects, or take care of myself, or actually be skilled at anything technical, and staring at my breasts while they talk to me.

I can't even kiss someone I love, without the animal part of my hindbrain wanting to run away or attack. I have to fight myself to not disassociate when being intimate with someone. And I hate it. [Note that if you're one of the people I'm intimate with, and you didn't know, don't do anything different just because I've said this now.]

The next time I see someone accusing myself or someone else of rape rhetorically, I'm going to call them out on it. I'm not going to passively sit by and take it any more. Put up, or shut up. What the hell was your rape experience like? And how is that the same as whatever petty drama you're upset about? Oh, you never were? Well then kindly shut the fuck up.

Really, all this accusation of rape is, is verbal bludgeon for attacking and gaining power over people, in a sense… a form of rape itself.


P.S. You know, I don't even identify as trans most of the time. I've mostly forgotten about it (except when I use the bathroom), the only time people identify me as trans, is when they're using it as a weapon against me.

P.P.S. This can not seriously be the official MWMF LiveJournal community, right, right? http://community.livejournal.com/michfest/profile

---

¹ What with working twice as hard as a man, for half the credit, because I'm a woman.
² I know this strikes most of you as being absurd, and it certainly strikes me as absurd, but there are people who very seriously believe this, which I still find hard to believe.
³ No, I don't want to talk about it, you may notice however that I'm still alive.

Comments

[foxgrrl]

I didn't have a childhood as a boy or a girl. I was the oldest in an abusive household. (And took the brunt of the abuse until I ran away, after which time the abuse fell upon my younger brother.) Does my childhood baggage count for anything? Where is my safe space?

When I was a child, I was constantly being ridiculed because I was too feminine. And I got into many embarrassing situations, because I did not understand that I wasn't a girl. After puberty I figured out my gender very quickly, and kept my gender issues a secret, I was deathly afraid that anyone would find out about them. I spent a lot of time alone, and not talking to people about how I felt. Still got lots of homosexual themed abuse in my direction. I kept rationalizing that just because I think about being a woman every single day, doesn't mean I'm transgendered… until I found out one day that, yes, actually that is exactly what that means. I was on hormones within six months.

Um, but no, I guess I haven't had the same worries and insecurities as a young girl, other than all those times when I mistakenly did the girl thing in any given situation.

[anaisdjuna.livejournal.com]

I can still see the picture of you as a child. You were beautiful then.

[elf]

Your childhood baggage counts for something. It doesn't make it female baggage.

You recounted an incident a while ago, when you stood up to a drunk/attacker in the street, and the woman you were with was petrified. That's part of our heritage, something we're raised to do from infancy: when something happens, freeze and let the menfolks take care of it. This happens even in very egalitarian households--even in lesbian households--because no matter how equally they teach, the kids see TV and attend school and hang out with other kids, and the girls learn, girls are supposed to be passive. If they're not, they get in trouble. Followed by, someone is supposed to protect you.

Those lessons starts before we can walk. Recognizing them and overcoming them are a large part of our baggage. (Overcoming them can be near-impossible; training your body to react in crisis requires... putting yourself in crises. Not exactly a recommended thing.)

Worries and insecurities of young women (setting aside the kidstuff here, because that would take long discussions of how children are treated differently by perceived gender, and that's mess of its own):
--OMG have I counted the days wrong and is there going to be a huge red stain on the back of my pants by lunchtime and nobody will tell me?
--Pads? Tampons? Cup? Sponge? Eco-friendly washable flannel pads?
--If I don't shave under my arms, will anyone notice? If they do, will they mock me? If I don't shave my legs, can I still wear skirts?
--Does this skirt make me look fat? Is this out of style and I'll get laughed at for wearing it?
--If I like him and we have sex, will I get pregnant?
--If he attacks me and rapes me, will I get pregnant?

Being transgendered comes with its own set of insecurities, its own set of negative messages from people around you. And they are no less--in a lot of cases, they're more, because you don't have the comfort of the option of following a template everyone claims is "normal" if the stress is too much.

But they're different. And I can understand wanting to acknowledge that.

I cannot, however, understand or condone claiming that the main or only reason a trans person would want into "womyn" space is to rape them (there isn't enough desk for my head, for that one), or wanting to hold a HUGE female gathering and then narrowly defining "female" to include only "those who went through those adolescent female traumas." Because while they're important, they're not everything about being female; the glass ceiling and job discrimination and getting groped in public are also very much part of our problems, our identity.

I have no problems with small, intimate groups that want to limit membership or attendance by fairly strict criteria. I'm baffled and annoyed at such a large gathering doing so, because the "safe space" they want to create should damn well include you.

[elf]

It, umm... doesn't. I'm a idiot.

My point: there are differences between women-born-women and transwomen life experiences. Were this a "healing women's energy" gathering, or a "reclaim your personal power" gathering, I might be persuaded that there were valid reasons to limit membership to those women whose energy/personal power issues shared the common childhood ground of being told to wear dresses and being pestered about picking a good boyfriend so they could get married and have kids. (I am not saying that that's more difficult to face than *wanting* to wear dresses and being told not to, or being pressured to beat up on people who annoy you. Just different.) Were it a La Leche League gathering, again, I could see limiting membership to those who lactate.

Since it is NOT a "Wymyn Spyryt" festival, but a MUSIC fest, it should be open to all women who live as women today. There is nothing involved in having a period that makes one more or less appreciative of female musicians.

My interest in ovary-centric politics is, umm... limited to issues related to pregnancy, birth, and breastfeeding.

[oygevalte.livejournal.com]

Everyone has different experiences. As a woman, as a man, as a child, whatever. I was raped, repeatedly, by my father as a child, and I'm male. So does that make me more able to understand the perspective of a female who grew up being raped by her father repeatedly, or would another female who has never been raped at all have more understanding and more shared experience with that woman than I, as a male, do?

Ultimately, we're all individuals and all with our own experiences. I have a good friend who is a woman of color, and she is constantly pissed off, mainly at other black folk, because they make huge assumptions about her identity because of her color and gender, and in fact she suffers from being called names on a regular basis BY HER OWN PEOPLE because she doesn't necesarily conform with THEIR stereotypes about what she should be because of her gender and color.

So where do you draw the line, and further, WHY? Because ultimately, all such lines end up being entirely arbitrary. I know, having spoken to a number of other men who have survived rape, that each of our experiences, and what those experiences made us, is very different and ultimately individual. When I put my experience and its effects out there, it's up to them to decide if and how much they can relate to it, and what that means to them. I never, and would never, call anyone names or make inherent assumptions about their experience based on the fact that they were raped, or suffered abuse as a child of any sort, or what have you. And when I do make mistakes and assume, I apologize, because it's wrong of me. What makes it any more right for anyone else to do so?