In June of 2024, my best friend of over a decade refused to take no for an answer, a week after his wedding. I wish I'd been firmer, I wish I'd told him no, slapped him, something, but it was still hot and I still sort of wanted it.
He lied to his wife and I lost all my friends because of it. I'm transfem so there's the obvious scapegoat of the hypersexual tgirl. I don't feel good about my own sexuality anymore. I don't feel like I deserve to.
He's still out there, still a danger to trans women. I don't know how I can get closure.
I don't know how to recover from this. How can I just let go, knowing he will never face the consequences of his actions?
(wow okay so it doesn’t let me put a content warning for sexual assault above this thanks tumblr)
First of all I’m sorry he did this to you. I think it’s important to be clear in your own mind that by your description it’s not ‘not taking no for an answer,’ it’s this guy sexually assaulting you. As one victim survivor [word I don’t hate but can’t think of] to another, nothing you’re thinking or feeling is unusual or in any way your fault. For a long long time after (one time) I was assaulted I was on this pendulum back and forth between ‘I must have been overreacting, my rapist wasn’t that bad and I was kind of asking for it’ and ‘I’m a bad person because I didn’t overreact enough and other people are still in danger because of me’. It’s kind of inevitable to get your feelings scrambled unless (and maybe even then) you have a really good and well-resourced support network, and what trans woman has one of those?
Second thing is that those feelings are normal but they’re not correct. ‘I should have reacted differently in the moment’ is a way of seizing back control in your memory of an experience where someone decided your reaction didn’t matter. Okay yes you can learn to be more assertive about your boundaries but nobody is this kind of rapeproof titan of will who won’t ever freeze up in the moment, because that’s what coercion is. Time and again I have known this to happen to strong, assertive people - it’s not a reflection on you.
‘I should have said no’ in particular is an example of the first kind of feeling I had. I’m not going to argue the legalities here - whether or not it would stand up in court, you don’t need to say no to not be consenting, in a way which is obvious to any reasonable person. In the same way ‘I still sort of wanted it’ contains the non-consent in the particle ‘sort of.’ You’re allowed to feel conflicted, you’re allowed to have wanted sex and then changed your mind at any time.
‘It was still hot’ is brutal as well because again, this is an extremely common and normal reaction, but one that I myself took a long time to even be able to think about, let alone articulate. Feeling it doesn’t make you hypersexual, it doesn’t implicate your sexuality at all. Not to get too Freudian here but ‘what if I eroticise the trauma’ is one of the things brains do. It doesn’t make it not real or not bad. And since we’re all carrying around all kinds of trauma it is perfectly possible for it to be a part of a normal and healthy sexuality.
Okay so what do you do about all this? I am enough of a lib to wish that the myth of policing were real, and that it would be a good thing if you could report it and be believed and go through a healing process that would enforce consequences on him for everyone’s safety. I don’t need to tell you or anyone that we don’t live in that world. So trying to get justice or protect others is messy and traumatic and often totally ineffective. It’s something you often have to be a ‘perfect victim’ for, and that’s a category from which trans women are almost always excluded. Even the kind of social sanction cancelling thing is gruelling and in my experience ends with the rapist just moving to a new social circle or a new city and none of it sticking to them.
All of which is to say, you don’t have a duty to protect hypothetical future victims, rapists have a duty to stop creating them. If he does it to someone else, that’s his fault and no-one else’s, except in the broadest sense society’s for not supporting you. It is perfectly, perfectly valid for you to do nothing. I’ve never been sexually assaulted and thought afterwards, ‘if only those hypothetical bitches he had done this to before had stopped him.’ Conversely I have been in the position where people have told me ‘thank you for warning me about this person, I would have been assaulted by them had I not known,’ and while that is a relief in real terms, personally it feels like ashes. There isn’t really a wrong answer. It’s just this shitty thing that’s been imposed on you, and sometimes dealing with it means going to court, sometimes it means doing a lot of stupid community drama, sometimes it means doing nothing. It’s like rain, it just lands on you and you either have an umbrella or a hood or you get wet.
The last thing is I don’t think closure exists. That’s not as frightening as it sounds. I don’t think you can ever go back to the person you were before any experience. Being alive is you just keep adding stuff over the top of other stuff, it’s like making a millefeuille but some of the layers are getting raped. And you go ‘this millefeuille sucks, why would I make this’ and the answer is ‘so far it is the only mode of experience we have discovered,’ so you keep making it. I’m getting kind of lost in this simile and I’m also hungry. My point is that it’s one of many experiences that have happened to you and there’s no making it unhappen, but with time and care and new experiences it matters less. Scarring is also a healing process - it’s not ideal, it’s not what we would wish for, but the important thing is that you’re still there and all the good things in the world that you deserve await you, and sometimes you will be in a beautiful restaurant drinking a glass of wine and think something about your rapist, but most of the time you won’t. They don’t cease to exist for us, but if we’re lucky they just become a more and more banal little detail. Okay I really am starving now, the food metaphors are too much. The point is, I love you and I promise it’s going to be okay.
annaxmalina
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