"INADMISSIBLE NARRATIVES OF ABUSE #1 The typical narrative of abuse on social media doesn’t include the problems of the most vulnerable, like how public verbal harassment may only be an ultimately minor part of a trans fem’s exile. The most skilled abusers know that a good exile is done with pure silence, through the whisper network, by having the person wake up one day and have every second or third person she knows or who practices her profession block her and/or stop talking to her. No one tells her why. She has to painstakingly talk to every friend, every contact, every person she would normally have a cheerful conversation with. The electric shocks of knowing that every simple human interaction you have with a friend or stranger could turn into a nightmare of victim blaming or worse, a cold iciness where they pretend nothing is wrong. Imagine repeating that experience hundreds and hundreds of times, with no way to end it. After the noise, the long years of silence are what kill us. The backchannels that should be used to protect people from abusers and rapists are instead used to protect abusers and rapists. Any usefulness these channels have is reserved for Real Women. No one warned me about any of the comically large number of predators in my professions. I was considered unrapeable, unabuseable, not worthy of protection. A trans fem can try to talk about her experiences of abuse for years and have no one listen, but the instant one of her abusers smears her, everyone is alert and awake. One reason it took me so long to talk about my experiences was that I associated being able to speak against abuse with being an abuser. Because every abuser throughout my life was so good at being believed, I thought that being believed was the exclusive domain of abusers. This is why my first months in therapy were spent convincing me that I wasn’t a sociopath, crazy, abusive, or any of the other terms I had been brainwashed with. Abusers don’t spend years disabled by those thoughts because they don’t care if they hurt other people.
INADMISSIBLE NARRATIVES OF ABUSE #2 And when verbal harassment does occur, it’s often cloaked in feminist language, making it impossible to fight. If they call a woman a bitch, people comprehend that as misogyny. But they call trans fems things that are harder to respond to. Rapist, pedophile, male conditioning, etc. They call us things so bad that even denying them is destructive. Who wants to stand up in public and say they aren’t those things? Who has the privilege to not get called those things in the first place? When I look at a cis woman these days, the first thing I think is, I bet no one ever casually called her a rapist. "
