CN: sexual assault and abuse, no detailed descriptions.
A lot of people are saying a lot of stuff on the internet about the Kavanaugh nomination. It's bringing up so much for almost everyone who has experienced sexual assault or trauma, and there's so much pain around how to talk about it and who gets included and what all of the consequences of that are. I thought I knew a lot about sexual assault before this week, but I am learning so much so fast about the depth and breadth and complexity of experience around sexual assault and abuse. One of the most intense things for me was a discussion about including nonbinary people in women's spaces created to address sexual assault, and how folks want to be inclusive but that can feel really complicated and sometimes bad to nonbinary people. It brought to the surface a bunch of feelings that I've been wrestling with for a while, and I want to share them. [Note: I am speaking from my own experience. I am not speaking for all nonbinary people. Please listen to other nonbinary people when they tell you their experiences and needs, which may be totally different from mine.] I’m an AFAB genderqueer femme who is perceived as a cis woman 99.9% of the time unless I out myself. I can go into virtually any women’s space and be welcomed. This is, for the most part, because people are actively misgendering me or, if I’m out to them, because they don’t understand what I’m talking about when I say I’m genderqueer. And I am constantly being placed in women’s space without my consent when I am misgendered in public and private spaces, every day, all day. I’ve also often been invited into “women and nonbinary” spaces, and I have a lot of complicated feelings about that. I know it's done with good intentions. And it’s true that in terms of how the world treats me, I have a huge amount of overlap with women. But, to be clear: I’m really, actually, FOR REALS not a woman. I’m not mostly-a-woman, or pretty-much-a-woman, or for-all-practical-purposes-a-woman. I’m genderqueer, and for me that is something totally separate from being a woman. And being invited into women’s spaces as a nonbinary/genderqueer person often (although not always) feels like being rounded up to “woman,” especially since these spaces are almost always centered on women’s needs and experiences. [Note: I’m NOT suggesting that folks stop inviting nonbinary people into women and nonbinary spaces. I'm not even suggesting that people stop inviting me into women and nonbinary spaces, because some of them really are inviting me to bring my whole self. They are also pretty much the only spaces to get support around sexual assault and abuse, and what doesn't work for me may work fine for someone else. I just want people to have the awareness that it's really complicated. I do think that organizers should check in with people individually, when possible, and ask them if they personally want to be invited—even though the answer to that might be complicated.] I also don't agree with the idea that we make spaces safe by excluding men. This is not to say that I don’t support women-only spaces or see the value of them—I absolutely do. But women-only space is not a safe space either. I’ve been abused and assaulted and harassed by men; I know very few people for whom this is not true. I'm incredibly suspicious of men. As a result, I spend almost all of my time in spaces that do not center men, and my relationships, platonic and romantic, are almost exclusively with women and nonbinary people. And you know what? That has not kept me safe. My first abuser was a woman and my most recent abuser was a woman. The first person who sexually harassed me in a professional context was a woman and the boss who told me there was nothing she could do about it was a woman. I spent several years working in an intentionally all-woman environment—created in explicit response to men’s violence against women—and abuse of power there was fucking rampant. It’s scary to even talk about that because I know there are assholes just waiting to wave it around and say, see, sexism is a myth, which is not what I’m saying. What’s true is that sexism gives men a huge set of tools they can use for abuse of power. It makes them complicit in misogyny no matter what their personal choices are, just like any group in a position of relative privilege in a hierarchy. So it makes sense that men are far more likely than women to be abusive in relationships between men and women, and while I'm not familiar with the data, I think it's likely that most sexual assault and abuse, if you look at a population level, is being done by men. But population-level data doesn’t mean shit when you are experiencing abuse. Women (and nonbinary people) still have tools they can use to abuse power (racism, heterosexism, ableism, etc.). And abusers don’t always have more privilege than the people they abuse. Women are not more evolved than men, or more peaceful or more cooperative or any of that gender essentialist bullshit. If a given set of women are behaving better than a given set of men, maybe it’s because they understand power and privilege and are choosing to behave differently. Or maybe it’s because there aren’t any major power imbalances in the group along lines of privilege other than gender. I don’t know why it is. But it’s not just because they are women. I feel like we are still working with an incredibly heteronormative conception of what abuse looks like. While that works well for people whose experiences of sexual assault and abuse fall along those lines (regardless of their actual sexual orientations), it also makes it really hard to name a lot of the violence that goes on in our lives. The people who are most likely to abuse and assault us are the people we are close to: our families and chosen families and our friends and our partners and our dates. To give just one example, if the people you are dating are not men or mostly not men, the people you are most likely to be sexually assaulted by? Not men. Naming that doesn’t erase the vast and brutal reality of men’s violence against women—it adds to the complexity of it. So for me, it’s not just that I feel like I’m being actively or low-key misgendered when I’m invited into women’s spaces, and sometimes when I’m invited into women and nonbinary spaces. It’s also that when I want to talk about my experiences of abuse and assault, some of the abusers I want to talk about are women and those experiences count. I have tons of points of commonality and connection with women abused by men, but that doesn’t make my experience the same as theirs. And solutions that work for them do not necessarily work for me. I think the overall discussion about abuse and sexual assault needs to get way, way more complex. Not in every space, but in some spaces. I don’t want to take up too much of this current cultural space because I get that it’s not about me and my experiences, but the problem is that there aren’t any other spaces. The only time there’s a major public discussion about sexual assault is when a woman is assaulted by a man. And those are only happening at scale right now because white women have been the victims (see, e.g., the current iteration of #metoo and the Kavanaugh hearings). That’s fucked up. Yes, we should be having discussions about men's violence against women, times one million. We literally cannot talk about it enough. It is so necessary! But we should be having a lot of other discussions too. There is also a super real privilege dynamic around binary vs non-binary gender identities, and while I get that it’s complicated as shit, I’m really, really ready for some 201-level discussions about gender and abuse and sexual assault. This is a Facebook post that got really big, and I don't know how to end it. I'm sad and frustrated and tired and I know everyone else is too. Thanks for listening,
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