Lost like a Snakeskin in High Grass: Queerness, Trauma, and Accountability

tw: sexual assault

When I opened my laptop to start this piece, "Where is My Mind?" by the Pixies started playing in the bar I am writing at in Portland, OR. Coincidence, sadness, and the importance of place all mark the intersection of my queerness and my mental health, so this feels like an incredibly fitting start. Appropriately enough, since my task in this essay is looking back at myself, I was at the Gemini Lounge. 

I think I've felt crazy for as long as I've felt queer and sexual. Shortly after my sixteenth birthday, I began having intense dreams and hallucinations about my missing penis, fucking someone who had tits and a cock, losing my own breasts, and being/becoming a boy. I stopped recognizing myself in the mirror. During this period of time I vividly remember staring at anonymous, often elderly men and women on the subway and feeling so emotionally dead that I could be attracted to anyone. I felt so depressed and scared, by some of these feelings but mostly in general, that I entered counseling. I started taking Zoloft and was put on a high-ethisterone birth control (an early testosterone analog) because my cycle was extremely irregular and infrequent. I had my first genital lesion as a result of Beçet's syndrome, my autoimmune disorder. I frequently vocalized feeling bad, wrong, and incomplete as a girl or with a "girl" body.

However I was also definitely confused and secretive about my sexuality. Unfortunately for me, there was nobody around to hear and respond to my confusion in a way that helped me make sense of those feelings. I was obsessed with the L word (with Shane), obsessed with my best friend Violet [name has been changed], who I fell in love with, obsessed with myself and with the power that older androgynous women and men around me seemed to hold. It was a confusing time during which I generally left decisions about my identity to the people who encountered me.

I felt this vague about myself in the next year, 2007, as well. Beginning around June I started hanging out exclusively with a group of 20 year old straight men and Violet. Drawn there because Violet was being pursued by a few of them, I was the youngest person in the group. I realized quickly that if I was to hold my own with everyone I had perform straight and vulnerable. And so began one of many processes of sublimation, repression, and confusion of myself. I let my hair grow even longer than before. I did a lot of things I thought a good "bad" girl would do to get attention. And, during it all, I was even more deeply infatuated with Violet. Even at the time, I knew I was performing for these boys because I wanted to be near her. I wanted her to see me as they would if I pleased them: as worthy of attention.

And so, over that summer, I gave up my dream of being or passing as a boy. I hid in a straight community so that I could be near the girl I loved, and along they way I repeatedly either dipped my toe into or was dragged down by the undertow of experimenting with a straight identity.

I can say that my first experience of being "out" as queer -- of outing myself -- came after I was sexually assaulted by a man at the end of that summer. At the time of my assault I was almost seventeen, and the perpetrator was the first anonymous straight man I attempted to pick up as (in my mind at the time) a cis girl. I noticed a boy who had graduated from my high school, age 20 or so, in the same subway car as me and invited him to a house party. I often think about what my life would be like absent that moment of horror and horrible luck; if I hadn't been brave enough to pick up a near stranger on the subway, and if he hadn't decided to rape me.

This assault, which came after my attempt to hack it as a cis woman, suddenly inverted of all my attempts to survive in the straight world. Though I wouldn't realize it for many years, being assaulted after my first confident sexual move as a "woman" exploded the effectiveness of presenting or being female as a strategy for survival in my mind. Flaunting my femininity was suddenly dangerous, and shortly after my assault I shaved my head with the help of my one out lesbian friend. In that moment I gave up worrying about straight male reactions towards my own presentation because I felt like I would never want to be touched by a boy again. In other words, I felt I had nothing to lose by looking gay.

It was a genuine surprise to me when I started feeling interested in a male friend a few weeks later. When he and I started seeing each other the friend who shaved my head accused me of being a faker. Somewhat of a prince in our scene, she used her own social capital to police my presentation, remarking after I ran into her at a show that it was too bad I wasn't actually gay, because with my short hair I finally looked like someone she'd want to fuck. This is the place where the narrative of my assault, my feelings about gender and sexuality, and my experience of what I would later come to call mental illness first coalesced--outside the Knitting Factory in NYC, being harassed for somehow inauthentically performing my own queerness.

Her jab confused me. It was no secret that in 2006 I'd fallen frighteningly in love with Violet, that she'd stopped talking to me in part because of it, and that we'd had sex a few times. I think that Violet stopped speaking to me then, and even feared me, because I wanted to be her. Or perhaps more accurately, I wanted to be what I thought she was -- someone capable of living outside of gender, outside of the oppression and power of the binary, and of getting away with it.

Despite having no exposure to a self-proclaimed queer community, both Violet and I chafed at the social expectations levied upon us as women. The difference between me and Violet was that -- in my eyes at least -- she had the kind of body and the kind of confidence that could carry androgeny, whereas I did not. She was able to move fluidly between male and female worlds and aesthetics, but especially as her shorter, younger, and heavier sidekick I felt exiled to inexorably failing at being female. Since I was in love with her, and specially if I had failed at being a boy as well, how could I not be a gay woman?

My infatuation spiked again after a reunion in the early months of 2007, but not too long after I was assaulted Violet insisted on another period of separation from me. Strangely, at the time of our falling out in 2007 the pain of failing to mirror the person I was in love with (and, in my mind, losing their love as a result) felt fresher than what I conceptualized at the time as a negative and painful one night stand. In many ways, separating from Violet was actually emotionally harder than surviving rape. On a social level, being assaulted seemed to take away a power I'd been toying with, but unsure of; losing Violet felt like forever being cut off from the source of my identity.

What I didn't count on in my process of self-care and surviving was the extent to which my brain was affected by my rapist's attack. In the six months that followed I would become increasingly uncritical about the straightness of my appearance, but this confidence was accompanied by an accelerated descent into another psychological world, one which I now recognize as being marked by persistent and severe dissociation. My memories of that time feel underwater, hazy, and like they're saved in a different file than all the others in my brain. I was doing a lot of drugs in the winter of 2007, but I also remember distinctly and consistently feeling as though a part of me was lost. I felt like a new, ruined person, capable of anything and nothing. That was the first time I started actively seeking out self-identifying queer people as sexual partners.

∞

I'm 23 now. In the last seven years I've spent a huge amount of time working on surviving my assault and managing the PTSD it left me with. In my freshman and sophomore years of college I experienced my first PTSD symptoms, and they were accompanied by a wild resurgence of femme and female pride. For the first time in my life I had something in common with a lot of other women and girls: I had been sexually violated. I made art around this, organized around it, and constructed a spirituality based upon it. I began identifying as a feminist. I spoke the birth monologue when my college's feminist student union performed the Vagina Monologues.

But, slowly, queerness came back again. It took me almost three more years to understand, finally, that I could be a queer, genderqueer survivor of sexual assault. That my assault didn't mark me as woman. My body, my mental health, and my experience of gender had been so shaped by an instance of gendered sexual violence that I didn't stop feeling like a(n increasingly uncomfortably failing) girl until I accepted and acknowledged how huge a role having sexual trauma played in my self-identification as female. Now that I know definitively that I don't have to be female to have a legitimate experience as a survivor of assault, I feel much, much more able to articulate my identity and my needs.

The arc of my story could end here, but I keep coming back to the year before my assault, 2006: when I first started feeling queer and also when I first started feeling like something was wrong with me. I have asked myself what happened to make me feel so depressed countless times.

I believe that part of it was being raised with an anemic attitude towards the discussion of personal boundaries. My parents didn't inquire about my sex life or my gender; they also didn't inquire about my reaction to the increasingly scary emotional outbursts of my little brother, the person in my family whose problems are easiest to see. In my home during the middle of high school, I felt like plastic bag in a windstorm: neglibigle, manipulable, disappearable. I felt like it didn't matter where I landed, who used me for what, or if I ended up carrying dogshit or diamonds inside me. My parents were too worried about dumbing down the wind. I was openly in love with Violet, dressing like a boy, and coming downstairs from my room with hickies on my neck from another girl, and my parents said nothing. We only talked about my sexuality when a different friend punched me in the face. My parents asked me if I was dating her. We had one conversation that I can remember about my decision to enter therapy, and it ended once they ascertained I wasn't an immediate threat to myself.

In my current work around mental health, I'm concerned that because of this neglect and the neglect inherent in my assault, I tacitly permit myself to disrespect the boundaries of other queer people. Though I've positively identified as a survivor and a feminist for years, I've had some friends tell me that my behavior in certain spaces fits a worrying pattern. They see that I enter scenarios where I feel disempowered by other queer friends, and react by attempting to dominate and disempower them.

I can't leave this part of the story out. I own the fact that my assault, my confusion about my gender, my neglect: these do not excuse ways in which I am negligent, harmful, and confusing. I am extremely grateful to my community for pointing out this behavior because, at this point in my life especially, I yearn to be recognized as a whole, healthy, and (most importantly) safe person. I can't be that until I know who I am; until I know that I am. This is the first time I've had a queer community to respond to my failures, my bad decisions, my unaccountability, my attempts to hide the dark parts of me. Thank you for your consenting contributions to my process of integration as an out, proud genderqueer person who hopes to be cusping on sane.