so excited to be working on a dance piece about trauma and gender featuring sounds from Ixixán and I Am a Spiral by the amazing eskimeaux. body movement is incredible and terrifying art.

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.

Why We're Getting "All Activist": an FSU Organizer Responds [TW sexual assault]

    I’m writing this article to address the closing question, posed by Sal Rodriguez, in the Quest article about his performance in the SU on November 17th. FSU immediately mobilized around Sal’s performance because his words caused immediate and dire harm to both audience members and survivors and allies who heard about it afterwards. During a support workshop held in the Women’s Center on November 19th, over a dozen survivors and allies sought mutual support and worked to craft a cogent response to Sal’s actions. As was discussed in the workshop, reactions to this incident have made it clear that many people at Reed are still gravely undereducated about harm reduction and trauma.
    According to RAINN (the Rape, Abuse, and Incest National Network), someone is sexually assaulted in the US every two minutes. 44% of sexual assault survivors are under 18, and 66% of survivors know their attacker. 1 out of 6 women and 1 out of 33 men has experienced attempted or successful sexual assault. Reed’s current student population is approximately 1,455. Doing the math yields a sobering local statistic: according to RAINN’s statistics, there are likely around 130 female-identifying and 20 male-identifying sexual assault survivors currently enrolled at Reed. This makes around 150 total survivors of sexual assault at Reed. That means that 10% of our population is at increased risk for serious psychological hardship from sexual assault alone. Unfortunately neither database includes trans*people although they are at a statistically higher risk for experiencing sexual assault than cis-people.
As such, this article aims to provide a response to Sal’s actions by explaining what trauma, re-traumatization, and triggering are and entail. I take my definitions from Nina Kammerer and Ruta Mazelis’ 2006 article, “After the Crisis: Trauma and Re-Traumatization.” The two begin with trauma itself, which they describe as
Interpersonal violence…which may or may not entail physical violence against a person but always entails violation of that person… Thus ‘trauma’ designates both events and their impact, in part because the actual experience of abuse and the assault that experience poses to sense of self, safety, belonging, and connection are intertwined.
It is incredibly important to emphasize that trauma does not only come from sexual assault. It does not only come from physical assault. Trauma can happen whenever a person is directly exposed to violent behavior or speech. Thus, the racist comments that Sal made on Saturday had just as much of a potential to be traumatizing as his comments about women and sexual assault. As such, all mention of trauma and triggering in this article includes racism in its purview despite the fact that such language has yet to be widely applied to the lived experience of those who have been subjected to racist aggression.
--
    Because managing power asymmetry has already injured so many people at Reed, the potential for retraumatization as a result of Sal’s performance was my primary concern. Kammerer & Mazelis note, “By attaching the meaning of ‘again’ only to trauma…erases the possible repeated nature and duration of…trauma and its impact… So, rather than as trauma once again, retraumatization should be understood as trauma yet again, with this ‘yet again’ likely to be again and again…” This ‘yet again’ is what Reed needs to shift its focus to—especially because, for many people who are attacked here, it isn’t for the first time.
    Having had this lived experience myself, what I see as the fundamental flaw in discussion around Sal’s performance, free speech, and sexual assault at Reed is the extent to which the emerging narrative prioritizes students’ rights to say whatever they want, wherever they want, and neglects the right of all students to feel safe at this school. Campus climate is far from threatening of free speech—except for when it involves damaging community property, the administration is remarkably tolerant of student expression. Across the board, the student body is even more tolerant.
As such, allowing dialogue about Saturday’s performance to center on Sal’s right to speak freely turns him into a martyr of a crusade that doesn’t exist. Spinning this story in a direction that privileges Sal’s right to free speech (which isn’t being challenged) over the right of survivors to avoid being triggered and feel safe on campus (which has been transgressed) is unconscionable, especially as an honor case does not amount to censorship. The point of an honor case would not be to punish Sal—it would be to benefit those harmed by holding Sal accountable for the very real damage he caused on Saturday.
Again, the issue at hand is not and never has been that Sal’s bit wasn’t funny, or that people didn’t “like” it. Triggering has absolutely nothing to do with aesthetic judgment, and everything to do with uncontrollable, brutally manifest physiological pain. The word “trigger” comes from the language of clinical psychology around symptoms of PTSD, “the most widely known impact of trauma” (Kammerer & Mazelis). Thus, when people talk about “triggering” they are referring to the sudden incursion or exacerbation of any adverse symptoms associated with trauma, such as “Dissociation, flashbacks, and nightmares…[but also] depression, anxiety and panic disorders, obsessive-compulsive disorder, psychotic disorders” (Kammerer & Mazelis). In other words, triggering is often as detrimental to life as the trauma that grounds it—if not moreso. Incidents of violence are what create the psychological infrastructure that enables triggering, but a survivor is likely to experience many more episodes of triggering in their lifetime than they are of immediate violence. As such, on a day-to-day basis avoiding triggering actually becomes much more central to the quality of many survivor’s lives than avoiding directly abusive contact.
--
It is in understanding all of this that consent and honor come into play. Like behaving honorably, practicing good consent is not about protocol. It’s not arbitrary. It is about avoiding treating someone in a way that could deeply impair their ability to thrive as a person. Frankly, it means giving a shit if or when you’ve hurt someone’s feelings.
Like behaving honorably, good consent can and must happen socially and sexually, and Reed’s criteria for defining both effective and ineffective consent are applicable to both. The audience’s resistance to Sal’s performance is an example of retaliation to actions taken without effective consent—“Silence does not equal consent, [for] a lack of verbal resistance does not, by itself, constitute consent. Resistance is not required, [for] a lack of physical resistance does not, by itself, constitute consent” (Reed College 2012b). During Sal’s performance, sincere demonstrations of both verbal resistance and physical resistance were present. Because these reactions were elicited as a genuine response to unwanted and spontaneous violence, both the audience’s reaction and Sal’s behavior can be read under the rubric of assault.
--
From my experience at Reed, it seems that many students worry that being asked to avoid triggering behavior will limit their right to speak freely because they don’t understand what is triggering and what isn’t. Unfortunately, there is no universal metric. This why, rather than focusing on censoring potentially offensive student speech, we need to encourage folks not to behave aggressively or callously, and come to a sanctioned agreement that enables students to call out triggering or hurtful behavior when it does arise in a protected, supported, and respected way. Making discourse accessible to everyone at Reed ultimately means maintaining a certain level of awareness about where and who we are.
We are here because we have so much potential—to be brilliant, constructive, lovely, and whole. Attacking one another as Sal did on Saturday seriously undermines our ability to be all of these things, both as individuals and as a community. As painful as it is, experiences like this one are what access our potential—both positively and negatively—and force our community to grow in necessary ways. The tragedy of this situation is that growth should never be involuntary, as someone will always be harmed by the violence inherent in impulsion. In this case, the person harmed is not Sal—it’s the many people he hurt with his speech. We owe those people accountability, and we owe them transformation. Influencing what Sal thinks is not my aim—but improving the standards of what our community will tolerate is. I will never advocate against free speech, but I will advocate changing the debate towards something that is much more in jeopardy: the right of all students to exist happily, safely, and equitably at Reed.
Sources

Feministing.com
    2011    Critic’s Pick: Definitions of Sexual Assault. Feministing.com. Accessed
        11/21/12,         definitions-of-consent/>.

Kammerer, Nina & Ruta Mazelis
2006    Resource Paper: Trauma and Retraumatization. SAMHSA’s GAINS Center    for Behavioral Health and Justice Transformation. Presented at the After the Crisis: Healing from Trauma after Disasters Expert Panel Meeting in Bethesda, MD. Accessed 11/21/12, .

RAINN
    2012    Statistics. The Rape, Assault, and Incest National Network. Accessed
        11/21/12, .

Reed College
2012a    Facts about Reed. Reed Website. Accessed 11/21/12, .

2012b    Sexual Assault Prevention and Response at Reed. Accessed 11/21/12, .