Losing Trust in Rape Crisis
I want to talk about an experience that happened to me recently regarding my local rape crisis as a survivor of abuse who gets PTSD symptoms around biological males.
I was already worried about attending there due to a self ID policy that allows men who identify as women to access the service even to mix with women (I have no issue with trans identifying males accessing one to one therapy for sexual abuse). This had already broken my trust of rape crisis when they dont even have to do this by law. the fact they were choosing to do this when it is not even yet enforceable by law felt like a massive betrayal. Anyway I dont have access to any other support and went along hoping it would be just women and luckily there didnt seem to be any men there.
Then they employed a new staff member and this had a severe impact on my mental health. When I saw a picture of this person my first thoughts were: ‘Is that a man?’ It played on my mind a little but I went to Rape Crisis as I thought I would be able to tell for myself. Unfortunately I was not able to tell whereas usually when I meet people I can tell immediately if they are male or female biologically even when they are trans. I was glad that this person wasnt definitely a man but I found it a little unsettling and could not stop myself from looking at this woman to see if she had an adams apple or large hands and listening to see if she had a male sounding voice. This is not what I want to be focusing on when i am supposed to be in a healing environment where I am supposed to feel safe.
I returned home and I thought I was ok. I thought maybe my anti depressants were helping me not get ptsd symptoms. However I then had another unrelated issue that compounded my anxiety and I found myself waking up terrified in the night worrying if this person was really a man. I had all sorts of thoughts going through my head like should I just stop going and not have any support which I really didnt want to do. It severely impacted my mental health the next day to the point where I felt suicidal. I neglected my needs and didn’t eat anything till 6pm when I have a chronic illness and neglected my 2 rest periods I need to manage my illness. I was in tears and distress and had to seek support from several friends over the phone. I ended up online all day which causes me insomnia looking online to find evidence of whether this person is male or female. I eventually found evidence that she is female and now I feel relieved but awful that I have focused on another woman in this way.
Early Memories
One of my earliest memories includes sitting at the top of the stairs at the age of three, clasping my oversized teddy bear to my chest for comfort whilst peering through the rails of the bannisters to gaze down on my mother in the hall below, doubled-up in pain and lying across the floor after my father had kicked her. On the wall hung the telephone, its beige plastic casing half-missing to reveal a skeletal dial, segments held together with brown parcel tape. This low-tech method of repair was a recurrent theme throughout our home, the combined result of poverty and my father’s violent rampages. There would be warring throughout the house four or five days out of seven, the lull always so cruel, giving me in my childish naivety some hope that this time it was really all over, that things were going to get better. I never understood why my mother didn’t leave, but I now understand how she was isolated, as women who are abused often are, with no close friends or family to turn to for refuge. Once I hit puberty I also became the target of my father’s aggression, sustaining black eyes and other injuries. At the age of fourteen, after being swung around by my hair for the crime of ‘turning off the taps too tightly’ I found the courage to call the police on my father for the first time. The male officer on the phone dismissed me and told me I was being a silly girl. I was devastated and put the phone down, sleeping in a nearby industrial park that night, despondently returning home the following day through a lack of any other options.
Education was my way out and I left home at eighteen for university, but following this I became unemployed and the relationship with my cohabiting boyfriend ended. With no safe family home to return to I found myself homeless. I was allocated a place in a hostel, which had separate floors designated to men and women. Unfortunately, due to overcrowding I was placed on the men’s floor. I felt incredibly vulnerable after everything I had been through in my childhood home to then be sharing this space with men whose behaviour could be unpredictable and rowdy due to alcohol and drug use, but thankfully after I requested to be moved to the women’s floor a space became available for me.
Sadly, my experience with my father is not the only time I have faced male violence and intimidation. When I lived alone, the teenaged son of a neighbour embarked on a campaign of harassment against me, eventually putting a brick through my window. When the male officer came to take my statement, he told me that it was probably because the boy fancied me, shrugging off the intimidating behaviour as if the boy’s feelings made it acceptable for him to trespass, harass me and vandalise my home. I lived for months in fear of what might happen next and would alter my activities to avoid his attention, trying not to put lights on in my house and staying late at work where I felt safer, until the family were finally evicted.
One day, a few days before Christmas I was walking in my neighbourhood at around four o’clock in the afternoon when I was violently sexually assaulted. I called the police immediately, and they arrived minutes later to take me in to the station. Unfortunately, there was no female officer available to take my statement, so I had to recount the details of what had happened to a man. Whilst the officer this time was more understanding and professional than those I had previously dealt with, I was nonetheless distressed by having to put into words what had happened to me to a male officer, as well as getting undressed and handing over my clothing for forensic evidence. I vomited several times whilst giving my statement (I had not drunk any alcohol). For the next few years I suffered from PTSD, experiencing flashbacks, nightmares and a fear of leaving the house. Whilst I was still waiting for this man to be brought to justice, there was another incident with a flasher who stopped me on the street, again in broad daylight and on my regular route. When my sex attacker’s case came to trial, I developed a painful condition called Tietze’s syndrome from the stress, which took several visits to the doctor to be diagnosed, and curtailed my activities for a number of years afterwards. I otherwise carried on with my life, studying for a Master’s degree and working two jobs, but my relationship with my boyfriend suffered due to the stress.
Apart from these more brutal examples of violence, there have of course been many other times where I have been put at threat by men: the time I was coming back from a friend’s wedding and a taxi driver was asking me sexually explicit questions whilst keeping me locked in his cab; the party when a man I’d never met before or shown any interest in locked me in one of the rooms, grabbing hold of me and demanding I have sex with him. I am lucky compared to some, such as the 21-year-old woman who lived on my street and was beaten to death by her partner in front of their three-year-old daughter. Like most women, I’ve managed by doing the same thing I learned to do as a child, trying to be as invisible and inoffensive as possible, even though my own boundaries are being transgressed, even though what they are doing is wrong, just so that I might avoid stirring up the aggressor’s anger further and escape as soon as possible.
I still struggle with CPTSD, including nightmares, a fear of confrontation and the crippling inability to stand up for myself: I am standing up for myself now. I am standing up for all the women and children who have had experiences similar to mine. Vulnerable women deserve safe spaces they can go to in a crisis where they do not have to validate the feelings of men, whether these are men who identify as men, or men who identify as women. This is not anti-men, nor is it anti-trans, it is about the protection of some of the most vulnerable women and children in society; it is about supporting them where support has been lacking; it is about easing their psychological distress and providing a place of safety when they are at their most fragile. Of course, male-bodied people are also the victims of violence and their needs should be catered for, but it should not be expected of deeply traumatised women who have suffered physical and emotional abuse to then put their own needs last so as to tiptoe around the feelings of others. Women who have been raped, beaten and psychologically tortured by men should not then be expected to share a room and facilities with a male-bodied stranger, no matter how that stranger identifies. Sex segregated spaces exist specifically to exclude male-bodied persons – not because all are predatory, but because these women have been traumatised by those who are, and because such predators specifically target vulnerable women. Of course there are men who will abuse any loopholes they can to access vulnerable women and girls, to suggest this would never happen is naive in the extreme! Disguising themselves, gaining trust and exploiting kindness is exactly what predators do. How dare anyone who has not had to endure such violence demand that sex-segregated spaces be opened up to anyone who identifies as a woman – which under the transgender umbrella can mean anything from someone who has had reassignment surgery to a fully male-bodied heterosexual man who only occasionally cross-dresses. How dare activists tell women who have suffered horrific abuse at the hands of men that they have ‘cis-privilege’ for wishing to protect themselves from further acts of violence. Any trans person who cares about women would also see the risks involved and how callous it is to impose upon vulnerable women in such a way. Inclusion is nothing more than a futile gesture of badly thought-out virtue signalling by those far removed from what’s at stake if including one group then puts another already vulnerable group at risk. The validation of the identity of a male-bodied person should never surpass the needs for physical safety and psychological well-being of some of the most damaged women and children in society.
Anon
FOVAS 