JoanDelilah.com

*Trigger Warning* This post contains descriptions of emotional, physical and sexual abuse.

I feel the need to publicly say this:

A couple of years ago, from the very beginning of my transition until about a year into it, I was in an abusive relationship wherein I was emotionally, physically, and sexually abused by an intimate partner.

I wanted to start this post by saying “I have a confession to make”. But, surely, that is the wrong word. But the fact is, it is how this feels. I feel that I did something wrong, that I have continued to do something wrong, and that I am about to make it even worse. As I am sitting here now, trying to enumerate why it is that I feel the need to make this post and what I hope to accomplish with it, I can feel my brain fighting with me- trying to stop me, trying to convince me it is not as bad as I feel like it is, trying to convince me that, in fact, I was at fault for what happened, that I deserved it, that I asked for it, trying to convince me that the person who did these things I am going to talk about doesn’t get to air their side of the story and that this is unfair. I know that she has a very different view of events, and would use very different words to describe them, and I feel guilty for wanting to finally use the words that I feel describe the situation: “Emotional torture”, “Brainwashing”, “Hitting”, and “Rape”. I feel shitty that we still have at least one mutual friend who will probably read this, and I greatly fear any repercussions that may result from that, but I cannot keep this anymore. It is slowly un-doing everything I have done. (And I have done some amazing things which do not deserve that fate.)

Then there are other bits of shame too. If I can push past the conditioned responses I just mentioned (all systematically  programmed within me to protect the abuser) then there is another layer. “Well, if things were so bad, why did you let that happen?” and “you must have enjoyed it”, “why didn’t you stop it sooner?”, “why didn’t you report it?”, and “now you’re just looking for attention”.

And then I feel shitty for even mentioning it because so many other women have been through so much more than I have. So much more abuse, for so much longer. Women I have known. In fact, the woman who abused me was herself the victim of horrific abuse years ago. So what right do I have to complain? What right do I have to make a spectacle of myself over this?

And so I’m going to address it all this way; I’m going to tell you all why I am telling this story, then I am going to tell the story, and then I am going to wrap it up and move on.

So… Why am I doing this? I have no plans of perusing this through the legal system (for a large number of reasons). I have no plans of ever speaking to this person again, and (not because I bear her any ill will, actually, but simply because it would not be good for me, right or wrong, I have tremendous sympathy for her still). And I am living a pretty satisfying and happy life at the moment. But, you see, by not talking about this, by not being open about it and what effect it has had on me, it is festering.

I have been trying to write another post, one I feel strongly about, but I cannot seem to get through it without this coming up. It affects the way I see the world, and the way I see people and relationships. It informs my (sometimes strong) opinions about sex and sexuality and it has had an impact on how I define myself in terms of sexual preference. It affects the way I present myself, and It affects the way I deal with authority. This is part of me, part of my story, and I feel like the rest of what I have to say about sexuality and gender and relationships and all of that is colored by this, and I would be less than authentic if I did not mention it…

And, as is true with all of my writing, this is my therapy, this is how I am working through things right now. I recently became sexually active again after almost a year of celibacy, and so I’m working through this particular issue at the moment. I had a lovely couple of dates last week, and it wound up leading to some really nice bedroom time, which was frankly awesome and healthy and safe and made me very happy for a little while… but afterwards I was struck with a feeling I haven’t completely been able to shake, a feeling of intense vulnerability, of fear, and of deep deep shame. I know these feelings do not belong to me. They’re not from me. They were planted there by someone else at a very vulnerable time in my life, and they are a reflection of that person’s attitudes and damage. Not mine. And so I have been a zombie all week. Shuffling through my life, being depressed, reverting to old unhealthy habits and withdrawing from friends and activities. Fortunately, I have some pretty good mental checks in place to detect such things and stop them before they get out of control, and so here we are.

So, here is the part where I stop explaining why I am explaining myself, and just tell the story, right? Because that’s what I need to do now, for myself. I have started to finally put a name on all of this and I can’t stop here, as much as I want to, I need to sort of walk through a play-by-play in such a way that I can look back at it and be able to say, “this is what happened to me.” So- without further ado, this is what happened to me:

I had this friend. A best friend, really. Back when I was a guy still. She was a very close friend for something like 13 years, and we shared a lot of good times and bad times and deep special meaningful times. She had a rough life in many ways. She had been in and out of mental institutions and had attempted suicide and had herself been the victim of a tremendous amount of abuse, and had, IMO, also been ill-served by the entire mental-health system, and she was in the long and scary process of finding her own sexuality and gender identity. But I am already digressing. There are many reasons for this person’s behavior, and I could easily rationalize it ten-thousand different ways, but this isn’t about her story, her tragedy. This is my story. The things that are important to know about her for the purpose of my story are this: She was a long-time, deeply trusted friend, she was bisexual (leaning towards lesbian), she was genderqueer and often presented in a very masculine fashion, and sometimes cross-dressed as a man and passed easily. Throughout our thirteen-year friendship we had on and off periods of sexual intimacy, and then, shortly before I began to transition and my male personnana was in the last stages of falling apart, we became (somewhat secretly) romantic.

As I began to transition, slowly at first, and then later quite rapidly, she began to respond to this by becoming increasingly more masculine. Not in good ways. I believe that she did not have much in the way of good relationship role models, and despite being a self-proclaimed feminist, she had a large vein of misogyny that ran through her. She began to become very controlling. She decided that since I was the woman now, she would have to be the man, and that meant laying down the law and being the one who wasn’t always so “frivolous” and “femme” and “weak”.

The worst of the physical abuse and the rape occurred early on. She stopped slapping me and physically forcing herself on me about the time I went full-time. But those seeds were already planted. I was already a little bit broken and had been put in my place rather effectively. And the abuse shifted to a much more insidious form of emotional abuse. And so then the rules came.

There were rules about what color I should keep my nails, and how long I should keep them. There were rules about the length of my skirts. Rules about my lipstick color. And, ultimately, before it all ended, rules about what kind of underwear I could wear outside of my apartment. I was always to be a “lady” and never a “slut”.

Who I hung out with, and wether or not my hairdresser or massage therapist was a male became big issues. I wasn’t allowed much contact with men outside of work, and the fact that I was increasingly attracted to them and unable to stop myself from reacting to them sexually was really bad news.

It was all too easy to fall into this. I had known and trusted her for so long. Plus, as a woman, she claimed to have all of these secrets she could give me, all of these ways she could help me transition, and transition is a very difficult time and she was there to take full advantage of that, and of my loyalty, and of my strong aversion to causing other people emotional distress. And, of course, she had hit me. And she had raped me, in a very painful and humiliating way, and that all had left me broken.

The hardest thing I have had to deal with is that realization that I still am broken. The realization of what really was taken from me those three years ago makes me sob. I was such a sweetheart. So fresh and so young and so innocent. So happy to be discovering myself. So fresh and new and full of wonder and curiosity at this new me, at this new life. And she took that wonder, and that joy and that sexual empowerment and she broke it, turning it into shame and disgust and fear.

When I desire to be held, her voice is there telling me I am weak and silly. When the smell of an attractive man gets my attention, she is right there to call me a slut. When a man is nice to me, she is there to remind me that he just wants to fuck me and that he thinks I am just “a hole for him to use”. When I do manage to get through all of that and have some healthy, fulfilling sex, she is there in the aftermath, calling me a whore, telling me I am cheap, telling me I degraded not only myself but all of woman-kind by allowing that to happen. Real women are lesbians. Real women don’t allow themselves to be penetrated by men. Being attracted to men meant I was untrustworthy, anti-woman, and a whore.

When a man or woman acts like her or looks like her, or has a haircut like her, I become immediately fearful and deferential to them. This is causing me some ongoing problems, as there is someone in my life who fits this description whom I have to deal with.

I am now suspect of my own human desires. I am suspect of my own femininity. And as much as my pubescent body and lonely soul crave affection and company and sex, I am afraid of those things and I have been hiding from them.

And all of these thoughts and feelings are not mine. The do not belong in my sweet, compassionate, and loving mind. They clearly do not match their surroundings. This is an emotional cancer, I am enraged that it is there,  and I want it removed. This is not who I was supposed to turn into. This is not how I was supposed to grow up the second time around, this is not where I am supposed to be right now.

After so much hard work and striving and change and wonderful empowering beautiful things I have done and that are in my life now, she is still there. Calling me a whore. Calling me a traitor. Making me ashamed of myself, of my sexuality, and of my femininity.

I feel like I can see that girl I should have been. Like she is a ghost in the room with me. A happy Joan. A free Joan. An innocent loving Joan. And I want to be her so bad. I was supposed to be her, that was my destiny. That was my goal. That was the one thing I wanted to do with my life was become that girl. And it’s been taken from me and as much as I try to get there, as much as I can pretend to be her, as much as I am -almost- her. I am not. I am traumatized. I am fucked-up. I am wracked with guilt and shame and pain and fear and the image of a .50 BMG ammunition round that she raped me with, and I want to know how I can cut all of that out. I want my self back. My sweet innocent happy self that I earned, that I deserve, and that she poisoned. I am filled with rage and sorrow and grief and emptiness and I don’t even know what to do about it.

And I can’t even hate her or be angry with her because I know all too well how this cancer was given to her. But I am seriously pissed off that I have it now too. I don’t have time for this. My life was half over before it ever began, and now someone else’s damage is eating away at the years I have left. Eating away at MY chance, after living 35 years for everyone else and their expectations I vowed to take the second half of my life for myself, but my plan has a great big huge fucking Ball of Cancer in the middle of it, and I want it gone.

And this is my first step. There.

I’m Joan. I’m a sweet, brilliant, pretty, spiritual, 37yo, successful professional trans woman, and I am an abuse survivor.