Many transsexual women including my wife and many of my close friends have told me that the original version of this essay is their favorite thing I’ve ever written because it made them cry. I can’t in good conscience recommend you read it. But it is essential to understanding this article. They recognized themselves in it, and I fucking hate that. I hate that so many women read what I wrote and immediately knew what I was talking about because somebody had done the same thing to them.
I don’t know how I’m supposed to feel when a woman tells me that my writing made her feel understood because I described something horrible that happened to her. I’m glad I could give her the words for it, but Jesus Christ, I wish she hadn’t needed them. I wish I could write about being a transsexual woman without having to hear how many of us have been hurt by people who were supposed to love us, protect us, or at the very least give a shit about us.
And what makes me angrier is how many of these women thought they were alone. How many were convinced they were overreacting, or that what happened to them was just part of being queer, or that speaking up would make them the problem.
I’m rewriting The Casualness Is the Violence because I think the original essay deserved better than what I was capable of giving it when I first wrote it.
I love that my writing means something to these women. I hate what we’ve had to live through to understand each other.
I wish the original essay hadn’t made so many of you cry. I wish I’d been wrong about more of it.
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Thank you to everyone who’s stuck around long enough to watch my writing grow up alongside me. There’s a lot more coming, and I think some of the best work I’ve ever done is still ahead of me. I love you all. So much. Thank you for making the last five years the best.
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A girl I know threw a party a few months ago. There were forty people in her apartment, most of them trans women and most of those the kind of trans woman who has a Substack, a podcast, or a body of work. Sometime around midnight, two people began making out in the kitchen, and a third wandered over and joined them. By one in the morning, there was a pile of queer people on a mattress in the living room doing what everyone at the party had tacitly agreed, in advance, without anyone having to announce it, was the thing you did at a party of this kind. Nobody was drunk or high, and the pile was neither romantic nor erotic in any register I could identify as erotic. It looked, from where I sat on the kitchen counter, like a group project.
The girl who hosted, who hadn't been in the pile, wandered over eventually and said, without looking at me, "I don't know what's wrong with me lately. I'm just not into any of it." When I asked her what she meant, she said, "I don't know. It used to feel like something."
I've been carrying that sentence for months: it used to feel like something. She was standing in her own apartment, surrounded by people she liked, looking at an activity she'd once enjoyed, and the explanation available to her was that something inside her had stopped working. Whatever she'd lost, she didn't know when she'd lost it, and she'd already decided that the loss was hers to explain.
A woman finds herself unhappy in a sexual culture everybody around her considers liberating, and the first question she's encouraged to ask is whether she's sufficiently liberated to appreciate it. She may eventually discover that she doesn't want the life everybody else has been describing as freedom, but by then she's often spent so long searching herself for the problem that she barely knows how to explain what she wants instead.
The original article was written from inside the exhaustion of a particular sexual culture. Being wanted by people who seemed remarkably uninterested in what I wanted had become painfully familiar, as had laughing through something I didn't enjoy because I couldn't imagine making the evening stop. Sex could happen without anybody having to admit how much another person's body mattered to them, and an encounter could be made socially insignificant even when one participant experienced it as profoundly consequential. The ability to decide that something didn't matter was distributed unequally, and the women paying for that inequality were often the ones who'd been told they were finally free.
Before the morality police arrive
Some of you are already composing an objection in your heads. A woman who describes herself in interviews as a kinky freak, and who has a wife she fucks with enthusiasm and talks about fucking with enthusiasm, apparently can't credibly criticize the sexual culture she participates in. The fact that I like Andrea Dworkin makes this even funnier to people who believe feminism requires a woman to become sexually respectable before she's permitted to speak.
Frankly, Dworkin would probably disapprove of some of the sex I have, and there's no reason to rehabilitate her into somebody who'd have given me a thumbs-up at the kink party. My desire is, without question, informed by patriarchy. Parts of what turns me on draw from fantasies of domination and submission whose history I can see even while I'm enjoying them. My sexuality didn't develop somewhere outside society, and there was no period of my life when the world left me alone long enough to discover a perfectly innocent erotic self. By the time I understood what desire meant, I'd already encountered a thousand explanations of what my body was supposed to be and what other people were supposed to want from it.
The desires I actually have are the ones I have to work with, and understanding what makes them pleasurable sometimes means confronting things about myself I'd rather not look at. Some fantasies excite me precisely because they resemble situations I'd find intolerable outside a consensual encounter. Enjoying submission doesn't require believing women ought to submit, any more than finding a particular scene exciting means wanting it imposed on somebody else, and the fact that desire has a political history doesn't relieve us of responsibility for what we actually do to one another.
Dworkin treated sexuality as a field in which the domination of women could be made to appear natural and even desired by the women subjected to it. She understood that patriarchy survives partly because its demands get built into the lives of the people it subordinates: women learn to navigate a world that rewards accommodation, and sometimes we learn to desire things inside the very situations that constrain us. Her analysis refuses the fantasy that everything we want must be beyond political criticism. Yet criticizing how a desire was formed doesn't give somebody else the authority to regulate the woman who has it, and the people who believe they've achieved an ideologically superior relationship to pleasure would often benefit from spending considerably less time explaining other women's desires.
A woman may enjoy being sexually available to several partners while another wants one exclusive relationship or no sex at all, and neither owes the other a justification for the form her intimate life takes. My raunchiness belongs inside that argument, as does my feminism, and becoming quieter about sex would only make me easier for people to take seriously on terms I've never accepted.
The sex is everywhere and nowhere
Sex occupies an extraordinary amount of space in the queer social worlds I'm describing. People discuss it constantly, and who is fucking whom gets catalogued with the fervor of nineteenth-century amateur naturalists assembling butterfly collections. Everybody seems to know who's slept with somebody else's girlfriend and who has recently become available. Knowing the details of somebody's sexual life can create the impression that you know her intimately, even when you've never had a conversation about the things she's frightened of or the kind of affection she actually wants.
A girl I was sleeping with a couple of years ago once told me, unblinking, that she'd slept with someone she had no desire for because "it would have been weird not to." Nobody needed to tell her she was required to participate. She understood the expectations surrounding her well enough to make the decision herself, and sexual availability had become one of the ways she kept her place among other people.
Variations of that explanation have come from women who seemed entirely comfortable calling themselves sexually liberated. They knew consent mattered and would've been furious if somebody suggested women ought to have sex out of obligation, yet the obligation had returned through the expectations of their friends. It took shape through repeated encounters in which participation made social life easier and refusal made it more complicated.
Before an encounter has even begun, people may feel obliged to establish how little it's supposed to mean: "I don't want this to be a whole thing," "no pressure," "I'm not looking for anything," "we can just see where it goes." The assurances arrive before anybody has found out what the encounter means to them, and they protect against the possibility that somebody might develop feelings and expect those feelings to receive consideration. Desire is allowed to emerge, provided nobody becomes inconveniently attached to what follows.
In some of the communities I've lived in, this expectation is reinforced by a presumption of polyamory so thorough that it no longer feels like an assumption. A woman who wants exclusivity may discover that her preference requires an explanation, and people ask whether she's possessive or whether she's reproducing conservative expectations about relationships. Polyamory has acquired moral prestige among people who supposedly reject compulsory sexual norms, and the woman who wants something different is invited to reconsider herself. She may have been mistreated by her partner, or she may simply want a monogamous relationship, and those very different circumstances can disappear into the same psychological explanation: she needs to work on herself.
An encounter gets scored afterward as a six, or a four with a nice conversation, in the tone of somebody reviewing a restaurant whose food was acceptable but whose service left something to be desired. Women who've experienced something painful can find themselves describing it in this language of mild disappointment, saying the vibes were strange when they meant somebody had ignored a boundary, or calling an encounter awkward when it had frightened them. Talking that way lets them speak without requiring anybody around them to respond as though something serious had happened, and sometimes what those women are describing is rape.
A friend of mine was raped at a house party by a transmasculine person who was, at the time, dating her closest friend. She told me about it a week later and used the phrase "kind of a mess." She'd been sober and had said no, and the perpetrator hadn't stopped. When I said, carefully, "that sounds like assault," she said, with equal care, "I don't want to call it that because things are complicated."
The complications had very little to do with whether she'd refused. The person who'd hurt her was beloved in the scene, and she understood how much trouble naming the rape could cause, so she was calculating the cost of telling the truth before she'd even finished describing what had happened to her. Calling it rape would have required other people to change their behavior, and her story threatened a social life they wanted to keep intact.
Before anyone asks
A room doesn't consent on behalf of the people inside it. That sounds obvious until the room is one where everybody's supposed to know what kind of evening they're having. People are flirting and touching one another. A woman arrives with a reputation for being sexually open, or somebody knows what she's posted online, and familiarity begins circulating ahead of any agreement with her. By the time somebody puts a hand on her, they may already believe that asking would interrupt an understanding everybody shares.
This is what I call ambient consent: the assumption that the atmosphere has supplied an answer the woman herself hasn't given. Her presence becomes evidence that she's taking part in whatever somebody else believes the gathering permits, and the hookups she's had before, or what she's written publicly about her sexuality, become evidence that she'll welcome this one.
If a woman has to stop an unwanted touch, she's already been assigned the work of correcting somebody else's assumption with her body. She may object immediately, or she may hesitate because the person touching her is close to the host and she doesn't know whether anybody will back her up if they get angry. Either way, the person who touched her has made their own desire the starting point from which everything else has to be negotiated.
Andrea Dworkin, speaking in 1983 to men who considered themselves opponents of sexism, said: "It's in life that men believe they have the right to force sex, which they don't call rape." A man can understand the word perfectly well while believing his own conduct falls outside it. He may treat a woman's refusal as something to overcome, especially once he's convinced himself that she wanted the encounter, and his political convictions stop mattering the moment he decides his desire entitles him to disregard her answer.
The same failure turns up among people who've spent years discussing consent. They can explain sexual coercion beautifully when the perpetrator is somebody they dislike, but when a woman's refusal interrupts something they want, the analysis gets considerably more complicated. The touching wasn't meant to be serious and the person accused of crossing the boundary has always been respectful before, so the woman who described the violation becomes the one making the evening uncomfortable. She's told she can say no to anything, and then she finds out that saying no may change how everybody treats her, because she's expected to possess an independence her social world has done very little to provide.
Doll, this is on purpose
Patriarchy enforces itself through explicit commands far less often than through ordinary life arranged so that accommodation is easier than refusal. A woman may stay in work she hasn't freely chosen because the alternative threatens her livelihood, or tolerate sexual attention because the person approaching her has authority over some part of her life, and eventually people begin describing these accommodations as expressions of her own preferences.
Sexual desire developed inside a history of these accommodations. For centuries, women's reproductive capacities and domestic labor have been subjected to control that organized the production of families and workers, and Silvia Federici, in Caliban and the Witch (2004), places the European witch hunts inside that history, tying them to the suppression of women's knowledge and the consolidation of patriarchal authority during the transition to capitalism. The fight over who controls women's bodies and labor didn't end when people began separating sexual pleasure from reproduction.
Contraception and abortion access have transformed what's possible for women, and the freedoms they provide are worth defending, especially while political movements keep trying to restrict them. Yet the ideological expectations surrounding sex have survived the change in its reproductive function. A man can approach a woman who can't become pregnant and still believe her body exists for his enjoyment, and a transsexual woman can be subjected to sexual entitlement that has nothing to do with the possibility of reproduction, from somebody acting on a familiar patriarchal assumption: another person's desire creates an expectation that she'll accommodate it.
The history of women's reproductive subordination helped build sexual hierarchies, but those hierarchies have never been limited to reproduction, and sexual domination can express control over a person's labor or her dependence within a household. In the culture I'm describing, the expectation of access is often detached from explicitly male authority and reproduced among people who understand themselves as opponents of patriarchy. Nobody has to be a man to learn that their own desire deserves satisfaction. A trans woman can violate another trans woman, and somebody who has survived sexual violence can still disregard another person's refusal, because people grow up inside a society that distributes authority and vulnerability unequally and can reproduce its expectations even while opposing its institutions.
The particular relationship matters, because authority is exercised through what people can demand from one another and what it costs to refuse them. Someone whose place in a social circle is secure can disregard another person's boundaries without necessarily losing the support of the people around them, while the woman whose relationships depend on staying agreeable may have considerably less freedom to object, and those differences exist before either of them says a word.
An explicitly disregarded refusal establishes a violation that no elaborate account of social pressure can excuse. But agreements are also made inside relationships. If keeping her friendships depends on participating in a sexual culture she no longer enjoys, a woman may keep participating because isolation seems worse, and she may genuinely desire some of the people involved while feeling compelled to stay available to others. Her desires don't become unreal because she's under pressure, and the pressure doesn't disappear because she expresses desire.
The legal recognition of consent remains indispensable, but the political question reaches past the standard by which a particular act becomes punishable, because a woman's ability to decide what happens to her body is constrained when exercising that decision threatens the resources and relationships she needs.
My Blackness is already in the account
A Black woman's account of sexual violence enters a world that has spent centuries producing explanations for why her body was available and her suffering undeserving of recognition. That history shows up in what people assume about how much distress I can withstand and how quickly my anger becomes evidence that everybody else needs protection from me. Hortense Spillers, in "Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe" (1987), draws her distinction between the body and the flesh to describe the violence through which enslaved Africans were stripped of recognized social relations and subjected to captivity, and she shows how the gendered categories of dominant civil society failed to describe the position of enslaved Black women, who were subjected to sexual and reproductive exploitation while being denied the forms of recognition attached to white womanhood. Her work forces the question of who is understood as possessing a body entitled to protection and whose vulnerability becomes legible, and for a Black transsexual woman that question acquires a particular intensity.
I can be represented as sexually voracious enough to have welcomed whatever somebody did to me and physically formidable enough that I supposedly couldn't have been seriously hurt. The two judgments reinforce one another: the more appetite people assign me, the less explanation they require from the person who took access to my body, and the more aggression they imagine in me, the easier it becomes to treat my distress as a threat.
Angela Davis writes in Women, Race & Class (1981): "The license to rape emanated from and facilitated the ruthless economic domination that was the gruesome hallmark of slavery." She shows how sexual coercion reinforced economic domination while racist representations of rape protected white power and obscured violence against Black women, and the people permitted to define a situation as threatening have often held considerable power over the people they accused.
Versions of the same pattern show up in queer communities whose members consider themselves intensely committed to racial justice. A white woman says a Black woman made her feel unsafe. The fear may be genuinely felt, since people can experience sincere emotions through assumptions they've never questioned, but sincerity doesn't establish that the person being feared actually threatened anyone. If a group treats a white woman's fear as sufficient evidence that a Black woman is dangerous, the judgment has already been made.
The Black woman may then be told to soften her voice so everybody can keep discussing what happened. Somebody explains that the other person is overwhelmed, while somebody else suggests she'd be more persuasive if she sounded less angry. The requests can seem reasonable one at a time while adding up to a situation in which her story becomes acceptable only after she's removed everything that might make the listeners uncomfortable. Nobody asks whether the same patience was extended to her body.
White women need to acknowledge their own vulnerability without treating it as proof that they can't exercise power over me. Having experienced misogyny doesn't stop a woman from participating in racial domination, and she can understand what it's like to be disbelieved and still benefit when other people find her distress more credible than mine.
When a Black woman's anger is treated as threatening, friends may become reluctant to support her. They may keep welcoming the person she says hurt her while explaining that her own behavior has made the situation too difficult, and she loses invitations and perhaps somewhere to stay. By the time everybody announces they simply want peace, the person accused of harming her may have kept nearly every relationship. She's expected to treat her exclusion as an unfortunate outcome of interpersonal conflict, and if she refuses that explanation, her refusal becomes further evidence that she's the problem.
The body they think they already know
People ask why transsexual women don't make scenes when our boundaries are crossed, as though making a scene would guarantee us any authority over how it was interpreted. A trans woman's visible distress can be read through the masculinity other people insist they still see in her. She raises her voice because somebody won't listen, and her voice becomes the reason people claim they can't listen, so the conversation turns toward how frightening she sounded while whatever hurt her disappears from view.
By that reasoning, you can't rape the abuser-bodied. That's the obscenity I'm naming: a social judgment that treats a woman's embodiment as proof that she couldn't have been violated. She's assigned the position of perpetrator before anybody has established what happened, and her body becomes evidence about the direction harm supposedly traveled.
Somebody can desire her while taking part in that judgment. They may want precisely the physical characteristics they've also learned to regard as dangerous, then use those characteristics to justify withdrawing sympathy when she objects to how she's being treated. The person doesn't have to consciously plan this reversal. They may genuinely experience themselves as more vulnerable because they've learned to notice their own fear immediately and hers only with difficulty, and if the group shares those assumptions, their version can gather support before she's had a chance to explain herself.
Her height may be offered as evidence that she could have stopped the encounter. People imagine strength on her behalf and then use it to deny her vulnerability, and if she physically resisted, the resistance becomes the event everybody remembers. Physical capacity and social authority aren't the same thing. A woman might be able to push somebody away while knowing that doing so could expose her to violence or social punishment, and she might know the person touching her is beloved by a host who already regards her anger with suspicion. Whether she could move somebody's hand tells us very little about whether she could make the room accept her right to move it.
Seeing a man where I am doesn't make me invulnerable. That perception affects whether somebody helps me, but it can't alter what happened to my body, and treating their misrecognition as proof of my strength lets prejudice justify itself. The same maneuver survives perfectly correct pronouns. Somebody may call me a woman right up until acknowledging my womanhood would mean admitting my vulnerability, and at that point the supposedly enlightened person starts explaining that my anger resembles male entitlement. Suddenly the woman describing a violation is the man in the room.
Protection shouldn't depend on my becoming a more delicate version of myself, and a small, quiet transsexual woman shouldn't receive care that a tall woman with a voice people dislike is denied. Passing can't become the admission price for bodily autonomy, and nobody should have to produce a convincing performance of helplessness before anybody accepts that another person violated her.
The history of a woman's behavior can also become an excuse for disregarding what she says. She may have argued with people or said something cruel, and there may be things she's done for which she genuinely owes somebody an apology. Those actions deserve to be judged on their own terms, because a woman can be responsible for harming somebody else and still have been violated herself. But a group may keep discussing her character until there's no attention left for the conduct she originally described. They don't need to announce that disliked women may be raped. They only need to decide that the woman describing the rape is too difficult to deserve their concern.
Call the thing the thing
A few of us, privately, among ourselves, started calling it lowkey rape. The lowkey describes how people treat the violation: the speed with which an encounter becomes a misunderstanding and the pressure on the woman to keep it from becoming serious. Nothing about the rape itself is low-key; it's a hand inside your body that you did not consent to having inside your body.
I have been fingered at parties without being asked. I have been penetrated during encounters I had agreed to as making out only, after I had said no to penetration, because the person I was with decided the no was soft and could be worked past. I have been held in positions I had said I didn't want to be held in by people who treated my saying so as a negotiating position rather than a limit. I have had people put their hands inside me while I was still deciding whether I wanted their hands on me.
I have, in several cases, laughed while it was happening, because the register of the scene required the laugh, and laughing was less socially expensive than freezing, and freezing was less socially expensive than refusing out loud, and refusing out loud was the unthinkable thing.
Those sentences still belong to my life when I've finished explaining them. Understanding the politics around what happened doesn't make me want any less for the person touching me to have cared enough to stop, and there's no level of theoretical sophistication at which that desire becomes embarrassing.
The laugh made the encounter easier to survive. It could make me sound less threatening when I was frightened of how an objection would be received, and sometimes it bought me a little time to work out what to do. Later, the person who disregarded my words could point to the laugh and claim I'd been enjoying myself, as though the work I did to survive their decision proved I'd welcomed it. My refusal apparently needed interpretation while my laughter was treated as self-explanatory, and the job of making their decision more difficult was assigned to me.
There's a particular loneliness in hearing yourself sound agreeable while knowing you aren't agreeing. The voice leaving your mouth can seem to belong to the evening everybody else is having, and your own experience has nowhere to go without interrupting it.
Pain can sometimes be described plainly: somebody did something you didn't want, and it hurt. The confusion afterward is harder to explain because it changes how you remember your own participation. You may start wondering whether you should have objected more forcefully or whether laughing made everything ambiguous, and you can spend an extraordinary amount of time trying to reconstruct the perfect refusal. Meanwhile, the person who disregarded the refusal you actually gave remains responsible for what they did.
Since my platform grew, the pattern has accelerated. When I was unknown, these encounters were already distressingly frequent, and becoming recognizable brought another set of assumptions about what people were entitled to do with my body. Some people wanted access to the woman who wrote the essays. They knew what I'd written about sex and approached me through a sexual character they'd assembled from the things I'd chosen to make public.
My essays are not a blanket release form. People I barely knew described, to the woman I was going to marry, in granular detail, what they wanted to do to me, as though she were an administrative function of my availability rather than the woman I was marrying. They approached a relationship between two women as though it contained an office where requests for my body could be submitted.
My public sexual confidence has become something other people believe they can hold against me. Disliking an approach supposedly contradicts the openness I've expressed elsewhere, and refusing an act can produce a reference to something I once wrote about enjoying, because they believe that knowing what I like means they already know what I'm prepared to do with them. Becoming ashamed of sex shouldn't be the price of making that distinction clear.
I want to be allowed to be fucking hurt without my hurt becoming the next thing on trial. The woman who can write confidently about sexuality can still feel frightened when somebody ignores her.
The people you need are also the people deciding
A friend group is often where a transsexual woman finds somewhere to stay when her housing becomes unstable. The people who hear her story might also be the people who drive her to medical appointments or help her survive a difficult month, and some of them may be sleeping with the person she's describing. The same network supplies intimacy and practical support while claiming the authority to decide what happened.
Social reputation has material consequences. The person with the most established relationships may have friends prepared to defend them and repeated opportunities to explain their version of events before the woman reporting harm speaks, and their place in the group helps preserve the credibility that makes them difficult to challenge.
For the woman with fewer connections, refusing one person can mean negotiating with everybody. A host may keep inviting the person who hurt her while assuring her that she's welcome too, so every invitation asks her to decide whether seeing her friends is worth running into somebody she doesn't want to see. After enough declined invitations, she becomes the woman who stopped coming, and everybody describes the distance as her choice. Technically she did choose not to attend, but the people who set up that choice decided that keeping their parties the way they were mattered more than making room for her.
The person accused of harming her can do without anybody's approval, provided enough people keep behaving as though nothing has changed. Some people sincerely insist they're staying out of it, but keeping the guest list as it was isn't staying out of anything when the guest list decides who has to withdraw.
The difficulty sharpens when care gets tangled up with sexual access. Somebody may have helped a woman through an awful period and later treated that help as a claim on her intimacy, so that gratitude starts operating as a debt whose terms were never disclosed. When she refuses, the earlier kindness comes back as an explanation of why the other person feels hurt. A couch doesn't purchase a place in somebody's bed. Yet if her alternatives are scarce, she may have to consider what disappointing the person providing her housing will mean, and even without an explicit threat, affection and security can become hard to separate.
Material independence matters because it changes what refusal can cost. If a woman has somewhere else to go, the person controlling her apartment loses some of their power over her, and if her friendships continue when she stops sleeping with somebody, refusing sex no longer carries the same threat of social disappearance. The expectations get more powerful when they offer almost no other route to belonging, and a woman can start wondering whether being wanted is how she earns the right to stay close to people. Women shouldn't have to become immune to loneliness before anybody can be expected to respect them. The fact that a woman wants affection gives other people more reason to care about how they treat her, and no reason at all to treat her vulnerability as an opportunity.
The culture of casual intimacy is the sex-negative culture
Apparently asking queer people to take sex seriously makes me sex-negative. The term has historically described attitudes that regard sexual pleasure as inherently shameful or dangerous, particularly when women express desires that challenge established moral expectations, but I've watched the accusation expand until it can be aimed at women who simply want to decline the kinds of sex their friends prefer. A woman says she doesn't enjoy a particular form of sex, and people start wondering whether she's internalized shame. She wants an encounter to carry emotional significance, and suddenly the conversation is about her attachment style.
The expectation that women should get over their discomfort has survived remarkably well among people who believe they've escaped traditional sexual morality; they've only changed the preferred destination. Women were once instructed to get comfortable with sexual obligation justified through marriage and femininity. Now, in some of the queer spaces I'm describing, they're encouraged to get comfortable with sexual openness because openness has acquired the prestige of liberation. Either way, a woman is expected to adjust herself to a sex life other people have already decided is good for her, and I refuse to call that freedom.
The suggestion that criticizing queer sexual culture lines me up with the religious right is equally absurd. The religious right has spent decades trying to restrict reproductive autonomy and queer life, and its campaigns threaten my wife's and my ability to live openly as women who love women. Still, the existence of an external enemy can't make every internal practice immune to criticism.
Somebody hostile to transsexual women may misuse what I write, ignoring the distinctions I've made and treating my account as evidence that queer people are inherently dangerous. They don't need my permission to be dishonest, and they certainly don't get authority over what transsexual women are allowed to say about our experiences. The people who've told me not to write about sexual violence in queer communities often invoke the chance that our enemies will use it against us, but that silence protects the people who depend on everyone else's unwillingness to look at their conduct. The woman being asked to stay quiet is part of the community, and her life matters as much as its reputation.
Sex matters too much to me to accept a culture that treats a woman's actual feelings as an inconvenience. Women should be free to have casual sex when they want it and to enjoy kink without submitting their desires to somebody else's ideological inspection. They should be just as free to want intimacy that matters deeply to them, and to stop an encounter when it stops feeling good. A woman who takes sex seriously may simply have decided that her pleasure deserves more consideration than the people around her have been willing to give it, which is a long way from dragging anybody back to the 1950s.
What we're willing to change for her
The woman who's been hurt eventually has to get back to the practical business of living. She may need somewhere to sleep that night and still have to work the next morning, with a body that hurts and the fear of running into the person who harmed her, and somebody has to help her make the next day manageable. A friend stays awake listening to her describe something terrible and helps her find somewhere safe, spending money she barely has and missing sleep she needed. Meanwhile, the rest of the community discusses accountability. People become very interested in terminology; somebody explains the importance of restorative justice while somebody else emphasizes that everybody involved deserves compassion. The woman who needs somewhere to sleep still needs somewhere to sleep.
My commitment to abolition includes the belief that people can change. Imprisonment doesn't offer an adequate general response to sexual violence, and the criminal legal system has inflicted enormous harm on the women it claims to protect. But refusing carceral punishment doesn't relieve us of the responsibility to interrupt violence.
The 2001 joint statement from INCITE! and Critical Resistance warned that alternatives to incarceration can depend on "a romanticized notion of communities." It criticized anti-prison movements that had neglected women subjected to sexual and domestic violence while challenging mainstream anti-violence organizations' reliance on policing and imprisonment, because its authors understood that communities could reproduce the domination their members claimed to oppose. The word community doesn't establish that everybody inside it is safe, and it doesn't guarantee that the people gathered under it have the resources or the willingness to respond when somebody is harmed.
The possibility of change sometimes gets invoked as a reason to restore somebody's social position without expecting any change in their conduct. The person responsible is welcomed back into familiar company while the woman who was hurt is encouraged to get comfortable with their presence, and sometimes the whole thing consists mainly of waiting until she's too exhausted to keep objecting, after which everybody announces that the matter has been resolved.
Some people have confused the possibility of redemption with the right to remain comfortable. A belief in change means something when the person responsible is expected to face what they've done and alter the behavior that harmed somebody else. They may have to accept that certain relationships can't be restored, or stop contacting somebody who wants no contact, and their friends may need to set limits that keep it from happening again while supporting them through real change. None of this requires denying their humanity, but the woman they hurt shouldn't be required to supervise their development. She may want nothing further to do with them, including hearing how much they've learned, and improvement doesn't create a right to recover every relationship somebody has lost through their conduct.
A host can decide whom to invite, and friends can arrange to see the woman somewhere she won't run into the person she says harmed her. None of that requires pretending every accusation has already been independently established, because uncertainty about a particular event doesn't require abandoning somebody who asks for support. When a pattern of boundary violations becomes established, the group has a responsibility to ask why the person responsible keeps getting opportunities to repeat it.
That work gets harder when the person accused controls things the group depends on. Perhaps they host most of the parties, or they have money or influence that would be hard to replace. Asking that person to run the response returns the woman to the dependence she's trying to escape, so other people may have to provide alternatives, even if that means finding somewhere else to meet. These are genuine costs, and it's revealing how quickly people start worrying about the dangers of accountability when supporting the woman who's been hurt requires them to give up something they enjoy. We can't promise women safety while making it conditional on preserving every existing friendship unchanged.
At the same time, accountability can't become another popularity contest deciding whose story gets heard. The people doing this work need limits on their authority. Their decisions should be explainable, and there should be ways to challenge them without losing access to support; otherwise the effort to take apart one informal hierarchy may build another around whoever speaks most confidently about justice.
Women need somewhere to go when a relationship becomes unsafe and friendships that don't disappear when they stop having sex with somebody, and the work of caring for them can't keep falling to the same exhausted women. No single friend group can resolve the economic conditions that make these dependencies so hard to escape, but knowing that should shape what we build, and it can't turn into one more reason the woman who was hurt has to accept less. Sexual freedom requires the ability to refuse without losing what it takes to sustain a life, and anything short of that is an incomplete promise.
The years afterward
To the transsexual women who cried reading the original, I don't need you to name your experience on my timetable. You may recognize something here and still be unsure what you want to call it, or remember an encounter differently after reading another woman's story. You may have loved the person involved, and maybe you still do and find yourself wanting to protect them from the consequences of what happened even while knowing how badly it hurt you. Those feelings don't arrive in a politically convenient order, and you've already spent enough time learning how other people think you should respond without needing another set of expectations from me.
Whatever you wanted before somebody crossed a boundary, wanting didn't give them permission to disregard your limits, and whatever you did afterward to survive the encounter doesn't transfer their responsibility to you. If you laughed because you were frightened or wanted to keep things from getting worse, you don't need to reconstruct a perfect refusal to make what happened matter. A woman can spend years trying to become the kind of woman whose violation everybody would immediately recognize, and I don't want us to spend the rest of our lives doing that.
Some of the women who recognized themselves in the original were strangers to me and some were women whose lives had already crossed mine, and there are so many things I'd rather share with them than this. I'd like us to recognize ourselves in the pleasure of being loved well and in the relief of finding that somebody knows our boundaries well enough to respect them without treating them as an insult.
I wish recognition could reach backward, that an essay could arrive before the person who decided your limits were flexible, before you began wondering how much of yourself you had to give away to remain welcome. It can't return those hours, and the girl I was can't be handed everything I've learned since about the people who wanted me. The loneliness of certain encounters makes more sense now, though, particularly the evenings when somebody spent hours telling me how desirable I was and I still went home feeling terribly alone. Being wanted felt wonderful, and sometimes I mistook that feeling for being cared for. There was nothing foolish about wanting affection.
I still want to be touched, and I still want the pleasure of knowing that another woman finds me beautiful. I want my wife to look at me with desire for the rest of our lives, and I'd like every woman who has learned to fear intimacy to find out that being wanted can feel safe.
The woman at the party told me sex used to feel like something, and I keep wondering what it would have taken for her to say that to the people in the living room. Some of them might have understood, since some of them may have been tired of keeping up an atmosphere of sexual openness and frightened of what would happen if they admitted they wanted something different. A sexual culture worth defending should be able to tell her whether she'd still have been invited once she stopped participating, and whether the people who wanted to sleep with her would have stayed interested in knowing her.
I want to grow old among women whose company doesn't depend on how available I am to them, in a life full of evenings when we laugh about sex and evenings when nobody has it, when women come over because they like one another even though there's no possibility of fucking. When we do have sex, I want the pleasure to belong to the people having it. There should be years in which being touched gives us more of our lives to inhabit, with enough ordinary affection around those years that desire doesn't have to purchase belonging and a woman can refuse somebody without fearing she's about to lose everyone else.
The women who can't tolerate your weight were never going to be yours in the way you needed them to be, and you don't have to make yourself lighter so somebody else can carry you.
My body isn't an argument somebody else gets to finish. I'm still here when a person decides what they think it means, and I'll still be here after they've left, so anyone who wants to touch me has to care about the woman who remains. My sex will stay heavy, weird, kinky, political, and mine. The women who recognized themselves in my pain deserve something else to recognize eventually: a life in which being wanted doesn't ask them to disappear. It's your move.
Tara
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Sources
Hortense J. Spillers, "Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: An American Grammar Book." Diacritics 17, no. 2 (Summer 1987), pp. 64-81. For the body/flesh distinction and the historical conditions under which enslaved Black women's bodies were subjected to violence while denied the recognition attached to white womanhood.
Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation. Autonomedia, 2004. For the interpretation of witch hunts and reproductive labor during capitalist development. The historical account is contested, and the essay does not present it as the sole explanation of patriarchy.
Angela Y. Davis, Women, Race & Class. Random House, 1981, chapter 11, "Rape, Racism and the Myth of the Black Rapist." For the relationship between sexual violence, slavery, and racialized judgments concerning rape.
Audre Lorde, "Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power." Delivered at the Fourth Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, 1978; reprinted in Sister Outsider, Crossing Press, 1984. For the distinction between erotic experience and the instrumental use of another person.
Andrea Dworkin, "I Want a Twenty-Four-Hour Truce During Which There Is No Rape," 1983. Reprinted in Last Days at Hot Slit, edited by Johanna Fateman and Amy Scholder, 2019. For the relationship between everyday sexual entitlement and men's refusal to see coercion in their own conduct.
INCITE! and Critical Resistance, "Statement on Gender Violence and the Prison Industrial Complex," 2001. For the warning against romanticized community-based responses to violence and the importance of survivor safety within abolitionist organizing.
The essay's account of ambient consent is a feminist interpretation of the experiences described here. It makes no quantitative claim that sexual violence is more prevalent in queer communities than elsewhere.
This redux combines and supersedes "The Casualness Is the Violence," first published April 24, 2026, and reproduced in The Collected Works, printed pages 315-343.