Remembrance

Today is Transgender Day Of Remembrance. Whether by nature or culture, people tend to feel sympathy and empathy with individuals and personal stories. The one symbolizes the many, however incompletely, because the many do not stick with us in the same way.

So many trans folks have been killed. The one that stares out at me, the person whose photos stare back at me, is Gwen Araujo, murdered in Newark, California on October 3, 2002. She was just 17.

Gwen Araujo was a lot of things to a lot of people. She was a No Doubt fan and a daughter and a Californian. But she wasn’t killed for being any of those things. She was killed because of her history. And in death, she has been largely been reduced to that one fact.

In life, she was not one thing or one identity. None of us are. We live in the world as whole people, individuals from the way we brush our teeth in the morning to the way we lay our heads on our pillows at night. Our medical history and our gender presentation and our orientation are part of us, but so are our ethnicities, our communities, our achievements, intellects, abilities and relationships. In life, she was a whole teen girl, but that all gets lost. In death, she is a collection of snapshots and a dry biography of a woman who left the world at age 17, because a group of men couldn’t coexits with one small fact about one small facet about a woman that they knew, and were attracted to.

Anyway, there’s more to her than “trans and dead” and there’s more to TDoR than “Gwen and many like her,” but while we can think about the many we tend to feel about the one, and Gwen Araujo is the one on my mind today.

On the Hofstra Rape/Recant Case & the Campus Rape Epidemic

I’m talking about it all on CNN tonight during the 5PM broadcast. In the meantime, check out my related piece from the Prospect last week.

What it doesn’t mean.

So, reports are everywhere that Chris Brown and Rihanna are getting back together, or at the very least spent the weekend together at Diddy’s mansion in Miami.

Who knows what’s true about these rumors? Hardly anyone. But for argument’s sake, and because many people are already assuming this is true, let’s discuss what it doesn’t mean if Rihanna takes Chris back:

1. It doesn’t mean she is stupid. Leaving an abusive partner is hard – really, really hard. Some studies have shown that it takes an average woman 4-7 tries before she can leave her abuser for good. Why? Because abusers aren’t transparent assholes all of the time. They can be very manipulative, and most of the time will wear down their partner’s self-esteem quite thoroughly long before they start with the physical violence. They’re also often charming and can be very loving and doting and romantic when they’re not being violent. They can talk real pretty about what they’ve learned, how sorry they are, how they’re going to change, how they can’t change without the help of their wo/man. And of course, we want to believe that we haven’t been so blind in choosing a partner for ourselves. We want to believe we can help. We want to believe that the good in them outweighs the bad. It’s a hard, hard situation. This is a good post about all of these dynamics.
2. It doesn’t mean we should forgive him. Because of all this, even if she does take him back, even if they seem happier than ever together, we shouldn’t forget. We shouldn’t shame her for her choices – when we think we can tell a woman what she should do, we’re not much better than a controlling boyfriend ourselves. But we can still call for justice to be served. He can still be prosecuted even if she doesn’t press charges. We can also continue to hold the media accountable for what they say about this case, to ensure that blame is placed on the proper party – the abuser.
3. It doesn’t mean what he’s alleged to have done is any less horrible. Again, see above. There are a lot of psychological reasons that victims take their abusers back. It doesn’t mean the abuse was any kind of “no big deal.” In fact, it often means it’s an even bigger deal than we thought, and involves psychological abuse as well, which leaves a victim vulnerable when the abuser comes back and tries to make nice.
   
4. It doesn’t mean she has betrayed any kind of sisterhood. OK, let’s get real clear on this one. Rihanna did not sign up to be any kind of spokesmodel for dating violence. The fact that we even know it was Rihanna is due to her name, and then her photo, being leaked and exploited. Rihanna is a young woman in a really hard situation, trying to figure it out the best she can. She owes us nothing. Her decisions are hers to make, and none of us know what we would do in her shoes – even if we have been through similar things, we haven’t been through her actual life. If we start judging her or blaming her for being a bad role model, the sisterhood has failed her, not the other way around. Got it?
5. It doesn’t mean that if he hurts her again, she deserves it. See number 1 – she is likely in a psychological state that’s hard to understand from the outside. There may seem to her to be a million reasons for her to take him back. Not one of them means that she deserves to be hurt again. No one deserves to be beaten or abused. Ever. By anyone. Period.

Dear Michigan 2L,

You don’t know me. Though I’ve spent a little time in Ann Arbor, I don’t know any current law students there.

But I read your letter today, and I can’t stop thinking about you. About the violence that was done to you – that is, the profound and numerous ways you were violated by that professor and by the police. About how hard it must be to speak out in the midst of all of this pain, risking your anonymity and knowing that every asshole on the internet is right there waiting to violate you some more. About how grateful I am for your survival, and for your bravery and selflessness in going to the police in the hopes of preventing Eliav from attacking another woman, even though you knew full well what you risked in going to the police.

I wish I knew you, so I could make you some tea, and wrap you in a warm blanket, and sit with you as you tried to make sense of what you now know firsthand about the worst humans are capable of.

I also wish I knew you so I could tell you this, a hundred times a day: It wasn’t your fault. It wasn’t your fault. It wasn’t your fault.

No part of it was your fault. It’s not your fault that sex work is illegal. It’s not your fault that law school is prohibitively expensive, and that good jobs are harder and harder to find, and that women make 70 cents to every man’s dollar. It’s not your fault that capitalist greed pushed housing and credit beyond your reach. It’s not your fault that you decided to sell your sexual services to survive, even though it sounds like you really didn’t want to.

This violence wouldn’t be your fault even if you had sold your sexual services willingly or enthusiastically. It wouldn’t be your fault if you did have STDs. It wouldn’t be your fault if your “lifetime number” was over 20, or over 200, or over 2000. It wouldn’t be your fault if you were still an aetheist, or if you hated the gym, or if you were an antisocial loner, or if you loved to party and were known as a wild child.

NONE of this is your fault. There is NOTHING you could have done to deserve this.

Please believe that. Really. And I’ll be in Ann Arbor around New Years’ if you want to get that tea.

easy

I really appreciate Stacey May Fowler’s post from yesterday. It gives me pause, though, and a push into excavating my own truth. When I dig through each layer of my past twelve years of slut-identified existence, I can’t pretend that I am only sifting smoothly to find shiny pro-sex artifacts constructed from my own autonomous decisions about who, when, and how. My tools get bent and my work difficult when I hit upon that version of myself that actually was almost unconditionally “up for it.”