Know my name: Similarities between coming out as transgender and as a victim of assault
Content warning: This article discusses themes of transphobia and sexual assault.
Today I finished reading Know my name, by Chanel Miller. One thing that struck me in the Afterword of the book is that the way she talks about coming forward as a rape victim has a lot to do with the experience of coming out as transgender.
One sentence in particular ignited the parallel in my head with what I know of the trans experience.
I wondered if there was a way to reveal my first name, but not my last.
As she states in this video, “when you are assaulted, an identity is given to you. It threatens to swallow up everything you plan to do, and be. I became Emily Doe. Assault teaches you to shrink. Makes you afraid to exist. Shame, really, can kill you.”
She did not choose the name everyone referred to her as during the trial. She had no say as to what name the media would use to report on the case. An identity was imposed on her, without her ever being able to consent to it, much like when a baby is given a name while just freshly out of the womb. But this identity didn’t only consist of a name. Victim is a role that limits who you are, and what you can say.
When the statement she read to her attacker went viral, some people suggested she wasn’t the one to write it. Because she was a victim, her words were not supposed to have power.
What they were really saying is, victims can’t write. Victims aren’t smart, capable or independent. They need external help to articulate their thoughts, needs and demands. They are too emotional to compose anything coherent. It cannot be the same drunk girl who was found unconscious, the one who the media said uncontrollably sobbed throughout testimony. On a deep level they wanted to take away my writing, which I would not give up as easily.
After her assault, she was given a new name and a new, limiting role in society. She was told by influential voices around her that she didn’t belong in the spotlight, that she had to hide, that she had to be ashamed of herself.
That is what transphobia does to transgender people every day. While still in the closet, we are referred to by names we didn’t choose, and, in order to survive, we have to shrink and hide. We can’t abide by the narrative of what our life is supposed to be like, and we are unable to imagine a future for ourselves within the bounds of what is expected of us. Gender roles are imposed that prevent us from ever living as our true selves. Society reminds us that we are supposed to feel shame and guilt for who we are. It denies us our power, because of how threatening we are to the status quo that maintains men and women in oppressive gender roles, and destroys any attempt to define a life outside of this binary.
Hold up your head when the tears come, when you are mocked, insulted, questioned, threatened, when they tell you you are nothing, when your body is reduced to openings.
Victims are always looked at from a place of scrutiny. They are not believed simply from their words, just like words often aren’t enough for trans people to be recognized as the gender they identify with. Society looks at them both from a place of distrust, and humiliates them on any occasion it gets. Transgender women have been the object of jokes since the beginning of cinema, as exemplified in Netflix’s Disclosure. But above all, the experience of trans people can be described as one of erasure. Only a handful trans of trans people are represented on screen and in the media.
Trans people, just like rape victims, are reduced to their bodies, they are defined by them. Strangers may ask them intrusive, inappropriate questions, just like rape victims’ bodies, outfits and personal history are scrutinized during a trial.
Their past is used to define them, and they are often unable to ever completely detach from their former identity, as a victim or as their pre-transition selves.
In the victim realm, we speak of anonymity like a golden shield. […] But while we discussed the protection it afforded, no one discussed the cost. Never to speak aloud who you are, what you’re thinking, what’s important to you. I was lonely. I longed to know what it was like not to have to spend all my energy concealing the mode heated parts of me. I kept coming back to a line from one of Lao Tzu’s poems: He who stands on tiptoe doesn’t stand firm. I could not spend my life tiptoeing.
She uses the word golden shield, but I would describe it as a golden prison. For a while, hiding protects you from any bad things that might happen to you in the physical world because you are visibly trans. But it doesn’t protect you from what is arguably the most hurtful part, which is the rejection from society and from yourself, through internalized transphobia. Hiding does come at a cost, it costs us our energy, it costs us our voices, it costs us a life that is authentic to who we are.
That golden prison is a step we need to go through, until we find it in ourselves to say aloud who we are. But hiding inside that cage doesn’t mean that we lack any courage.
Whenever I hear a survivor say they wish they’d had the courage to come forward, I instinctively shake my head. It was never about your courage. Fear of retaliation is real. Security is not free. […] I don’t think survivors want to live in hiding. We do because silence means safety. Openness means retaliation. Which means it’s not the telling of the stories that we fear, it’s what people will do when we tell our stories. I remember thinking, If anyone finds out, they’ll think I’m dirty. We suffer from society’s shallow understanding.
But when the circumstances allow us to, we have to step out to set an example, and let other people know that they are not alone, just like we once longed to know, even if it means exposing ourselves to violence and prejudice. Chanel Miller’s mother first tells her to remain anonymous because she wants to protect her. But after a while, she finally gives Chanel her blessing.
She said, If you want to break yourself, to be bigger, to help other women, do that. Pain always gives you more power to go forward. Happiness and comfort don’t. It all depends on who you want to be.
But coming out doesn’t mean we will be exposed only to violence and negative reactions. To the contrary, Chanel Miller’s experience in coming forward has a lot of positive aspects.
For so long, I worried that to be known meant to be undone. The more they see you, the more they can use against you. For years I worried this was true. Upon finishing this book, I knew it was not. […] I often question where men like the defense attorney get their confidence, while I’m the one who struggles with self-loathing. […] I decided that for as long as they’re out there, I will be out there too. I will appear on every television screen across the nation and I will not question my being there. I will be seen, open about everything I am and ever was, because I know that from the very beginning, the defense attorney had it wrong. To be known is to be loved.
When her name and picture were released, her friend texted her “Happy birthday”, “because that’s what it felt like, being born into the world. No more fragmentation, all my pieces aligning. I had put my voice back inside my body. I was inundated with messages of grief, shock, pride, but all I felt was peace.” She describes the merging of her own identity and her victim status as the two identities of a trans person merge together when they come out, the hidden, closeted, true identity, and the mask that we are expected to wear for our own safety. We are finally able to live under one identity, after a period of leading a double life, which can last anywhere from days to years. In coming out, we are born again, because we get a new first name, a thing that is normally only given to you once, on the day you are born. We get a new identity, not only a new gender, but also all the expectations that come along with the word transgender.
The responses to a coming out can be mixed, but they can be described exactly the way Chanel Miller describes the reactions of people learning she was assaulted: some people may face grief, when loved ones consider their newly born selves as having killed and replaced their old selves (which they have not, as they are the same person they have been all along). Other reactions might include shock, and sometimes disbelief, because people believe they have known you all along when you were only really showing a version of yourself tailored to help you survive. Finally, there is pride, the opposite of shame, the feeling that allows you to step out of your hiding place, and other people might feel that on your behalf, because they know that it is the right path for you, and that it took courage for you to get there.
Ultimately, we can see that assault victims and transgender people are both regarded as a monolithic group, taught to hide and be ashamed, reduced only to the flesh of their bodies, deprived from any complexity or depth, unable to choose their own identity. Those two groups are porous, and a disproportionate number of transgender people, especially women, are victims of sexual assault. Our voices are silenced, but we don’t have to hide forever. Speaking up not only helps us be more true to ourselves, but it might also be what sparks change and acceptance in another victim, in another trans person.