Posted by
Ganymede
Trigger warnings for discussion of rape, sexual harassment, rape culture.
I
feel as though my feminist awakening is very much still ongoing, and
over the past year or so, my eyes have been opened to a lot of pretty
shocking stuff about which I used to be ignorant. The big one is the concept of "rape culture" - the idea that certain commonly-held beliefs and attitudes in our society (
even ones which are seemingly innocent and well-meaning) add up to make rape and sexual harassment easy to get away with. So when I heard that there was
going to be a
Reclaim the Night event held in Cambridge, I was
determined to attend and show my solidarity.
The
question was whether to attend the march itself, or the allies'
solidarity demo. As a symbolic point, Reclaim the Night marches are for self-defined women only, though as someone who was
raised female and is still overwhelmingly read as female, I believe I
would have been welcome to attend. However, in the end, I chose to
attend the demo instead - for the simple reason that I have never
experienced any kind of street harassment, and could not in good faith
march alongside people who had, without feeling I was appropriating
their experiences.
Frequently, as a trans* person, I
come up against difficulties in interpreting my gendered experiences. I
was "raised female", but I often feel as though I haven't had "a woman's
experience" - I've ignored a lot of the messages society gives about how women should behave, and as such I can't relate to a lot of the supposedly "universal" aspects of life as a woman. The more I
hear about others' experiences of street harassment, the more I start
to feel like I'm the only female-assigned person I know who
hasn't
experienced it.
And this is horrible, and it's
shocking, and above all it's
not right. But how have I managed to
escape it? What's more, how have I managed to go a lifetime without even
internalising the
fear of harassment or gendered violence which is
central to so many women's experience of rape culture - which is fed by
every well-meaning piece of advice to restrict how you dress, how much
you drink, where you go and with whom?
Is it because I,
identifying as male, have subconsciously never thought of this advice
as applying to me, therefore have behaved with the ill-founded belief that
"it won't happen to me" (or that, if it did, I would be able
to single-handedly fend off a would-be attacker)?
Or is it because female gender conditioning has worked on me at a more insidious level?
I
was never entirely unaware of the perils of being female in public.
In fact, since it thoroughly freaked me out to be thought of as female, I
was
more than usually aware of them. More specifically, ever since
puberty, I was terrified of male-identified people coming on to me. I
just wouldn't have known how to handle it. So I cut my hair short
(badly), I wore baggy clothes to hide my breasts, I chose glasses with
thick fuck-off-don't-look-at-me frames. In brief, I deliberately worked
to make myself look "ugly". Because god only knew what would have
happened to me, I thought, if I'd been "pretty".
It
didn't stop there. I was aware that, having a female appearance, any
"friendly" or "innocent" conversation I got into with a male-identified
stranger might be taken as a sign of... interest. I've taken a lot of
intercontinental night buses, and I've always been wary of the
chatty-looking guy taking the seat next to me. It's a long journey,
sure, and he might legitimately just want to pass the time with a bit of
conversation. But hey, it's much safer just to plug yourself in to your
headphones and avoid all eye contact, isn't it?
I like
my headphones. I wear them when I'm out walking, which means that even
if someone
does verbally harass me (or, of course, try to interact
with me on any more benign level), I won't hear it.
Dress
dowdy. Avoid eye contact. Don't talk to strangers. In summary, don't
"lead them on". All typical bits of rape-prevention "advice" that I've
followed to the letter ever since I grew breasts. All symptomatic of
behaviour restricted by fear, the fear of what might happen if you don't
hide how you look and who you are.
Maybe I've got away
with avoiding gendered harassment and violence because my short hair and featureless
clothes make my gender hard to read. Or maybe, if I
am read as female,
it's as such an unusual (i.e. unpredictable, i.e.
dangerous) variant
on the theme that nobody dares try it. I went through a brief student
phase of going out clubbing, in my own slightly off-centre version of
"sexy girly clothes", but still with badly-cropped hair, and tending
more towards unashamedly uncool flailing than dirty dancing. Not once
was I sleazed upon.
Or maybe, the rape-prevention
"advice" "works". Well, whoopee. I don't think it's a fair exchange:
letting fear impact upon your wardrobe, your actions, your whole
personality, just in the uncertain hope of retaining your physical
safety. And that's said as someone who was never big on femininity in
the first place.
Or, y'know what? Maybe it
doesn't work. Maybe it's just sheer blind happy coincidence that I've survived in a female-coded body for this long. After all, there are plenty of masculine-presenting female-assigned people who
do experience harassment of all kinds. And that's before we even get on to the fact that the overwhelming majority of rapes are
not committed by strangers in dark alleys (
a 2005 Home Office study estimated that only 28% of reported rapes in the UK were "stranger rapes").
And the most insidious thing about the rape prevention "advice" is that if it
"works" at all, it's only on the principle that you don't have to outrun
the bear, you just have to outrun your friend. Me going around dressing
as gender-ambiguously and behaving as introvertedly as I can isn't going
to prevent rapes; if it has any effect at all, it's just going to mean
that the would-be rapist goes for someone
else. Someone dressed
more... "provocatively". Someone whom people will be more likely to
blame for
the incident, rather than support and encourage to report it. Because
everyone knows what you "should" do to avoid being raped. And that
includes the perpetrators.
Rape-prevention "advice" isn't useful information for women. It's a handbook for rapists.
And
that's why I demonstrated in solidarity with the Reclaim the Night
march on Monday. By some stroke of good fortune, I don't feel that the night is
mine to reclaim. But I will defend every woman's right to dress, and
behave, and live as she chooses, free from fear. Rape is never going to be stopped by restricting women's freedoms; it can only be stopped by our culture sending out the message that rapists
will not get away with it, no matter who they pick on, whether it's someone who was "following the advice" or not. I demonstrate to say I want to be part of creating that culture. I demonstrate to say that nobody, of any gender, should have their lives twisted and restricted by the threat of sexual violence. I'm angry enough at the way that happened to
me, and I haven't even had "a woman's experience".
