Content warning: this post is going to contain graphic descriptions of male on female sexual violence. It also is going to contain the use of sex-based pronouns and the language of male/female. If either of those triggers you, this essay is not advisable reading.

The recent news that twitter has updated their terms of service to include “misgendering or deadnaming of transgender individuals” as a perma-bannable offense is horrifying to me on a dystopian level — specifically, the dystopia for female people we live in. Sex based pronouns are not hate speech. Twitter making the declaration that sex-based pronouns are “…tropes, or other content that intends to dehumanise, degrade, or reinforce negative or harmful stereotypes about a protect category.” is a pretty serious blow against being able to name male violence when it comes from trans people who were assigned male at birth, who I will refer to as male trans people.

This is the reality: if I wanted to go on twitter and tell the story of how a male trans person who I trusted pulled my underwear down when I was sleeping and began penetrating me vaginally without using a condom, ignored my frightened efforts to pull away when awoken, and then ejaculated viable sperm into me without my consent resulting in an unwanted pregnancy and subsequent miscarriage, I would need to call this person “she”.

I would have to say “she” ejaculated in me as I lay there, frozen. I would have to say “she” listened in silence on the phone when I called “her” up hysterical and bleeding. I would have to say “she” told me that “she’d” done this before to another intimate partner and thought “she” was over it. I’d have to say “sleep sex” (porn in which sleeping/passed out women are raped) was one of “her” favorite porn categories. I’d have to say “she” told me “she” thought “her subconscious might be a rapist” from the “toxic masculinity” “she” grew up in.

This is bullshit. I was not violated by a female lover with a turkey baster. A male person prioritized HIS semen-producing male orgasm over my bodily autonomy, a male person decided HIS sexual gratification was more important than my right not to be raped. This is nothing new. Female people experience this all the time. I have no idea how many female people are experiencing that right now as I type it, or later, as you read this.

I share this example not because I want “I’m so sorries”. I’m not sorry. I’m fucking angry. The realization that this incident between us was so undeniably a male on female interaction, that raping your female partner with your penis causing impregnation is simply something one female person can not do to another, was vital in my deprogramming from my radical queer conditioning. It sounds so obvious to anyone who hasn’t been indoctrinated into queer/trans ideology, but within that framework, to name and understand violence from trans male people as male violence is one of the greatest taboos. So I know this game: to be denied the language to name my experience and my rapist doesn’t come with surprise any more, just a dull rage.

Recently I found out in October, Dana McCallum, a high-ranking twitter engineer, plead guilty to the rape of his wife. This doesn’t surprise me, but his ex-wife’s response letter to the controversy around it did. You can read it here.

In this letter, I clearly see the rhetoric of male-created, male-led, & male-benefitting trans & queer activism that controlled my life for so long and is controlling many other female people right now.

“My case is not about the genitals of my wife. Her chromosomal structure and genital configuration and that she was assigned male at birth have got NOTHING TO DO with the sexual violation of my body. Why does it matter if she used her penis or even has one? WHO CARES?? You want so badly to create the “all men/penises are evil” platform, that you can’t see the anguish your comments cause me, the victim, and other victims of sexual abuse. The CRIME here was not her gender configuration. What if she had XX chromosomes or a vagina? What if she had used a carrot? A bamboo plant? A fist, a dildo, or ANY OTHER BODY PART OR OBJECT? The CRIME was the sexual violation of my body by someone I loved, who was under the influence of alcohol. THAT should be the focus of this conversation, not the instrument used.”

It hurts to read this. At the end of the essay, she wonders in anguish why her story has been completely ignored by LGBTQ people and feminists, why there is silence about her victimization. She rails against “penis-hating” feminism (and the angry, crazy feminists who perpetuate it) and the naming of male violence even while living with the traumatic aftershocks of it. She acknowledges that she’s been in an abusive relationship with a male person before and immediately sets about distinguishing the man who identifies as a man as wholly worse, because he wasn’t even drunk when he abused her, unlike Dana, as if a few drinks is the difference between an unforgivable male rapist and a sympathetic one. To watch this woman plead for justice and acknowledgement from a community which has been specifically set up to silence people abused and raped by male trans people is devastating.

Am I supposed to believe this rapist, this high-ranking engineer, had nothing to do with this policy change before being let go a few days after the guilty plea? Maybe so. Maybe this is an incredible leap of logic made by a crazy traumatized woman. Very well then, am I supposed to believe that the many trans women rubbing elbows in the tech industry didn’t come together for this policy change? Many of the same trans women who have been observed freely associate with their predatory friends or are have been accused of themselves? Am I supposed to pretend like this has nothing to do with shutting up women who are talking both specifically about trans male violence, that is rapes and murders committed by trans women, or more generally about the disturbing behavior and misconduct of trans male people?

I am not denying that the use of sex-based language & pronouns specifically for trans male rapists, abusers, & murders makes trans people as a whole uncomfortable. This is because it goes against trans/queer ideological rules and norms. If you have tried to talk about trans male violence as I have, you are familiar with the indignant responses. “Don’t misgender someone just because they’re shitty/imperfect/messed up!” Shitty (or fill in the blank) in this case meaning not someone who said something misogynistic online but someone who killed or raped someone (or multiple people). I remember when I first started blogging openly about this someone who had previously been a friendly acquaintance sending me message after message about how betrayed they felt because I had “misgendered my rapist.”

I object strenuously to the the rallying cry of “Pronouns are not optional, they are a human right!” Pronouns are an accommodation for dysphoria. It is not reasonable to value accommodating a rapist, abuser, or murderer’s dysphoria over naming the problem of male violence. Using male pronouns are not a punishment, it is not dehumanizing, it is to clarify. Sex based oppression matters, gendered socialization matters, male violence matters. A movement in which this has ceased to be true is not a feminist movement at all.

Dana MacCallum was a self-identified feminist, advocate for survivors of sexual assault, and LGBTQ+ advocate. That didn’t stop him from raping his wife. The rapist I talk about in this post was a anarcho-feminist, anti-capitalist, smash the patriarchy, “tenderqueer”-identified male. It didn’t stop him from raping me, raping the woman he raped before me, and most likely continue to rape more of his female partners in their sleep and cross a multitude of other sexual boundaries with them.

I remained partnered and friends with this rapist long after that incident, through more rapes, many ignored big nos & little nos, many frozen moments, broken promises, and wasted efforts to love him better. That last sentence, I almost typed love “her” better. That neural pathway in my brain still exists. At that time, I had staked my whole (liberal) feminist consciousness in the belief that trans women were women, that male people were female, and that if I wavered from professing that belief outwardly and also inside my own mind, I was directly contributing to hate crimes against the most vulnerable population on earth.

After I (finally) broke up with my rapist, he kept claiming to me that he wanted, he NEEDED to be accountable. I started identifying as gender critical just a few weeks after this crucial final sever. I wrote him a loving, compassionate email begging him to stop calling himself a lesbian, to out himself as a rapist, and, most of all, to stop seeing the female person he was seeing because he is a danger. I told him I was no longer able to think of him as a woman and explained why.

After years of professing extreme grief for repeatedly sexually violating me, my heartfelt plea to be accountable and set things as right as I felt they could be was too much. He went ballistic. What right, he sent, obviously in a rage, do you have to tell me I can’t be a woman? You can’t tell me I’m not a woman. You can’t tell me what I am.

He called me a TERF, but it was too late.

I sent him back the brutal truth. A woman can’t get her victim pregnant by raping her. I told him that nothing he ever does will change that he is male. No surgical adjustment to his genitals will change the fact that he used them to rape. No ideological shield will ultimately protect him from the truth. You cannot cut your maleness off. All you can do is try to control what the people around you say and think about it and try to obscure your maleness with medical procedures.

I want to be clear: my rapist was not especially male because of the nature of the rape he committed. The fact of his maleness is not special or exceptional, it simply is. This rape and its outcome were one among many of that time in my life. The uniqueness was simply the pregnancy and miscarriage, as he was not on hormones at the time. One deflection I often encountered when talking about this was “Women rape other women.” Of course women rape and abuse other women, no matter how taboo the subject. That has never been something I would argue against. But this was not that. The fact that it took such an undeniable instance of the presence and intersection of our biological sex to open the intellectual door for me is an example of how deep the denial of patriarchy & sex-based oppression is within trans activism. To have been in my mid-twenties and grappling with the reality that only male people can get female people pregnant during a rape is an example of how strongly this ideology can control your thoughts and viewpoint.

I don’t know what this new twitter terms of service change will come to and how intensely people using sex-based pronouns will be censored. This might be a turning point in our ability to use social media effectively as radical, lesbian, and/or gender critical feminists. But even if I can’t tweet about it — I will never, ever stop naming what happened to me and what is happening to other female people in insular trans/queer social circles.