Em Travis, after Gabe Moses

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content note in the linked piece for v explicit sex, violent body imagery, surgery and needles and scars, mentions of illnesses, car-crash analogy mention, non-binary erasure, romonormativity and descriptions of hypothetical transphobia

content note in this poem for sex, violent body imagery, scars, imprisonment imagery to imply systemic cissexism/transphobia

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As a trans person who has sex with trans people, I read this poem and loved a lot of what I read. The concept of challenging preconceptions about body parts and about what kinds of sex trans people will want to engage in, and the reassurance that it’s okay to fumble through and experience a shared discovery of new positive kinds of sex with your partner, is something I know resonates very deeply with many trans people.

I was compelled to write a response poem, to add to and reply to the original, because I felt there was more to say. I wanted to emphasise most strongly that trans people are not a monolith. Some of us have gone through aspects of physical transition; some have not yet; some are unable to; some have no wish to, and never will. Some of us experience constant physical dysphoria relating to our bodies or to parts of our bodies, and some of us never or rarely experience it at all. I wanted to elaborate with more representation of experiences outside of a binary trans narrative, using pronouns other than just he/him and she/her, including neopronouns that some people may not be very familiar with (disclaimer: no pronoun is inherently binary or non-binary).

My response is written with for a more explicitly cis readership than the original, which was very deliberate – firstly, because I wanted to underline the necessity for cis people who have sex with trans people to communicate with them individually about what they want and don’t want, rather than assuming that all trans people have sex in any kind of similar way; and secondly, because one thing that made me uncomfortable about the first piece was the focus on cis people “being okay” with trans people’s bodies, and helping their trans partners “be okay” with their own bodies, without recognising that, as members of an oppressive system, they must also hold some level of accountability for a certain amount of the impetus behind trans people feeling uncomfortable with our bodies in the first place.

(Also: this poem is written in a trans-specific context, but its message is by no means trans-specific. Detailed communication about sex, and explicit consent for specific things within sex, is always important, whether a partner is cis or trans or neither.)

~ Anonymous

*Content note for abuse, victim blaming, denial of experiences*

Abuse is a doctrine, and it is collaborative. An abuser shapes it and teaches it, adjusts the lighting by which their victim sees the world, but that shape is maintained by the people external to a partner dynamic. Their doctrine lays out a perfect victim, tells you that a victim is certain things and an abuser is certain things. It does it all silently, and yet this doctrine holds immense power over a victim. One part of this belief system held onto by victims, abusers and onlookers alike, is that a victim must have passively accepted their abuse, that they themselves never did anything “bad”. But victims are panicked, victims do scream or cry or plead, victims do become jealous and frightened and beg not to be left alone. If someone slapped you whenever you displeased them and one day you hit them back, that would not make you an abuser too. With emotional abuse, though, for some reason, this seems harder to stomach.

An abuser can entirely undermine your self-worth and reconstruct you on their own terms. An abuser can isolate you from friends and family, perhaps blaming them for the problems you’re having – an abuser can look like your saviour when things align just so. An abuser can make you doubt your own judgements, make you hate yourself more than anything, even whilst they slip in kernels of praise amongst it all. Given all of that, given everything more that we all know an abuser can do, is a “bad” reaction from a victim really surprising?

So why does this make someone less of a victim? Why would knowing that an abuser was hurt by the reaction of their victim somehow shift the blame away from the abuser?

A response of “I didn’t abuse them; they abused me” is an uncomfortable situation, something that destabilises the falsely ordered system the abuse doctrine tries to create. Everyone questions facts, analyses behaviour. What can really sting, though, is the fact that this is exactly what most victims go through all the time. Because of the way an abuser can make themself the centre of their victim’s life, make the victim believe anything they say, make the victim hate themself rather than their abuser, the belief that they were the one in the wrong can be one of the hardest things to get free of. An abuser turning around and denying what happened, accusing their victim, is exactly what so many victims are afraid of, and this absurd doctrine of how abuse works makes it all too easy.

Abuse is about power. An abuser exerts power over their victim and enforces a change in the victim’s behaviour, mentality and wellbeing. If being abused makes the victim frightened and therefore the abuser spends a lot of time giving reassurance, that does not invert the dynamic. If the victim becomes jealous because the abuser has made them believe they are worthless, that does not invert the dynamic. If a victim shouts at the abuser because they are constantly shouted at themselves, backed into a corner and afraid, that does not invert the dynamic. It is so tragic that this needs pointing out, but the world likes to harm vulnerable people. If you ever question your victim status, or if anyone you care about ever does, ask yourself as objectively as you can where the balance of power lay, whether any “abusive” behaviours you exhibited would have happened without the stimulus of being abused yourself.

Every relationship is individual, and that means every relationship has its own power balance, not necessarily tied to the privilege each partner has (yes, men can be abused by women, it does happen, and the abuse doctrine makes it really hard for them to say so).

The doctrine is fundamentally wrong. It encourages people to deny experiences and to turn against victims. It creates an impossible template for an abuse victim, an unrealistically phantom-like template for an abuser, and hence allows real instances to be rejected. It encourages the victim’s actions to be examined to find something wrong with the way in which they took their abuse in order to invalidate their experiences, rather than acknowledging that it is not in most people’s natures to respond well to being torn apart emotionally by another person, and that what the abuser receives from a victim is by and large their own fault.

Someone’s experiences of abuse are likely to have shaped their identity, to whatever extent that may be. Denying these experiences is a rejection of identity. The fact that the abuser came away in a bad place too will never be enough to excuse something like that, whatever the fictional rule books says. But doctrine isn’t one single piece of legislation; it’s something formed by public opinion. And the more we discuss this, the more we’re able to engage with this sort of discussion, the more we can dismantle it and enable people’s experiences to be recognised.

– Martha PW

(content note for mentions of sexual violence, rape apology, misogyny)

The Socialist Workers’ Party are rapists and rape apologists, they covered up rape in their ranks and victimised women who came forward about it and decried “creeping feminism”, whatever that is, as an evil sectarian force, they are a writhing nest of misogyny and they are not a friend to women on the left. There was a huge exodus of former members because of the SWP’s complete and utter refusal to be anything other than horrendous misogynist rape apologists. You can read more about that here.

Despite this, they are an omnipresent force at protests in the UK. You will probably see their stalls at demos, you will probably see them handing out their shitty backwards-facing rape apologist newspaper The Socialist Worker, and you will almost certainly see a lot of people holding placards with their name on it. This means protests and demos become a space where women – especially those who have faced sexual violence / abuse / harassment – are not safe or comfortable among the people who are supposed to be on their side. Feeling unsafe at a protest because of the threat of police etc is one thing; feeling as though your allies are throwing you under the bus for the sake of a placard someone handed them is something else entirely.

If you’re at a demo in the upcoming weeks/months/years you can help to deal with this:

• DON’T TAKE SWP PLACARDS/PAPERS/ETC. just don’t take them. just don’t. make your own. take any other placard. whatever. if you really really want to be holding a sign and the only one available to you is a SWP placard, consider bringing paper & tape / a sharpie to the demo with you so you can cover up the SWP logo. but if you can’t do that it is better to have no sign than to have a misogynist organisation’s sign.

• DON’T LET YOUR FRIENDS TAKE THOSE THINGS EITHER. friends don’t let friends support corrupt rape apologists. explain why you’re refusing to tacitly support the SWP by holding their signs and tell everyone else to do the same thing.

• CONTACT THE PEOPLE ORGANISING
  — in advance, email or facebook message the organisers of the demo asking if there will be a SWP presence (even if they say no it is likely the SWP will show up anyway) and asking whether it will be tolerated if so. stress the fact that the presence of the SWP actively alienates women (who are, after all, one of the marginalised groups likely to be most affected by whatever it is you’re protesting about, e.g. tory cuts); stress the fact that women will not show up to the demo, or will show up and feel upset and unsafe and triggered, if the SWP are there. encourage stuff like a post on the facebook event making clear that rape apologist organisations will not be tolerated at the demo.
  — on the day, and if you feel up to it, talk to stewards (demo stewards, not police stewards) about it if you see a SWP stall or a SWP member handing out placards etc, encourage them to ask the SWP to leave (as politely or impolitely as they feel is appropriate).
  — IF THE ORGANISERS IGNORE / DISMISS YOU despite your explanation of why the SWP are an unacceptable presence at protests, or if they are actively affiliated with the SWP, spread that shit on social media, because people who brush off these criticisms should be held accountable for their lack of care for women in their movement.

• MAKE SURE YOU ARE LOOKING OUT FOR WOMEN (whatever your gender) at demos and in other activist spaces where this conflict about the SWP might arise. many many left-wing spaces feel latently hostile and unwelcoming to women already, because they are (like everywhere else) usually male-dominated and issues of sexism and misogyny are brushed aside as women’s problems for women to deal with. this feeling of being pushed out of what should be our movement gets far worse when our complaints about sexual violence in the left are dismissed as ‘divisive’ and ‘sectarian’, especially at protests when emotions are already running high. it’s exhausting to have to defend our right to safety among our ‘comrades’ over and over again. back up your women friends in these arguments, don’t let them face rape apologists alone.

• IN GENERAL – IF YOU’RE A MAN, consider what you can be doing to make your leftist spaces and politics inclusive and welcoming to women; the SWP is only one particularly bad example of an endemic problem. consider a statement or policy of condemnation of the SWP. more broadly, if your group/organisation is predominantly male, ask yourself why that has happened – it’s probably not a coincidence – and how you can fix it. check whether women have ended up doing most of your work, whether that’s activist labour or emotional. pay attention to the language you’re using and whether it erases women’s struggles in favour of a homogenous or outdated idea of ‘class’ or ‘work’. steer clear of calls for “unity” and against “sectarianism” or “division”, which are usually used to shut women up.

Certainly a lot of people holding those placards at demos are ignorant of the crimes of the organisation that made them, and we can only fix that by sharing the knowledge of the SWP’s misogyny as widely as possible and not letting it fade into memory. But many more people know about the ‘scandal’ and continue to accept the alliance and support of these open, unapologetic, dangerous misogynists, whose existence is actively harmful to left-wing women. As long as this problem is not tackled, women will be pushed out of the movement. Organisers have no excuse.