Okay, I wasn’t going to do this, but it kept eating at me (and other people around me). So. Let it be known that I am a South African Bisexual cis female.
“Corrective rape was a term coined by South African lesbians! Thus this is a lesbian-only term!” is something that’s getting thrown around a lot by the Discourse Brigade.
The first time I saw this I burst into laughter. I mean, I am the victim of corrective rape and never have I ever been told by any of my lesbian sisters to not use this term. It never occurred to anyone I know that I would not be able to use this term, or that this is not what my sexual assault was.
It was yet another example of how silly people could be. Were people who had never spoken to a single LGBT+ South African really going to be this ignorant?
I never took it seriously for a second because, really? Surely nobody actually thought that South African Lesbians were gonna expect everyone to conform to some nebulously specific list of things to qualify to use the term “corrective rape”.
But hey, as an African you get used to people talking over you and thinking you ride to school on a lion. Whatever, you laugh and you move on.
But I couldn’t move on.
Because people kept telling other people that they were, I don’t know, spitting on people’s graves, for using this term “incorrectly”.
So let me tell you this right now: If your assault happened because you do not conform precisely to your society/culture’s cisheteronormative* values, congratulations! You get to use the term corrective rape. Compliments of your South African brethren.
End. Of. Fucking. Discussion.
Now- let me tell you why I couldn’t move on.
Because the assholes that are policing the use of this term are spitting on the graves of every single one of my fucking ancestors.
Allow me to explain.
South Africa is a really unique place. Did you know we have eleven (11) official languages? That’s not including the minority ethnic groups that call my country home.
Now, when you realise that you have nine (9) traditionally black South African cultures, two (2) white cultures, the Chinese people, the Indian people, Other Africans… You may begin to figure out we’re really fucking diverse.
And we’re pretty proud of that diversity. Post Apartheid.
Apartheid was a system built- at its core- on ‘us’ vs ‘them’. It wasn’t inclusive. It separated people. It put some people in positions of power over others. It redefined the term ‘gatekeeping’ (in my opinion).
It was really fucking nasty.
It killed a lot of people.
And then Nelson Mandela came along. You know the story- he was imprisoned and instead of hating everyone he taught love and inclusion (after Winnie Mandela got him freed whilst running the Struggle- go read up on her. She’s a true feminist icon).
He is the father of our nation. And he taught us that hatred and bigotry and exclusion are never ever the way to go.
Afrikaans is still an official language. Part of the old Afrikaans anthem is still included in our official anthem.
We are taught that this is our country’s way forward.
We’re the Rainbow Nation!
LGBT+ people were granted every single right American LGBT+ people are still fighting for in our constitution in 1994.
But unfortunately, this lead to a huge homophobic backlash.
Thus- corrective rapes started happening all across the country.
But! The assholes who rape people? They don’t ask whether you’re lesbian or gay. They don’t check your credentials.
They can rape the girl who’s a little too ‘butch’ for their tastes, or the boy who might not play football (soccer for the Americans).
They do not care if you are a card carrying member of the LGBT+! They care only for the fact that you don’t look masculine/feminine enough. That you might have been staring at a boy/girl. That you said no earlier. Maybe you have a LGBT+ friend, so obviously you’re the same. Or hell, maybe your parents know you’re LGBT+ and they pay someone to rape it out of you. Maybe your arranged husband does it on your wedding night.
They do not care how you do not conform to societal standards- only that you do not.
And in South Africa we know this.
We know that no one’s rape is exactly the same as anyone else’s. Because it could never be exactly the same.
So yeah, here a completely straight white girl could use the term “corrective rape” and no one, no one, would bat an eyelash. Because she was correctively raped.
Because we know that united we stand, but divided we fall. And we have fallen so very very far in our past.
So no.
You do not get to fucking gatekeep this term which my brothers and sisters and I in this struggle have shed our blood and tears in.
You do not get to exclude people in our name.
Not when we freely gave this term to the world to use as and if needed.
Kindly respect us and our culture enough to not spit directly into our and our forefathers faces.
*I’m so sorry Trans Tumblr. I couldn’t find another word that really worked here.
** Yes, I have spoken to my fellow LGBT+ brethren. This is a PSA from the majority of us. If only because I cannot speak for all South Africans. Some of us are assholes too.
*** I know the UN wants to rename it “homophobic rape” but we will never us this term since it throws our Trans/NB/intersex/Bi/Ace/Aro/Agender/Questioning/Ally siblings under the bus. It frankly goes against what we invented it for. You, however, are welcome to coin the term yourselves.
When I was first coming out as trans, I had a lot of internalized transmisogyny. I knew how negative society’s images of trans women were and I was convinced that I was somehow different. I was terrified of being seen as a man in a dress, so I just never wore dresses. In that respect it was rather convenient that I’m butch. I was not going to be – as another trans woman put it to me – “a masturbating freak in panties.” I internalized a list of norms and behaviors that I had to avoid in order to be taken seriously and seen as a real woman. This list of “don’t"s is more or less the autogynophilia diagnostic citeria.
Years later, after I had begun writing on transmisogyny I still had a lot of these messages internalized. I had a wake up moment when I was traveling and visiting a girlfriend. Her roommate came home after a difficult day and mentioned that she had gone clothes shopping to cheer herself up, and quickly showed off her new underwear and dresses, in particular one slinky sequined number. There was much oohing and aahing and her mood significantly improved.
About an hour later she came back out of her room and said that she was having a hard time doing her work for the evening because she was still depressed. My girlfriend sat her down and gave her some sage advice. "Just put you nice new dress on, as well as your fancy new underwear. It will make you feel sexy and you’ll feel better.” "Then what, just work while wearing it?“ “Yeah.”
Warnings had been popping into head the whole time but now alarm bells were going off. I so desperately wanted to warn them “Don’t do that! You’re directly admitting a connection between feminine clothing and sexual arousal and using that almost as if you’re self medicating! No one will take you seriously as a real woman, you’ll just be seen as some fetishist!” But I didn’t say that of course. Not only because it would have been very rude, but because they were cis women. No one is going to take away their womanhood for feeling sexy about lingerie and slinky dresses. This seems to be something cis women, particularly femmes, do all the time.
The bottom line is that the behavior classified as autogynophilia is normal female behavior. Charles Moser did a small study where he tried applying the criteria for it to cis women and found that 93% of cis women qualify as autogynophiles. So why are trans women subjected to this standard and often stigmatized, punished, or denied access to healthcare if they fit this criteria? And why is there no similar criteria for trans men?
It seems to me this is primarily about exerting the control doctors have over trans people to maintain male control over the sexuality of women. It encourages us to be sexually available to men and discourages us from having a sense of sexuality focused in ourselves or in other women. It sets up a pass/fail system so we are beholden to gatekeepers and must prove that we are the good kind of trans woman and not the bad kind. And it pits us against each other as enforcers of this system and keeps us divide so we cannot challenge the psychologists who create the rules of who can and cannot access transition. It’s no accident that one of the main proponents of using autogynophelia as a diagnosis was caught having sex with his patients, not informing them he was using their experiences in his research, and manipulating their testimony by granting/denying medical care based on whether or not they said they fit his model.
My grandpa lives in clarksdale, Mississippi and HATES white people with a passion. I grew up listening to stories like this. His cousins had to flee to Chicago in the 60s for trying to fight a group of white landowners who wanted to hang them for trying to leave the land they worked on.
Slavery turned into “share cropping” if you kept your slaves ignorant and isolated then they didn’t know they had been freed. This went on well into the 60’s the fucking 60’s these people are still alive dealing with this type of shit in the deep south.
My friend said to “fact check” this and I’m like…black ppl are literally saying they were kept as slaves what is there to fact check. Anyway, sharecropping was still slavery as far as I’m concerned.
Classes on consent are being taught in Kenya and rape in these areas where the classes are taught has decreased by 50%. The classes have also increased bystander intervention as well as female empowerment and positive masculinity.
It’s almost like rape is a choice made by the attacker alone.. That they had the full control all along, and that simply teaching them that women are fellow human beings and not objects for their pleasure really alters that choice.
When will the rest of the world catch up
To all those people saying it’s inherent in a man’s nature or we can’t just “teach people to be nice” actually you can, it’s not that hard.
in 10 days ireland is having a referendum to hopefully repeal the 8th amendment, which equates the life of a foetus to that of an adult
abortion is currently 100% illegal in ireland with a penelty of up to 14yrs (rape is 7yrs, if even that) and up to 10 people travel to england to access abortion every single day
if you’re irish, remember go to vote Yes on May 25th. if you’re not irish but have irish friends, remind them to go vote Yes
I recently heard the news that Adam by Ariel Schrag will be getting a movie. I read the book myself about a year and a half ago and I cannot stress enough just how problematic it is.
Adam is a book about a cis boy pretending to be a trans man in order to trick a lesbian into dating him.
Adam goes to New York to stay with his lesbian sister for the summer, and while he’s there he meets trans men who consider themselves lesbians. At a party he meets a lesbian he thinks is pretty and in order to get into a relationship with her he lies and tells her he’s a pre transition trans man. Let’s make a list of some of the highlights from the book, shall we?
At the very beginning of the book his sister and her girlfriend visit home and Adam and his friend spies on them having sex.
Almost all the trans men in the book identify as lesbians, implying that they are still women because they haven’t transitioned yet.
Adam, a cis straight boy, tells a lesbian that he is a trans man to trick her into dating him.
Incidentally Adam is 17 I believe, pretending to be 21. His girlfriend is in the 23 range, I don’t recall exactly.
There are explicit sex scenes, the first of which involved Adam using an ace bandage to hold his erection down and using a strapon to have sex with her.
In the second one he claims to be using a strapon but is, in reality, using his actual penis.
Which is fucking rape.
The book doesn’t try to justify this, it somehow manages to do something worse.
This second scene is one of the last in the book. After he pulls out he lays down next to her and confesses that he’s not trans. She responds “I know.”
She says after they first had sex she started fantasizing about him as a “real guy” (yes quote) and that the image stuck in her mind and she started subconsciously imagining him with a penis.
And it gets worse.
So he goes back to ohio and she sleeps with other girls (because for some reason she decides not to break up with this cis 17 year old who lied about his identity literally raped her) and one night he gets drunk and calls her a bitch and a fucking whore and whatever, and THAT’S apparently the point she thinks that maybe they should break up.
And one day they message eachother to catch up i think maybe he graduated at this point idk but hes planning on visiting his sister in new york and they wanna meet up and
She tells him about her new boyfriend.
Get ready for it
Cis. Man.
So. We have
An underage cishet boy lying about being an adult trans man in order to trick a lesbian into dating him!
A scene in which he actually rapes her!
The lesbian in question becomes attracted to cis men making Adam, essentially, conversion therapy!
Do NOT support Adam (2018)
Ariel Schrag used to sometimes be in my high school for some reason, so I’ve met her in person and let me tell you with just one look at her it becomes obvious that she sees trans men as an advanced form of butch women
Beltainefaerie's Flights of Fancy 