[CW: sexual assault, verbal abuse, abusive relationship, ideological detransition/conversion practices]
Almost a year ago, I turned thirty-six and realized that my relationship with Devorah had began with her sexually assaulting me. This happened when I had just turned thirty and technically she was thirty-five but she would turn thirty-six a few months later and I generally thought of her as being six years older than me. In my mind, thirty-six came to be the the age when I would be as old as she was when she made a move on me and initiated our relationship.
I had just arrived at her condo a few days before, after driving thousands of miles from the Midwest to Oakland, California. I’d spent the last few years working on organic farms in the Illinois and Wisconsin and had gotten an internship to work at a small farm in north central California, about an hour south of Redding. My internship started in mid February. Devorah invited me to stay at her place for a few weeks before it started and I accepted her offer. I packed up my car and started driving west a few days after my thirtieth birthday and arrived in California about five days later.
I’d never lived on the West Coast before and Devorah was the only person I knew out there. The Bay Area seemed like another world. It took me a while to get used to all the different kinds of plants growing in people’s yards, everything from palm trees to cacti to fruit trees and the biggest rosemary bushes I’d ever seen. Being so far away from what was familiar and exploring a new part of the country was both exciting and overwhelming. I’d wanted to check out the West Coast since I was a teenager and now I was finally doing it.
I’d known Devorah for about three years at that point but, because of the distance between us, I had only hung out with her a couple of times before that. She was the first detransitioned woman I’d ever met. We met online and started out by emailing with each other and later talked on the phone. The first time I ever met her in person was at the 2014 Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival where we presented a workshop on detransitioning, “reconciling with being female” and converting to anti-trans radical feminism. We presented our workshop again at the last Michfest in 2015. Those were the only times I’d interacted with her in person before staying with her in Oakland.
I considered her one of my closest friends at the time. We’d have long and intense conversations about detransitioning, working through our past trauma, lesbian feminist culture, radical feminism, books we’d both read and just sharing about the events of our daily lives. I’d tell her about the farms I worked on, what I was learning, the food I helped grow and the livestock I cared for. She’d tell me about her own job working for a lawyer that paid well and gave her financial security that she cherished but was also frustrating and soul-sucking.
One of things we bounded over was that both our mothers had died when we were in our early twenties, mine from suicide and hers from cancer. Both of us had been deeply impacted by our mothers’ deaths and we both believed that our relationship with our mothers had been a factor pushing us toward transitioning. I thought I’d transitioned to avoid becoming like my mom and Devorah reinforced that belief because she believed that all transmasculinity and desire to medically transition was rooted in trauma and internalized misogyny. Part of why I turned to radical feminism and sought out connections with older lesbian feminists was to try to heal from my mother’s death and I wouldn’t be surprised if Devorah was driven to radical feminism for similar reasons.
I’d developed a crush on Devorah but when I’d seen her at the last Michfest, I found out she had a girlfriend. They camped together and were clearly a couple, so I never thought to pursue my feelings for her. Devorah was still dating this woman when I came out to stay with her. Her girlfriend lived all the way on the East Coast but they were in regular communication and her girlfriend had come out to visit Devorah in Oakland at least once. So I had no expectations of anything happening with Devorah when I traveled out to stay with her. I figured I’d stay with her before my internship, explore the East Bay and then drop by for occasional visits after my internship started.
The night I arrived she took me out to dinner at a fancy Mexican restaurant to celebrate my birthday. Later she would tell me that the way I scarfed down my carnitas tacos like a hungry creature was one of the first moments she realized she was attracted to me.
A few nights later we were sitting on her couch in her living room talking. I can’t recall how the conversation started but I know I ended up talking about some especially intense past traumatic event. I can’t remember which one, though I know it had to be one of a handful of events that happened to me, one of the worst ones, one of the ones that’s the hardest to talk about, that I usually only talk about with people I really trust. I know I ended up feeling dissociated, very emotionally worked up, and I started crying. Devorah was holding me and talking to me, trying to comfort me. At one point she said something about being worried about getting in trouble and I said I think I know what you mean. And then she kissed me, she starting making out with me. I’d felt attracted to her while I was staying with her but I wasn’t expecting anything to come of it since I knew she had a girlfriend. I was surprised but I kissed her back.
I don’t really remember what happened after that but I think either later that night or the next day, Devorah said she was worried about kissing me, citing our age difference. I had just turned thirty, just barely made the threshold of being old enough for her to date according to what she said were her principles. Still, she was five, almost six years older than me. I assured her it was ok.
Now I think she wanted me to tell her it was alright and she realized she had kissed me when I was in psychological state where I really couldn’t give consent but she made the issue about age instead of calling attention to the fact that I’d been triggered and dissociated when she made a move on me. Because if she’d drawn attention to that, she’d have called attention to how she’d taken advantage of me when I was in a vulnerable psychological state. And she wanted sexual access to me. So she engineered a conversation where she expressed concern about our age difference while eliding other more relevant power differences and secured my “consent” to keep going with our relationship. But she said something during one of our early conversations, asking me about what if one day I turned the same age as she was now and looked back on what happened and freaked out. At the time I assured her that wouldn’t happen. I actually thought she was overly concerned about me, which was probably her intention.
Years later, on my thirty-sixth birthday I found myself dissociating and remembering that night where we made out on her couch, thinking about how our relationship started with her assaulting me and our conversation years before. By that time I’d already figured out that she’d abused me during our relationship and cut off contact with her. I’d come out as trans again, left radical feminism, left the whole detransitioned radical feminist community I’d helped create with Devorah and was living on the other side of the country with my current partner. Even while the world around me started feeling unreal and I felt so swallowed up in intense emotions that I couldn’t move, it was still hard to believe that what she did to me was as bad as it seemed, that I wasn’t making things up or exaggerating. But I think she knew this could happen. She knew one day I might figure out what she did to me, so she did what she could to prevent it. Which means she knew what she was doing at the time. Somewhere inside of her, she knew she was violating me and then manipulated me so she could keep abusing me. She used the trust she’d built up with me over the years to take advantage of me sexually.
I was thousands of miles from anyone else I knew, I thought of her as one of my best friends and I’d talked with her about parts of my life that I trusted very few people with. I thought I was helping her create a community where assigned female trans people (who at the time I saw as “women” and “lesbians”) could heal from trauma and living in a patriarchal society. At the time I was proud of the work we’d done together like the workshops we’d presented at Michfest and the zine Devorah had put together for the last Michfest that contained writing from both of us and other detransitioned radical feminists. She’d encouraged my writing, told me it was important, that it was really helping people. I thought she’d helped me work through me own trauma, that she was helping me heal. I thought she had her life together and that she was someone who cared about other people and wanted to help them.
When she assaulted me, when she started treating me badly after we started dating, when she started saying cruel things to me that left me feeling gutted, I didn’t want to give up the person I thought she was. It was too much to consider that she’d deceived me about who she was all those years when I’d trusted her with my trauma and intimate details about my life. I couldn’t bare to see the reality of the situation I was in, even while I tried to navigate it. She started saying things that hurt me even before I left to start my internship. She pressured me to have sex with her to prove that I desired her.
She broke up with her girlfriend within days of making out with me, which should’ve been a huge red flag but at the time I was flattered that she was so attracted to me. She compared me favorably to her very recent ex-girlfriend, took me out to fancy restaurants, showed me around Oakland and Berkeley, took me to many used bookstores since we both loved to read. And then other times she’d say things that wounded me so deeply I felt like dying.
Parts of me knew something was off and sometimes I did things that looking back seem like attempts to sabotage the relationship or escape but at the time I thought I was being crazy and fucked up and I tried to get those parts of myself under control. I don’t like many of the ways I acted or reacted during my relationship with Devorah but I learned from reading about and talking with other people who’ve been in abusive relationships that how I acted isn’t unusual. I was responding to how she was trying to control and abuse me and I don’t behave in the same way since I ended that relationship. Even so, that’s still not how I want to act and I still feel bad about times when I yelled or acted out. It’s still hard to talk about.
It’s intense remembering that time in my life, when I was just arriving in Oakland and realizing now that I had no idea what kind of person I was going to be staying with or what was going to happen. The person I thought of as my friend didn’t actually exist, that was a persona created to charm and gain my trust. Who I actually ended up living with was someone who assaulted me the first chance she got. It took me years to be able to understand and accept that what happened was assault and it’s still hard to call it that. It took years to realize that the “support” she gave me as a “friend” was actually manipulation and insidious psychological abuse. She wasn’t helping me heal, she was convincing me that I needed to stop being trans and turn to radical feminism to heal from my trauma and live authentically. She was doing conversion practices on me, “peer support” style. That lead to so much psychological pain and damage that I’m still recovering from.
She betrayed me so deeply. I feel like I’ve only just begun to heal from the years I knew her. It’s hard to talk about, hard to put into words. How do I even name what happened? It feels like a giant wound eating up my whole reality. And anger, deep vibrant anger, finally breaking free. I just want to get this pain out of me. I want to be loyal to myself after turning against myself for so long. She took so much from me and now I’m taking myself back and growing past her wounds.