From A Survivor of Statutory Rape
“Why don't we hear about how suicidal rape can make girls and women, and the horrifying risk that being bullied and humiliated by men in our safe spaces will result in a spike in girls' and women's suicides?”
As a survivor of childhood statutory rape and as an aging woman just turned 60, one of the most healing experiences I've ever had was simply changing in the women's changing room of my local swimming pool.
There, girls and women of all ages used to be able to congregate and safely share the experience of living in female bodies. It was enormously healing for me, someone living in lifelong crippling shame over what a man did to my body when I was too young to stop him, to be able to be naked among strange women, to exactly the degree I felt comfortable; to see older women's bodies as my body was aging; to help girls see how their bodies would eventually age; to be a part of normalizing the human female body as it actually exists; to feel safe even when exposed; and to remind my subconscious that--while none of us even remotely resembled the sexist images of women's bodies to which we are constantly unavoidably exposed, through media and advertising--we are what women really look like.
This was us. This was womanhood. I was a woman safe in one of the rare public spaces available to me: among women.
Now all that has been taken away from me.
Living in BC, Canada, I don't dare anymore to change in a women's changing room or even use women's public toilets. I might not cross paths with an aggressive man exploiting self-ID to gain access to women's safe spaces, just to sneer at us that the law no longer forces him to respect our boundaries. But if I did, the PTSD from my childhood statutory rapes, along with innumerable near-rapes when I was a young woman, sexual harassment, obscene phone calls, misogynist bullying, sex-based discrimination and oppression, and the omnipresent demeaning and humiliating hate speech against girls and women in all walks of life--every way in which misogynist patriarchy has forced me to live my life in a cage--would be so devastating that it would make me dangerously suicidal. I could quite possibly lose my life.
So I have lost one of the greatest healing experiences an abused woman can have.
And I now live on a urinary leash, unable to venture too far from home for too many hours in case I need to use the toilet.
We hear so much about how suicidal these male-privileged men might become if they're not allowed to violate girls' and women's boundaries in our safe spaces. Why don't we hear about how suicidal rape can make girls and women, and the horrifying risk that being bullied and humiliated by men in our safe spaces will result in a spike in girls' and women's suicides?
Letters From the Front is a new series from WoLF curating stories from women about how “gender identity” ideology has impacted them. We’ll share new letters, submitted anonymously, each week. Write in to share your own story!
WoLF does not necessarily endorse the content of Letters.
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