Guest posts are highlights from authors who know more than me. I’m really excited to get some more voices on this website, especially about things I may not be the best person to speak about, such as gender fluidity, trans issues, or very specific areas of kink I haven’t explored. With the current political climate such as it is, I wanted Jackson Eflin to give some of their thoughts on the Kavanaugh hearings and how it affects those beyond the male/female gender binary. Since I’m firmly a cis woman, I’m not the person to talk about this, and having Jackon’s perspective has been very valuable. Jackson tweets here, and they also have a podcast about movies and media. If you’re interested in writing for a guest slot, let’s chat, but for now, let’s get to Jackson’s writing.
Content warning: This article discusses sexual assault, Kavanaugh, and genderqueer erasure.
I’ve been fascinated by liminality for a long time, long before I realized I was genderqueer. Liminal Spaces are not-quite spaces – those between two “real” spaces – doorways, roads, stairwells. The womb is the liminal space between nonexistence and being, the mortician’s table is the liminal space between the chaos of life and the peace of the grave. My body is 5 feet and 10 inches of liminality between the spaces of “Male” and “Female” – I belong to neither, but society has little space for people outside of the binary. This doorway is too narrow, no matter how I turn myself, my toes stick out into a room. In the rooms to the left and right of me, people are talking about sexual assault, and I crouch down under the line of sight as they glare at the people in the other room, because heaven knows I don’t want them to glare at me.
The response to the Kavanaugh hearings and confirmation have resulted in gendered advocacy, specifically, ones that aim to create solidarity and support for women, or to outline and deconstruct male privilege. This has resulted in an ontological framework of women-as-victims and men-as-aggressors. This is an oversimplification, obviously – most people aren’t earnestly defining literally every man as an aggressor and literally every woman as a victim. But, if you looked only at the buzzwords, if you saw only saw the slogans and the placards and the image macros circulating social media, you might think that Big Feminism™ was doing that – it’s how you get the useless “Men are afraid to ask a woman out” rhetoric. Obviously, this ontological framework leaves lots of people out – women who commit sexual assault, men who are victims of sexual assault, and genderqueer people who don’t fit into either space.
Why are genderqueer people pushed to the margins in conversations about sexual assault? There are a lot of reasons. Maybe some of it is the invisibleness of genderqueers – despite recent shift in awareness of trans people, society has a ways to go towards awareness of genderqueer experiences within that narrative. We are relatively easily overlooked. Maybe some of it is that the history of genderqueer marginalization makes us hesitant to speak out – we’ve already been pushed out, and pushing back is hard.
Certainly part of it is that genderqueers are still constructing our own ontologies to try to express our experiences, within and without standard cisheteronormative gender framings. There is pushback against phrasing along the lines of “Women and non-binary people” because of how that phrasing subconsciously frames genderqueers as as “Women-lite.” This framing can erase people’s experiences for a variety of reasons. To be included in movements designed for womens’ solidarity can, for some of us, be at best invalidating, at worst traumatic.
But that the intent of “putting someone in their place” runs all through various aspects of rape culture is vital to understanding how sexual assault, and how we talk about it, establishes and reinscribes gendered hierarchies. Sexual assault has a long history as an act employed to shame conquered soldiers – having nothing to do with attraction, and everything to do with power, and disempowerment. In many parts of European history, sexuality was less understood as a person’s attraction to men, or women, or both, or neither, but was a binary of being the active or receptive participant. While gender and sexuality have grown more nuanced, the gendered idea of the active/receptive dichotomy persists, even subconsciously, in our society. In societal structures where men are active, and women are receptive, if a man is assaulted, he is made womanish, ceases to be a man, or at least, as much of a man. Treating sexual assault as a thing that happens to women unintentionally reinscribes this, and treating genderqueers as part of this system of “Victims as Women” works to misgender people who are actively engaged in defending the validity of their gender – it is an attempt to heal with a poison.
I was assigned male at birth, and am usually read as male, or male enough, because it’s frankly too much work to shave every day and if I’m giving up that fight I might as well give up entirely. I’m also a victim of sexual assault. It was one of those messy, private, personal things that doesn’t get reported, among other things, because queers are taught to keep our sex life a secret. Despite knowing that I’m not a man, I still wear man-ness, was raised man-like, was assaulted when I identified as a man. And so when I see conversation about what mens’ role in all of this is, I ask myself, “Am I man enough that this applies to me, too? Is it arrogant to call myself exempt?” I have a knee jerk resistance to the proclamation of these roles, from being put into a box, and it keeps me from necessary introspection. The question of how we do or do not participate in, reinforce, and suffer from misogyny is one that every genderqueer person has to work through themself, and the tools we need for this are not always easily found in slogan-based activism.
But I think the biggest reason that genderqueerness isn’t being considered in mainstream conversations about gender and sexual assault, is that people are tired. It’s easier to construct a movement around shared womanhood because it’s fast, and simple, and by the gods, people are weary. Gender essentialist hot takes are comfort food for a nation in pain. “I believe women” is easier than “I believe women, genderqueer people, and men.” While I think that “I believe victims” or “I believe survivors” is a better, more useful way to frame the discussion to facilitate healing, doing so distances the conversation from gender, which is extremely part of why these hearings went the way they did, and of the wider conversation. And many people who are talking about this are coming from places of (entirely justified) anger, and it feels uncouth to ask people in pain to please stop what they’re doing worry about our pain too.
The gender binary in politics is simpler. It’s easier to solve an equation if there is only one variable. In multivariable algebra, you need more than one equation or you can’t solve for x. You can’t find a space for everyone if your house only has two rooms. The experience of genderqueer people in structures of sexual assault complicates the construct of “Victim as Woman”, but in so doing it opens up room for more people to receive healing and community support, and make progress towards making a safer world.