Woven

I was sexually abused between the ages of five and eleven. It was not a one-time event. It was repeated, sustained, and deeply embedded in the structures that were supposed to care for me: neighbors and family. The people who hurt me weren’t strangers in alleyways. They were people who held me, fed me, smiled at me in front of others. They were trusted, beloved. That betrayal shaped how I came to understand not just danger, but myself.

I’ve spent much of my life being told, explicitly and implicitly, that I should feel ashamed. That the shame belonged to me, not to the people who harmed me. And later, as I began to understand myself as que*r and tr*ns, the shame shapeshifted. I was told that maybe I was only this way because of what happened. That my gender and sexuality were side effects of trauma. That I’d be “normal” if none of the abuse had happened.

This is another form of violence. It denies the complexity of identity, the agency of self-knowledge, and the sacred resilience of que*r becoming and belonging. It implies that the “real me” is something more palatable, more heterosexual, more binary, if only I hadn’t been hurt.

My identity as a survivor and my identity as a que*r, tr*ns person are deeply connected, but not in the way people assume. They are not cause and effect. They are parallel truths that formed in the same body, in the same silence, in the same longing to be free.

Being abused taught me that my body could be taken from me. Coming out taught me that I could take it back.

Being abused taught me that I should be quiet. Becoming que*r taught me how to scream, sing, and speak without permission.

Being abused taught me not to trust what I felt. Transitioning taught me to trust myself anyway.

There is grief in all of this. There are things I will never get back. A childhood uninterrupted. A body that was only mine. An unburdened entry into sexuality. And there is also power: not the shiny kind, but the stubborn, quiet power of having survived what was meant to destroy me and of building an identity that was never supposed to exist.

Shame was something done to me. Reclamation is something I do.

It is in how I know myself. How I live in community, where chosen family knows the cost of survival and honors it. Where joy is not lighthearted but hard-won. Where boundaries are sacred, bodies are holy, and nothing is taken for granted.

There is no going back. Only going deeper into who I’ve always been.