I Now Pronounce You Trump and Sexual Trauma
These words have been piling up since Monday, the end of Pride month. Until yesterday, when the words came out like diarrhea and I didn’t have constipation typing anymore.
On June 30th, 2025, I was reading a piece by a trans woman in regards to her gender affirming care appointment juxtaposed with the recent Supreme Court ruling. On June 18th, 2025, United States vs. Skrmetti upheld Tennessee’s 2023 statute, which prohibits puberty blockers, cross sex hormones, and gender affirming surgeries for anyone under 18 when the purpose is to address gender dysphoria. The law does not apply to the same medical interventions for cisgender kids with other diagnoses. Gender nonconformity in cis kids is medicalized to ensure alignment with their gender, yet the same for trans individuals is criminalized. As of now, there are 25 states that have banned gender affirming care for minors, 23 states that have not, and 2 states that have it permanently blocked.
She starts by saying “I don’t really talk about this, but I am the product of not being allowed access to gender affirming care growing up.” At those words, I was buckled into place. As I’ve written about my own sexual trauma, her words took me by the throat, sewed my eyes open, and made me look. I still had whiplash.
What she talked about felt almost like her own sexual violation. All of your years as a child trying - no, begging - to be heard. My knee jerk reaction to the gut punch (at least the first few times) was to scream, but I didn’t have the air for years. I tried putting words to the sexual trauma, to my [gender]queerness but shrank from confirming it - and now, more than ever, it can feel like slamming into the entire weight of the government.
I’ve been digesting her words since Monday (it’s Thursday) and “I am a product of” holds the before, during, and after of what didn’t have to be. She didn’t have to be denied access to gender affirming care; and when she did start HRT and get gender confirmation surgeries, it didn’t automatically address her gender dysphoria. I didn’t need to be continuously sexually assaulted for years if the judge rightfully jailed him the first time he was caught (he had already been sexually assaulting girls). The strangulation may have stopped but we try to catch our breath for years. Politicians don’t want to stunt our queerness, they want to ensure it is still born. Being alive was like playing dead - can’t be too loud about the sexual assault and can’t be too out about queerness.
Being denied access to gender affirming care growing up seems (as I took it) like sexual trauma, too, in a way. Sexual in that it’s about sex organs. Being denied choice and care. Recognition withheld. Eyes wide shut. It living in you, you living in it. My own sexual trauma became gender dysphoria. The years of childhood sexual abuse almost trapped me in my womanhood - I always had this coercive return to it. It felt like sexual assault tightened the screws of my gender in a way that my puberty had not yet approached. I went from childhood to girlhood.
Our demonstration of gender queerness is a capital offense that most react to with an irrational fury. The right-wing trips over themselves trying to implicate us into their political vision. We are the sexual perpetrators. Their sexualization of queerness and sexual trauma precedes us. We have to carefully detonate or suffer from their explosions.
Part of my rapist’s family apologized to me recently - not his immediate family, but family friends I always associated with him. I couldn’t help but cry as they apologized. I appreciated it. I fell to the floor after. I laid on the shower floor until 5 AM that night, sobbing. I threw up from the 48 hour panic attack it caused. It brought all the sexual trauma that is always at the back of my head, to the front. They had written me after reading what I’ve put out on him. I cried as she read it to me, though not because of her words but because of the years childhood sexual abuse. They may not remember when they told me to stay still while he did it so maybe then he wouldn’t continue. I realized I didn’t need their apology so much as I liked watching them apologize. An apology that I don’t think would have come had I not called out one of them a few months ago for knowingly surrounding themselves with rape apologists (one of which they said they are still best friends with as they apologized - though they have stood up for me to her, they ensured).
If you aren’t loud about it, you support it. And when one day everyone will have been against transphobia and sexual trauma, don’t come apologizing when you could have done more before. At least not to me.