Some survivors theorize a link between the two. What do we do with that?
Many LGBTQ+ individuals have a strong response to the idea that being LGBTQ+ could be connected to one’s experience of trauma and abuse. This response makes a great deal of sense, given that conservatives and other homo/transphobes have long tried to suggest that being gay stems from early trauma. As a pushback to this conservative rhetoric, it is common to hear LGBTQ+ folks argue that trauma is not linked to our queer/trans identities in any way. In doing so, we are trying to shore up the legitimacy of our own queerness.
However, slamming the door shut on any linkage between trauma and LGBTQ+ identity forecloses the possibility for some of us to accurately name and contextualize our experiences. To be clear, I want to emphasize that drawing a connection between trauma and being queer/trans may not be helpful for everyone, and we each have the right to narrate the contours of our own self-experience. Yet certain amongst us, myself included, do connect the dots between trauma and the ways in which we grew to be queer/trans. Those stories deserve to be named, too — even if the stories are explosive, and even if they problematize what the LGBTQ+ community tells ourselves and others about who we are.
I am far from the first person to write about trauma and its ability to shape our sexual orientation and/or gender identity. Professor and lesbian critic Ann Cvetkovich famously went so far as to theorize lesbianism as a “welcome effect” of sexual abuse, writing: “[W]hy can’t saying that ‘sexual abuse causes homosexuality’ just as easily be based on the assumption that there’s something right, rather than something wrong with being lesbian or gay? . . .” (p. 76, emphasis mine). Though Cvetkovich stops short of saying that sexual abuse is an absolute determinant of lesbian identity, she urges us to see the “value in exploring the productive and dense relations among these terms.”
More recently, an anthology of LGBTQ+ voices on trauma (ed. by Jennifer Patterson) featured numerous survivors who directly connect their queer/trans identity to their sexual trauma. Below, I’ve compiled a few relevant excerpts from the anthology.
River Willow Fagan: Genderqueerness as a “life-affirming response” to trauma
“[F]or me, my genderqueerness is inextricably bound up with my history of being sexually abused; my father’s violence seared into me the deep conviction that I did not want to be like him [a man] . . . I see my genderqueerness as a creative, life-affirming response to devastating violence . . . In speaking of our varied experiences, and the unique ways gender identity, expression, and history interact with experiences of sexual violence to shape a life, survivors of all genders might discover healing and insight, new ways of understanding and relating to their own experiences.” (pp. 18–20)
Pam Mack: Living joyfully as a butch woman after experiencing abuse
“One of the things that I took away from my abuse as I grew up was that I didn’t want to be a woman . . . I like the person I became in part as a result of what happened to me as a child . . . I have said to my therapist that I don’t think that it is possible to figure out what would have been my natural sexual preference, if I had not been abused . . . I can still claim as mine the preferences I have evolved[.] Knowing this hopefully provides another way of moving towards a culture in which a wide range of choices are seen as valid, even ones that have been shaped by abuse.” She concludes: “Aren’t we all shaped by pain?” (p. 57)
Mikaya Heart: Experiencing agency in sexuality post-trauma
“Had I still been trying to be intimate with men, I would not have been able to feel my anger [about my sexual trauma] in the same way . . . It was part of my personal empowerment to stand up and be counted as a woman who would no longer lie down for men.” (p. 121)
Jen LaBarbera: Speaking out about the relationship between trauma and queerness
“These are my terrifying, real, hard truths: I am queer. I am a survivor of CSA [child sexual abuse], a survivor of emotional abuse and neglect, and a survivor of rape. I do not see these aspects of my identity as separate, or separable. They do not exist as isolated truths. Each identity plays into and informs the other . . . I am not an anamoly. The anomalous part? I am speaking about it.” (p.84)
My own experience
I feel heard by the beautiful queer/trans voices above. For me, there has been something profoundly freeing in being able to say, “Yes, my gender and sexuality were shaped by trauma — and I find that to be useful and meaningful context rather than a cause for delegitimization of my identity.” I know lots of us justifiably feel that we can’t draw a connection between our trauma histories and our identities without providing right-wing provocateurs with more ammunition, but this does not negate the fact that I (and others) find so much self-clarity in linking the two.
Early experiences of violence made me think differently about my body and the (gendered) meaning assigned to it. Being raised in a deeply patriarchal, high-control religious group made me view the Western gender paradigm with skepticism. Later experiences of violent heterosexual encounters evaporated any sense of heterosexuality I’d previously endorsed. And anytime I experienced sexual violence, I heard the same inner refrain afterward: That was gender, and I want no part of it.
In sum, to echo Jen LaBarbera above: I’m gay and gender non-conforming and a trauma survivor, and it gives me great insight to believe that these identities and experiences inform one another rather than exist as isolated pieces of who I am.
Far from being disappointed that some queer/trans survivors will reject what I’m writing here, I appreciate and admire that we all understand our experiences differently. There is no one story of violence, survivorship, sexual orientation, and gender identity. As the saying goes, we tell ourselves the stories we need to in order to survive. For some of us, that is severing any potential connection between trauma and who we became. For others, it is a matter of joyfully recuperating our trauma by perceiving it to have played a role in the queer/trans people that we are today.
There are no wrong stories about how we became queer, trans, or both. The only wrong thing is to deny that a plurality of stories exist in the first place. As Caroline Picker writes on pp. 233–34 of Queering Sexual Violence: “Self-determination and transformative justice grow every time we defy a world that wants to tell our stories for us . . . There must be something fabulously dangerous about our stories, given how we are silenced.”
