Violence and Self Defence
This post is adapted from a Twitter thread where I talk about an incident I experienced last year. CN: Strong transphobic threat (in the thread and this article) and discussion of serious and sexual violence throughout.
Every time I discuss my experiences of frequently violent transphobic incidents, I receive a lot of “Arm Trans Women” reactions. These leave me feeling deeply conflicted.
I’m not especially proud of what I’m about to say, and I hope it comes through clearly that I’m talking about a dangerous response to trauma. I was stabbed at 14 years old. In the two years after that happened I carried a knife with me, out of fear that I would face similar again. It was no use to me at all, just a liability in case I got arrested. I was deeply traumatised from the stabbing. I was vulnerable, scared, hypervigilant and saw potential attackers everywhere. And I wasn’t necessarily wrong. As soon as I actually came out as trans to people around me and not just effeminate, I started facing a significant escalation in regular attacks. I went from a one off freak attack to being weekly or even daily assaulted by complete strangers.
What happens to an armed trans woman who defends herself? They try even harder to destroy you. I am reasonably strong and have trained martial arts over the years and I found out very quickly that being attacked by 3 men makes it irrelevant. They stop when they get tired or bored with you. There is no amount of preparation or training that makes you invulnerable to people determined to do you harm, as an individual with noone willing to step up to protect you.
Violence doesn’t just happen to trans people because a tiny minority of men are predatory and violent. It happens, like all gender based violence, because society allows it to happen, endorses it tacitly, says “boys will be boys” and enables the perpetrators. When I was in my teens still, I heard via a parent at one of the schools who’s students used to target me that the headmaster had bragged about his “lads dealing with that freak”. You can fight off one attacker but transphobia isn’t one interaction with one violent person. In the hilariously improbable situation where you heroically fight off your attackers they are likely to be followed up by more, or by higher systems. In some best case outcomes you go to prison for protecting yourself. At worst you fail and are killed. There is a very real sense in which I have had to many times make a calculation: do these people want to hurt me or kill me, and if I fight back are they just going to hurt me worse? If I pretend to be dead will that scare them off? How much physical harm should I absorb to get them to let me go home? In cases of sexual assault, I’ve had men outright stand in a doorway and make it clear to me that either I tolerate what they’re about to do or it’ll be worse. They know what they can get away with. Because when noone else around is going to look after you, you sure don’t have a lot of options to protect yourself. Noone does.
We need defence in our community structures not just in fantastical conceptions of personal heroics which ignore the entire infrastructure of violence backing up the guys kicking you in the head. The older I get the less patience I have for personal rather than communitarian security approaches. To be clear, personal security is an absolutely necessary layer as part of a wider portfolio of safety measures. But when we are talking about responses to systemic forms of violence like transphobia (and equally racism, institutional abuse of disabled people, or whatever else) It feels like neglect and abandoning vulnerable people to fend for ourselves to make bold pseudoradical statements about radical arms dealing and saying nothing about the necessary community safeguarding practices we need to develop to make it a community responsibility to make everyone safe.
My biggest personal security measure right now is that when my neighbours have a problem, if they are short of anything, have an emergency, fucking anything, I do what I can to help. This is so that when someone tries to hurt me there’s a chance they will give a shit. Having people who will care if you get attacked is the one thing protecting most people from being attacked. I think the same is true about the ways that people normalise for instance domestic violence — people are often far too willing to blame the victim, to see the victim of domestic violence as the dominion of the household, or say it’s their fault for staying, or find things she is failing to do to protect herself in order to suggest she isn’t doing enough to stop it. There’s a lack of recognition that these forms of violence happen, not just of course, because of a violent abuser’s fists and whatever. But also because of society, police, etc think it’s normal and okay to allow.
It’s one of the frustrating outcomes of the success of Bash Back! ethics in normalising self defence and militant resistance (good!) that so much of our idea of how to implement resistance to street harassment and sexual violence via self defence seems rooted in Rambo-esque macho organising norms, aesthetics and culture we’re all blasted with by heterosexuality of what violent competency looks like (really bad!). Things do not have to be this way. I don’t mean this harshly. I look at more marginalised elements of trans and queer community in my own area — the racialised homeless punk kids who aren’t necessarily extremely welcome in our more mainstream community spaces — and see people who simply do not have a lot of resources when it comes to building community. I’m not surprised that punk culture solutions to these issues is very short term and often better as a revenge fantasy than practical mitigation.
Nevertheless if radicals more widely want to think about militant resistance we ought to consider that every successful militant group in history has built mature community infrastructure for supporting, hiding and protecting the folks carrying weapons against occupying forces. Equally, given that this sort of infrastructure is not even close to a relevant thing for trans people right now it’s no use to me personally when I think about how I deal with getting attacked other than working at the ground level of making sure my neighbours would miss me if I was gone and would stand up if someone wanted to get rid of me. In the meantime I’ll carry on trying to do my bit in stressing care ethics, solidarity and community building as a radical base for other higher risk strategies.
