Trigger Warning–Assault, Rape, Violence, Transmisogyny

 

In their email to the Stanford Community releasing this year’s Campus Climate Survey findings, President Hennessy and Provost Etchemendy alluded to the vastly different experiences of “gender diverse” Stanford students concerning campus safety and sexual assault. “While the vast majority of students report feeling safe at Stanford,” they wrote, “the feeling is not equally shared among all groups — especially those who self-identify as transgender, genderqueer, or gender-nonconforming.”

A few hours after reading their address, I sat in my room, relaxing after a long day with another trans femme friend of mine. “I’m just not safe on this campus anymore,” she said. I concurred.

Over my four years at Stanford, I have cut down my time to essentially three spaces: Synergy, various community centers and class. This process has more or less been the result of trial and error — my safe spaces being whittled down by living in or frequenting some place and being hurt, and moving on to the next.

For many trans folks on this campus, this is an inescapable reality of life here. Sooner or later, most of us decide that the time spent reaching out to new communities and spaces is not worth the great risk to our mental and physical well-being.

***

I’ve been both sexually assaulted and raped while at Stanford, and neither time did I feel safe enough to report.

My freshman year, I was sexually assaulted at a frat party. I didn’t even realize that what had happened counted as an assault for nearly a year, when I learned the actual definition of sexual assault from a close friend.

However, the primary reason I decided not to report what had happened was that many people in my frosh dorm made me feel like I was the one who had harmed or attacked my attacker. The night after my assault, a popular guy in my dorm confronted me about the incident,  and verbally accosted me for “not telling that guy about what [I am],” the closest he ever got to openly naming my trans identity. He shouted at me in front of several dorm mates about how screwed up I was for daring to kiss someone without disclosing my trans identity, without realizing that I had never wanted  to kiss him in the first place.  He walked away, and I broke down crying and ran back to the relative safety of my room.

The next morning, I resolved not to tell anyone about the incident at the frat party, nor what the guy in my dorm had yelled at me. I believed that if I reported him, not only would my dorm mates retaliate, but I would risk being charged with sexual misconduct. I believed if I told anyone, my life would be over.

***

I was raped the last day of school this year while off campus. He was much taller than me, drunk and aggressive. I made the decision to acquiesce and survive another day rather than fight him and potentially end up in the next day’s headlines.

But afterwards, as I walked to my car shaking, I couldn’t help but have flashbacks to when that guy from my dorm yelled at me. Despite what most might assume, my rapist never penetrated me. He made me penetrate him, and then he laid on me and bit me all over.

I decided not to report my rape within an hour of it happening. I sat on the back porch of Synergy, and I realized that the police would never help me. I don’t match their idea of a victim, and the wealthy white techie who raped me surely would not match their idea of someone who enjoys being anally penetrated. I imagined how easily the case could be turned on its head — how my rapist could argue that I had, in fact, violated him. It’s happened before with others, so why couldn’t it happen to me?

While I lay in bed crying that night, I wept not merely because of the trauma of that morning, but because, yet again, those who caused me harm would escape their justice.

**

I do not feel safe on much of Stanford’s campus for the same reason I do not feel safe in much of the outside world — my life is consistently shown not to matter. The intricacies of my and other trans students’ needs and oppressions are routinely dismissed by administrators and students alike. Our mere presence on campus is a paradox, in which Stanford prides itself on our attendance yet never actually takes on the challenges and oppressions we encounter while here.

I’m reminded of my sister’s recent frosh orientation at SDSU, where administrators spent thirty minutes explaining to the new frosh in plain terms what affirmative consent is, that trans and gender non-conforming students exist on campus, that our bodies and genitalia might be different than what they might expect, and that we can, like everyone else, be assaulted and raped. They also detailed later what harassment against trans and gender non-conforming students looks like, and explicitly labeled such behavior as prohibited.

Hennessy and Etchemendy, if you take away one thing from the survey concerning gender non-conforming student’s needs, it’s that we don’t just feel unsafe — we are unsafe. Sharing statistics in an email means nothing without action. If you want us to experience less violence, then you must teach people that we exist, what violence against us looks like, and that they cannot commit any violence against us; and you must show us that if we do report, we will be taken seriously and respected, and that we will have justice.

 

Erika Lynn Abigail Persephone Joanna Kreeger, ‘16