Coercion, Holding Hands and Wondering What's Left of "You" When The Abuse Ends.
This one has so many content warnings. Please be careful. There's danger here.
This piece sat in my “scheduled folder” for months. I pushed the publish date back over and over telling myself “not yet, the time isn’t right”, playing chicken with voicing this into the world, as if publishing makes it real. Truth is it’s always been real. I don’t know why this time I didn’t flinch. Maybe I’ve just grown tired of holding back the tide, maybe just letting it happen is what I needed to do?
Tread carefully, my darlings.
I’m always thinking about hands.
I think about the hands that never touched me and the hands that did. I think about the hands of all those who reached out to hold mine in the months after the break up, and all those who didn’t. I think about the hands of the police officer pressing the button on his body camera, they way he folded them across his stomach as he leaned back in the chair, the very portrait of “appearing to listen”.
But then there were plenty who did listen. So many kind eyes and crinkled brows. So many gentle head-tilts and small nods. All those fumbling fingers reaching out to mine to give comfort, but they kept finding my hands hidden, pressed firmly between my knees.
Locked away. Inaccessible.
The reason my hands are unavailable is twofold. The first is because I talk with them. As my emotions ramp up, so do my wild gesticulations. For years I’ve been the subject of the warm, gentle teasing that happens between friends. The sort of lampooning that grows out of trust and kindness. Every impersonation of me is accompanied by an amount of flailing that Kermit the Frog would find gauche. But the wiggling of limbs is less charming when I’m upset.
“Threatening” is the word she used.
So now I sit on my hands when the emotions rise in my chest. I pin them under me.
The other reason they’re inaccessible is because she always told me she needed to hold my hand, “to make us feel connected” during fights. Because, for her, connection is important when you’re explaining to your trans girlfriend why it’s okay for you to scream at her when she flees the room during an argument. Or why you were justified in chasing her down the street. Or why it was reasonable for you to wrestle the keys from her hands when she tried to get away from you. Or how it’s her fault and not actually that big deal when, in the darkness of your bedroom, you swung your small bird-boned fist against her large, blunt trans-woman body.
I nearly added the word “ineffectually” to that last one… “when you ‘ineffectually’ swung your small bird-boned fist”… How does one say “I received no physical injuries” and still convey that a blow broke something inside you as effectively as if bones were being snapped? That’s not the sort of nuance a graveyard-shift constable at the local station house is primed to understand, especially when it comes from a vessel such as this. No, he just leans back in his chair and folds his hands over his stomach and pretends to listen.
These are the drawbacks of being 90 kilograms of muscle and having a history playing contact sport. Your body becomes the sort that can take a physical hit and shrug it off. Of all the occasions she struck me, every single one hurt. And just as unset bones heal in misshapen ways, radiating ache into a body for decades, so too does this damage.
This ache… I live with it and I don’t know if it will ever leave me.
You see, I can’t tell anymore when I’m right or wrong in an argument. The capacity to know has been broken so many times I find it’s safest now just to say “I’m sorry” and accept the responsibility for every problem that arises. I realise that I’m the perfect victim for this sort of relationship. I realise that any charming individual who gives me sympathy, tells me that they like me, could walk in here and do exactly the same things she did and I’d probably become the same meek, compliant girlfriend. I feel like this is how a dog would feel if they suddenly developed enough mental capacity to understand that they’ve been trained. Trained to fetch, trained to beg, trained to roll over for the service and entertainment of another.
I wonder how much of me is “me” and how much is “the conditioning”.
And that’s what it is: Conditioning. Years of small incremental shifts, the slow inch by inch exertion of will. You can’t see the size of the labyrinth when you’re inside it. But stepping back? The winding switch-back paths of arguments crafted to confuse and confound you. The strategically placed barriers to seal you off from support, the squeeze of walls and sudden release that takes your breath away. It’s embarrassing to realise you fell for such obvious tactics.
But mostly the new understanding of her tactics chill me to the core.
For example, when someone doesn’t make their constantly waving hands accessible to be held, and thus preventing a connection being formed, there are other ways to get past this defense. If you berate a person to the point where tears stream down their blunt, manish face, to the point where they flee like an animal, you can pursue and press the advantage. Double down on their flight response, scream even harder about their failures as a partner, a lover, a friend. Lean on their overloaded nervous system. Lean so hard that, blinded by tears, choking on snot, stumbling with that broad, lurching body of theirs, they’ll collapse in the dust of the building site next to your apartment and vomit into the dirt.
All the fear and pain and anguish will spill out of them in a torrent.
This is the moment for sudden calm, when your big dumb trans girlfriend is vomiting in terror, unable to flee, unable to stand, this is the moment you choose to stop. As she loses control of her body in terrified grief, this is where you exercise the control you’ve had over yourself the entire time. It’s that same self-control that’s enabled you to shield this part of you from friends and family for years. That same self-control that ensures they’ll always say, “Oh, I never saw her do anything like that! She’s always so lovely!”
This is the moment you get to take the hand that was denied to you.
This is where you lead her back inside. Back up the flight of stairs she flew down, every step of the way begging you to stop. Back to your bedroom. Back to your bed. You can take that hand that was previously withheld and you can press it against your flesh. You can press it to your cheek, run it over your breasts, hold it against your sex. You can whisper to her that “Everything will be okay, we just need to feel connected.”
And of course, she’ll comply.
Not because she feels safe. Not because she feels loved. But because you’ve made it so they only way for the terror to stop is by giving you access to her body. By making her service you, making her celebrate you, making her fuck you. All so you can hold her close and whisper “I love you, I forgive you.” so she’ll just be happy it’s over and gladly take the blame for all of it.
When she’s done servicing you, then you can mark the orgasm you coerced out of her on the whiteboard stuck to the back of your bedroom door. One more green tally mark for the month on your leaderboard of “who is obligated to who”. You get tell her “see, you’re catching up”. But of course, she’ll never catch up. She’ll always somehow manage to be owing you. They’ll always seem to be struggling to live up to being the amazing partner you are for them. A partner so magnificent sometimes you forcefully remind them by screaming it in her face while she weeps and presses her hands between her knees. Don’t worry, she’ll crack eventually and the whole cycle of gifting her forgiveness for her causing your actions will start all over again.
Until someone slips up, of course.
That bone-deep ache of misshapen understanding of what’s fair and right can only hobble along for a time. Something’s bound to slip out. That’s all it took a year ago. I let one thing slip when telling my wife during our regular “polyamorous check-in”. One little detail about how things were with my girlfriend.
You see the look on the face of someone who cares about you and you wonder…
“Why are you so shocked?”
It reminds me of when small children take a fall. All the early childhood teachers I’ve known talk about how important this moment is. Your reaction becomes their reaction. The little ones haven’t yet learnt to fear the sharp edges of the world. They don’t yet know what’s normal and what’s an emergency. So, when a child takes a minor tumble and you rush to them in fear, that’s when they start to cry.
That’s when the tears come, their panic blossoming out of your panic.
So, when you see the shock on someones face as you describe a car coming towards you at speed and ramming the curb where you’re standing. When you describe running and feeling the clip of the bumper against your legs as you scramble away. When you describe locking yourself in your own car while someone beats their small bird-boned fists against your window, screaming at you because your act of leaving their apartment during a fight is traumatizing and triggering for them. Suddenly you feel like a small child who’s taken a tumble in the playground. The child who doesn’t yet know the sharp edges of the world have harmed them. And sure as if a kindly preschool teacher came rushing up in a panic it dawns on you...
Oh, I’m in danger.
That’s when it all came out. First I told my wife about it. Then I started telling others about what my life was like. All those kind eyes and crinkled brows, those gentle head-tilts and small nods. Not everyone, of course. There were friends who cut me off, blocked me. These are the ones who “believed the woman” in the relationship and it wasn’t me.
But that’s how it goes when you look like this.
I realised just how awful these events were and just how much I’d kept hidden from the world, how much I’d been coerced into thinking it was all my fault. I’m still unpacking it. Reading and rereading the single piece of paper signed by a magistrate. The water-wrinkled letter, stamped and dated from the court saying that I’ve two years of “protection” from her. It doesn’t really mean anything. There’s nothing stopping her walking up to my front door right now. It doesn’t seem like nearly enough to keep me safe from harm, but it’s all I have.
I don’t know how much of me is left and how much is the conditioning, the version of “me” she had been molding me into. I say “molded”… just like that word “ineffectual” it’s a poor stand-in to describe having parts of you broken and twisted so they would left to heal in misshapen ways to better fit someone else’s wants.
I can’t stop thinking about hands and the ways they shaped me, but I’m safe, for the most part. There’s still danger in the world for me and people like me, but right now I promise you I’m safe and I’m working hard on letting people hold my hand again.
–S
♥️