Article of the Day

[malymin]

Nice Lady Therapists

Sometimes it’s – crossing a physical line. Touching in a way they have no good reason to be touching. Or touching over the objections of the kid in a way that is in no way justified by therapy goals. Sometimes sexually, sometimes not. Sometimes in ways that are against ethical standards of practice, sometimes not. But intimately, invasively. And if you say no, she patiently, lovingly, explains that you have nothing to be afraid of and that everything is ok. And that if you just trust her, you will have fun and get better. And when her profession has professional training about boundaries and appropriate touch, she thinks or even says “women don’t do that.”

Some male therapists do many of these things too, but there’s a gendered version of it that usually comes from women. And that can cause a problem for people with disabilities who are recovering from this. Most things about trauma and abuse of power are about misogyny in some way. They’re about men hurting women, and taking advantage of power dynamics that favor men to do so. Those descriptions are important because that pattern is common. But it is not the only abuse pattern, and it is not the only gendered abuse pattern.

Female therapists are subjected to misogyny and the power of men just as much as any other women. But they also have tremendous power over people with disabilities, many of whom are deeply dehumanized. The assumption that women have neither the power nor the ability to hurt anyone gets really dangerous really quickly for children with disabilities receiving therapy.

And it also means that people with disabilities often have a different relationship to gender than most nondisabled people. If you’ve been harmed by women over and over and assured that you liked it, it complicates things. If you’re a girl, it can make it hard to see a group of women as a Safe Space, especially if they think the thing making it safe is keeping the men out. If you’re a boy who has been repeatedly harmed by women who believed they were powerless, it can be hard to understand that the gender hierarchies that feminists and others talk about actually do exist.

This article is from 2014, but I think it's still relevant today. It feels frustratingly difficult to talk about how the sexist positioning of women (specifically cis white women - trans white women, cis women of color, and especially trans women of color are usually not afforded this kind of assumption of passive, doe-like innocence) not only enables the abuse of women by men, but also allows specific kinds of abuse by women (to other women, to certain men) to be taken less seriously or assumed nonexistent.

It makes me uncomfortable when I see people position women and girls as "more good" or "more pure" than men and boys, and that's Why We Need Feminism - rather than that oppression and gender essententialism is fundamentally wrong. (And let's be real - when nonbinary or genderqueer people are even acknowledged, they're arbitrarily sorted back into a binary box based on the speaker's own biases.) Because I was mostly physically abused by boys and mostly emotionally abused by girls - that's what bullying is, it's abuse of children by their peers. (Though I was also physically abused by a girl a grade younger than me, in first grade. I considered her a friend at the time because, unlike other girls, she was willing to be physically near me.) And I don't think the abuse the girls did caused less damage just because it didn't leave visible bruises. I don't think my kindergarden teacher locking me in a dark closet (a thing I don't even remember, but that people in my life remember me telling them about at that age) is made better because it was done by a woman. When a next door neighbor, or second cousin's dad, was physically and/or emotionally abused by their wife, I remember hearing adults implying it the man's fault for being weak-willed and spineless, for letting her walk all over him.

I don't really see myself as having a gender, but I was assigned female at birth, and I let people perceive me as a cis woman because it's easier to not assert myself. If I started taking testosterone, and was perceived more as a "man" than a "woman", would the things I've experienced suddenly become less serious? Would they have turned out, retroactively, to not have been serious? I already feel like such a burden on other people, like I take up too much space, being perceived as a girl. When I make characters for TTRPGs, I gravitate towards small characters - kobolds and the like - I want to take up less space, that's my power fantasy, not being strong or sexy or popular. Or I gravitate towards being the token non-humanoid, because it's easier to be a mascot or a pet than a person. It feels less bad if I don't know how to relate to my peers or be taken seriously if I'm just everyone else's crusty little white dog. I'm only afforded any grace as a human (a failed human, autistic, a dog trained to walk on its hind legs) in that I'm perceived as harmless, despite all the ways that I know I'm not.

Comments

[adore]

Yeah, discourse about how people's identity or circumstances makes them vulnerable, or powerful/privileged, often doesn't acknowledge lived experience of individuals if it doesn't fit the discourse, and it makes it so hard to talk about those experiences. And not acknowledging individual experience is a lack of empathy, but they do it anyway.

Many of the people who abused me: my mother, my father's mother, my teachers: were women, and I've noticed the way it makes me wary of certain people on first coming across them, and more trusting of others, is to do with age. Girls my age or thereabouts I see as safe, and I assume the worst of older women if I don't already know what they're like.

I assume the worst of men too, due to a different set of experiences.

I'm perceived as harmless, despite all the ways that I know I'm not.

My power fantasy is to be feared, not necessarily that people think I'm strong but that they think I have no societal inhibitions and could do something unpredictable and dangerous. But in practice, in regular life, I try to make myself fade and turn unnoticeable around my family . When I hang out with friends is when I express myself and let myself be seen, and it's because I feel safe to do so.

[malymin]

I feel like a lot of the times, in the discourse, there's this desire to make reality conform to a calcified, simple to understand model of How Things Work, rather than adapting one's model of reality with new information... a model that holds gender as the Main axis of power and oppression will fail to account for the ways that there is no "sisterhood" when you are a woman (or a person assumed to be a woman) who is in the "outgroup" relative to the women around you - an ethnic minority, in a lower social class, disabled physically or mentally, etc. Or how in (using an American example as an American) white women have historically gotten black men (often framed within antiblack racism as hypermasculine, beastly agressors) lynched by playing on the presumption that men (especially marginalized, "othered" men) are inherently predatory.

If anything, from my experiences, it's peer-aged people I have had the hardest time trusting for most of my life. Teachers were cruel to me, but I learned early on that both boys and girls my age were fundamentally, as a whole unsafe to confide in, compared to adults - because at least some of my teachers would stick up for me and be nice, but that wasn't true for kids. It's only in my thirties that I've developed any degree of... not being afraid? Talking to people my own age IRL. In my teens and through my twenties, people significantly younger or older than me just felt less likely to be cruel to me, so I avoided talking to classmates and the like almost entirely.

Even with my closest friends I often feel scared I'll say something wrong that will make them despise me - not because I have reason to believe that they'd turn on me that quickly, but because I feel in constant danger of being deserving of scorn, and like life is a constant game of hiding that I'm actually a bad or unpleasant person. No amount of being proven otherwise ever really makes that feeling go away.

I'm glad you feel safe with friends.

IDK, I hope I haven't said anything awful or tasteless.

[adore]

Our life experiences have shaped who we expect hostility from and who we expect safety from. So I relate to you even though my experiences were different from yours.

Even with my closest friends I often feel scared I'll say something wrong that will make them despise me - not because I have reason to believe that they'd turn on me that quickly, but because I feel in constant danger of being deserving of scorn, and like life is a constant game of hiding that I'm actually a bad or unpleasant person. No amount of being proven otherwise ever really makes that feeling go away.

TT It seems to me that you say things thoughtfully, and in good faith, so I hope that the people you choose to confide in also make the effort to understand you when you're expressing something to them.