#CSAsurvivor

[mormoncoverup]

My siblings turning their backs on me

What could you let go of, for the sake of harmony? If my siblings came forward about the abuse today I would forgive them. It has to be jn 2023. I can’t survive another Christmas. Murph, Stefanie, Ezra and even Karen. If they told the truth about our family we could move forward to some degree. They would benefit tremendously from the effects that therapy has on one’s overall health and…

[childabusesurvivor]

Being abused as a child is my reality. Any positive personality traits I may have were my choices and a result of my work. The abuse didn't gift me with those things.

There was no gift involved in child abuse, no silver lining, and no reason for it to happen

[procelibacyactivism]

she's saying she's not a kink shamer but she's a kink shamer to me 🥰

[prinzessinvondasnichtig]

[mormoncoverup]

M-O-O-N spells the title of my favorite book

What book could you read over and over again? “The Stand“ by Stephen King saved my life. I was a sheltered, abused, Mormon CSA victim when I discovered Stephen King. It was 1990, I was in 6th grade and my Language Arts teacher had just reported my parents for child abuse. I was not allowed to read any unapproved books in my Mormon house. I had access to a small library in the “gifted kids”…

[indigenous-gender]

I’m really sick and tired of colonizers forcing the binary of trans vs cis on Black and Brown ppl. not only do all of us exist outside this binary by virtue of our race, ethnicity, and culture, regardless of our personal identities, but there are many of us who consciously do not identify as either cis or trans. those who are forced into the cis role by colonizers do not identify as cis, and thus are not cis. our gender is not limited to cis or trans, and the commonly accepted definitions of both terms are exclusive of our cultures. I have said many times I was not assigned a gender, so how can I identify or not identify with a gender I was never assigned? my gender is not defined by what was or is forced on me, that’s colonial and imperial. nobody dictates my identity but myself. I’m sick of the way that trans colonizers dehumanize and degrade Black and Brown people who do not identify as trans or cis just because they want them to. Black and Brown people who inherently exist outside colonial gender constructs and terms are deemed “oppressors” for not forcefully being identified as trans. trans colonizers delude themselves into thinking they are victims and somehow oppressed by Black and Brown people. the amount of times I have been silenced and degraded for not identifying myself as the particular colonial terms demanded by trans colonizers. if we do not identify ourselves with these terms we are dehumanized and discarded and treated as worthless, our opinions are gaslit and invalidated and spoken over. the term cis is utterly useless unless you are pretending that race is not central to gender and sexuality. cis means you identify with a gender that was forced on you, which is in line with the colonialism and imperialism which has forced English and colonial genders and sexualities and terms and constructs onto Black and Brown people. how can Black and Brown people identify with genders forced on us? why are we deemed oppressors who victimize the very race that oppresses us, just because we don’t fit their gender constructs and rules? this very issue applies to non binary and non man. Black and Brown people are not binary by virtue of our race, white people ARE the binary because white gender is the binary because whiteness is the binary. white queers are the binary. they oppress Black and Brown people of all identifies yet have convinced themselves we somehow oppress them. how can we be non men when our native languages do not know the words non and man? how can we be defined by what we are not, by a language we do not speak, by a culture we do not belong to?

[fiveacretruth]

It makes me feel so confused and jumbled. It feels so unfair that my indigenous familia was exploited to pay such expensive tuition and I wasn’t taught anything properly, I was honestly discouraged from learning because it was such a toxic and depressing environment. When you suppress Indigenous children and our expression and behavior you make us internalize the message that we are unworthy, annoying, badly behaved; it creates profound self esteem issues for us.

[jasminecircle]

[procelibacyactivism]

can i just say. this woman's demeanor/neuroticism irks me. and the way she speaks of her own behavior/the behavior of her acquaintances make it seem like these people are actors in a sitcom. it's odd behavior. to me. i don't act like this and I dislike the kind of 'act' she's putting on. this feels artificial.

[heartshapedcracks]

I’ve been doing some vent art recently to help me cope with everything, it’s by no means good but I wanted to put it somewhere idk

[indigenous-gender]

slur discourse is for crackers. I’ve been saying this from day one. y’all crackers really think the colonizers who screamed dyke and tranny and fag at me stopped to ASK what flavor of fag I was before hurling slurs at me? Do you really think they stopped and said “hey what kind of homo are you so I know if you’re ALLOWED to be called a dyke or if you’re just a fag, cause only LESBIANS can be dykes” NAW DAWG. ain’t how it went down. they didn’t ask me what I was in order to use the appropriate slurs. I was called a dyke because I LOOKED LIKE A DYKE, BECAUSE I AM A DYKE. I WAS CALLED A FAG BECAUSE I LOOK LIKE A FAG BECAUSE I AM A FAG. I WAS CALLED A TRANNY BECAUSE I LOOK LIKE A TRANNY BECAUSE I AM A TRANNY. do y’all know how much abuse I got from crackers on tiktok for my username dykefagtrannyretard? ALL SLURS I CAN RECLAIM. (never called a single soul those slurs, that’s not reclamation, I only called MYSELF slurs that I CAN reclaim). I have been called all these slurs to my face but yt tenderqueers who haven’t faced violence that us Indigenous people face have a problem with me taking back my power the same way I do as a sexual abuse survivor. It didn’t matter if I dressed like a “woman” or like a “man” my appearance was inherently queered as a native to these people and I was treated as such. Not just slurred but sexually harassed for it. So fuck off with your white respectability politics and tone policing. I AM DYKE. I AM FAG. I AM TRANNY AND PROUD.

twlvie

transphobes on the street trying to figure out what kind of queer i am before calling me a tranny to make sure i can reclaim it

Just makes me think of Gadsby’s Nanette where she tells the story of when some man approached her aggressively accusing her of being a faggot, goes “oh wait you’re a girl nvm”, walks away, fucking comes back, and says “wait a second you’re a lady faggot, you’re still a faggot which means I’m allowed to hit you”, and beats the shit out of her.

It doesn’t matter that “faggot” is a slur directed, for the most part, at cis gay men.

It was used to harm a lesbian. It was used to harm her. So if she wants to say it as a part of her telling her story, as part of her comedy routine, as a recounting of her experience, she can just say “he called me a faggot” and not “he called me ~the f slur~” because he called her that as he was beating the shit out of her. He directed it at her, on purpose, as a means to hurt her. She carried the shame of the word and the experience as she continued her walk through life. She’s allowed to fucking say it if she wants to.

“Well it doesn’t apply to you so you don’t internalize it” fuck all the way off oh my god

[mormoncoverup]

i listened to @countingcrows today for the first time in a while. I forgot how great they are. And how much “round here” gets to me. Then “a long December” and I was in tears. Great effing songs. #exmormon #csasurvivor #mormon #lds #bookofmormon #music (at Temple Square) https://www.instagram.com/p/Cp5s0I6uCnl/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

[indigenous-gender]

If I had a dollar for every time a colonizer said this shit I’d be on a yacht. it fucking amazes me that white queers think gender and sexuality have nothing to do with culture and race, and it just shows how racist and completely stuck inside their Eurocentric bubble they are. this is the problem with white queers, just like white cishets they think their identities and experiences are the only ones in existence, they think their experiences and identities are the default. they don’t even consider Black and Brown Indigenous gender and sexuality because they’re white, they don’t have to. y’all deadass scream “gender/sexuality is a social construct” then scratch your fuckin heads and play dumb when we talk about how our Blackness, Brownness, and Indigeneity plays a role in our gender and sexuality. gender and sexuality are inherently cultural, every single culture across the globe has DIFFERENT constructs, terms, and experiences. y’all mfs really think the world revolves around white gender and English language.

[fiveacretruth]

Five Acre School is a school built on racism and cultural appropriation. From African marimbas, drums, and kalimbas, the sacred Aboriginal yidaki/didgeridoo, to plays of white students portraying enslaved Africans and Indigenous peoples, this school’s history is rife with exploitation and appropriation of Black and Brown people and cultures. Throughout my nearly nine years as a student, Five Acre School's staff not only ignored and enabled the bullying, ostracization, and ableism I experienced, but they themselves actively participated in it. Furthermore, Five Acre Staff knowingly neglected to protect me from the sexual abuse, assault, and harassment I experienced at the hands of my white classmates. Teachers are often trained to see the signs of sexual abuse, which I certainly exhibited, yet when Five Acre's founders Bill Jevne and Juanita Ramsey held a meeting with my parents and explicitly asked if I was being sexually abused, no actions whatsoever were taken to protect me from the sexual abuse I experienced both on and off campus. Not only did Five Acre Staff miss the most obvious signs of sexual abuse, but they knowingly ignored the cries of myself and multiple other students that we were being sexually harassed and assaulted, and took absolutely no preventative measures to protect us when they witnessed the sexual abuse take place on school grounds. Five Acre School is responsible for perpetrating racism and ableism against me, one of the only Indigenous students, and knowingly neglected to protect me from and actively enabled the sexual abuse their white students perpetrated against me. As someone diagnosed with trauma and dissociative disorders, I recognize the profound affect my experiences with this school have had on me. I will carry the pain and trauma for the rest of my life, and my thoughts and beliefs are permanently shaped, if not scarred by them. Five Acre School is paraded as a caring, loving, community and nature-based environment, but it is nothing more than a cultural appropriation hub and facilitator of sexual abuse. This school's shining image appears impenetrable, but it is my goal to shed light on the harmful history of this school and be the voice I needed when I was a child. No school should ever put a child through what they put me through.

[jasminecircle]

The Cards We’re Dealt

           “Do you want to take a bath?” My oldest brother asked me.

           I was sitting on the love seat in my mother’s living room waiting for him. My mother and step-father had taken the rest of the kids out to eat and my oldest brother was instructed to give me a ride to my friend’s birthday party. I felt confused, it was time to go and he was asking me to take a bath with him. I had taken baths with my siblings before, my other brother in the past, and now my younger sister as my parents said we had gotten to old to bathe together. I think they did bath time in pairs to save water and time. I think it also passed off the responsibility of bathing the children from my mom and step-dad. I trusted my brother, he was often left in charge of us. He knows what we’re supposed to do, he’s the oldest.

           “I guess so? But can we hurry, I want to get to the party.” I replied, getting up from my seat and following him down the dark steps to the basement.

           The rest of the memory is only in flashes, very small and short. It’s scattered and confusing, to this day I can’t quite put together what happened down there. I just know that it changed me. It changed the course of my life, forever.

           Any time I try to remember, the memories start to jumble together, and the timeline gets fuzzy. Most of them can’t be put into any particular order, they just exist, like cards in a deck, able to be shuffled around, separated into categories. It’s hard to count how many of each kind of card there are in the deck, some of the events are so similar, only varying by small details. Like suits with different numbers, or different colors. I know there are a lot, more than there should be. But the details on the cards, the memories of the events, they are vivid.

           I can sort the memories into all sorts of different categories, location, the acts that took place, whether there was force or threats, or just coercion and manipulation. This one was outside the trailer in Florida and it was between the legs, it involved fear and threats. That one, was inside a hotel room while my father and step-mother were in the next room, it involved hands and tongues and my heart was racing, terrified of getting caught. This one, like so many, was in a bathroom, half of those cards are in the basement bathroom, the other half are in my bathroom upstairs. That upstairs bathroom one involved penetration, crying, begging, pain. That’s the one where I said to myself, “there is no God in my life. He is not here.”

           There’s another category, a very large stack of cards, that take place in my brother’s room. Those ones are the ones where he tells me it’s part of being a good sister. That if I want my brother to be able to find love and to be loved, it’s my job to help him learn what makes girls feel good, so he can keep them happy. Those are the ones that he instructs me to hold his thumb and to squeeze it when he’s doing something that will make a future girlfriend happy. In these cards are the ones where I tell him I don’t want to, it doesn’t feel right, I’m scared, it hurts. And on those cards are the places where he shows me pornography and tells me that he knows the people in the videos, these ones are cousins, these ones are siblings, and they’re all doing the lessons too, because it’s what you do when you love somebody.

           I have other cards too, not all of them are bad, many more of them are. There are cards where I feel proud of myself, like the ones where I was on the Honor Roll, or the one where I was elected President of my school, or the one where all my teachers and friends’ parents liked me and said that I was polite and a good kid. I have more painful ones too, like the one where my mother told me that I was ruining her life, simply by being alive. Or the ones where the men I dated hit me and told me I deserved it because I was so hard to be with. Then there are the one’s where I’m ashamed to say I came to believe all those things and started abusing myself, with drugs, with words, with razor blades.

           Sometimes your cards open the way for you to obtain other, similar cards. Like the ones where I believed so thoroughly that I didn’t deserve to live but was too afraid to upset someone by killing myself that I drank until I couldn’t see, those cards are entirely black, there are no details on them. Or the one where I snorted cocaine off of a CD case while driving 100mph down the highway, taking my hands off the wheel. Some cards are given to you, and some cards you can trade into. I gave up a lot of the cards from the proud of myself and love myself piles to get the other, darker cards in my set.

           Like any card deck, the games don’t work well if all the cards are the same. You need some of each kind, otherwise you can’t get the full experience. You will get stuck in corners of the games with no way out. It has taken me many years, many hours of therapy, many agonizing introspective truth tellings, and endless shuffling and re-wiring to start to diversify my deck again. For about eight years now I’ve been shuffling and trading in my cards, trying to rebuild a healthy deck. And after all that work, there are still many dark cards in the mix, but I see progress that at least it’s becoming a mix.

           We’re all trying to do the best we can with the cards we’re dealt.