content notice: sexual assault (E. Jean Carroll’s and mine), Trump, racism in health care, binaried pregnancy language, maternal mortality including postpartum mortality
Happy almost-pride to all! This is a complicated and heavy time, and all I can hope for myself, my wife, my queer family and friends, and every person at any stage of themself is that we all find moments of joy, experiences that fully light our eyes and hearts, and embraces that bring us safety and calm and celebration. May we all be gentle with ourselves as we step into June, proud.
When I read the news about the recent outcome of E. Jean Carroll’s sexual assault case against Donald Trump, I cried. Hard. It’s so rare for a survivor to get a true and self-proclaimed moment in court, let alone a validating or even vindicating one. I was even more emotionally crestfallen to realize that her case could only have come to this, in this way, because so many other survivors were willing to state theirs, tell their stories, plead for an opportunity for justice now that, if even just a little bit, the world understands assault with a wider lens and perhaps even more compassion. I think about the assault when I was fifteen, and another at eighteen, and what an opportunity to bring cases against the men might be like. I do not have evidence like EJC did, as many do not while many others do, and either way it might not matter. But for her, it did, which means for all of us, it does. I felt a surge of appreciation that she’d won, like it’s a small win for me and others without such proof, because some among us should get the opportunity to win.
I’ve thought about what it might feel like if I could win, consensually open the door to something so viscerally traumatic and be able to hear a gavel thump followed by “case closed” so that I might voluntarily and proudly slam the door shut this time. I’d imagine she’d like the door completely shut on this, after so long and so much recent stirring up of the attack and the solitary life it engendered. Instead, he keeps talking about it, proclaiming he couldn’t have even identified her if he tried, that yes he assaulted her but he didn’t know her.
There’s something in particular about the anonymity that Trump claimed that gets to me the most. “I didn’t even know her.” The men who assaulted me when I was fifteen did not know me either. The knowing does not change what they did. In fact, it only served them and anyone observing to allow it or ignore it, the fact that I was an unknown to any of them.
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