It's Hard to Hear From Victims When They Are Already Dead

During Sexual Assault Awareness Month, I don't want to forget that there are several groups of women whose vulnerability doesn't always make the top of the page on most women's rights and feminist blogs. One group in particular is trans women, which is shameful, because trans women are victimized in startlingly high numbers. While the inclusion of trans women in feminist spaces might be a point of contention for some, I think that we can all agree that nobody deserves to be raped or brutalized.

There have been so many women whose faces are not on our social media and whose sexual assault cases were not drawing huge media attention. We haven't heard about them, in many cases, because for these women it doesn't stop with sexual assault, it stops with a death. It is hard to get stories from dead women. But why aren't these cases being reported with the same ferocity that the Jamie Leigh Joneses of society are? Is it because they are trans? Or because authorities deem their lives less notable? In many cases, the police don't bother to report it as a sexual violence case because of bias against trans folk (and the silence continues).

As blogger C. L. Minou wrote for Feministe in their Sexual Assault Awareness Guest Series, trans women are caught in a "Catch-23", where they must "be open about [their] background and accept that many potential sex partners will simply lose interest, or not disclose and run the risk of being assaulted or even murdered by [their] partners." Trans women also live in fear that if they survive an attack from a sexual partner that the police will ridicule them, abuse, harass, and possibly further brutalize or sexually assault them.

You will notice that a lot of these studies and stories have slightly older dates on them. That is because there isn't a lot of talk about violence — especially sexual violence — against trans women outside of trans communities and blogs. They are deemed as "less than" by society. Their very existence is considered deviation from the acceptable and therefore their humanity is forfeit. Sexual violence against trans women is something that we need to talk about more for the sake of their lives. We need to get demand justice as we demand justice for cisgendered women and girls. Trans women have no choice but to pay attention to the risk.

Photo credit: U-g-g-B-o-y-(-Photograph-World-Sense-)