by Janet Mock
I don’t remember where Dad went or why Chad wasn’t playing Super Mario Bros. on the carpet in front of the living room television. It was just the two of us: Derek lay back on the brown microsuede recliner, and I sprawled out on the matching couch. We sat in silence for about an hour, watching TV, before he interrupted the programming. “This is boring, huh?” he asked.
“I guess,” I said, watching him pull the lever on the chair to lift himself up.
“Let me show you something,” he said, grabbing my ankles. His touch felt foreign. I was irritated because I did not want to engage in any kind of roughhousing. I had seen him wrestle with Chad, and they’d be on the ground in a human pretzel for what felt like an eternity before Chad would bow out.
He pulled me off the couch by my ankles and I said “Ouch” as my butt hit the carpet. I’d found that the more I complained about physical activity, the less energy I had to exert.
“Awww, did I hurt you?” he asked with a sweetness in his voice that mimicked a Jodeci song. “I didn’t mean to.”
Derek was rarely mean to me, but he wasn’t exactly sweet, either. My presence was tolerated, so to hear this tenderness in his voice threw me off, like the touch of his hands on my ankles.
“I’m okay,” I said, resting my weight on my knees, which dug into the carpet.
“Promise I’ll be gentle.” He smiled. “Let me show you a move. Get on my back and put your right arm around my neck.”
I did so and was quickly back on the ground. This time I didn’t complain. I relished Derek’s single-focused attention, and we jostled until he conquered me, lying over me while my belly and the side of my face touched the carpet. My legs were spread slightly, and I remember my feet meeting his knees. Peering back up at him with my left eye, I could see him smiling, and I was happy he was having fun with me. It was a first for us, a breakthrough in our relationship.
Then I felt him holding his breath; there was a stiffening, a tightness in his torso. He let my wrists free and placed all his weight on me. I felt his hips moving and a growth in what I simply called his “privates” at the time. His breathing grew heavier through his nose, and my thoughts raced faster than the beating of his heart on my back. I couldn’t see his face anymore. The TV screen flickered as he began digging his groin against my pajama-clad back.
Derek thrust faster and harder, and my cheek dug deep into the abrasive fibers of the carpet with each push. Derek didn’t pet or caress me. He didn’t say a word. He just kept grinding as his breaths filled the silence around us. Then he jolted and stood up and walked away. I heard water splash against the ceramic sink in our parents’ bathroom.
I lay in that spot for minutes, not lifting my cheek from the carpet. I didn’t know what this was. I had no words then to describe the “moves” he had shown me. I was certain that they were to remain in the darkness of the living room and that I had asked for it because I didn’t play video games, because my wrists were perpetually limp, because his friend called me “The Fag One.” This is what happens to sissies, I thought. If Dad finds out, you’re going to get whipped for acting like a girl again.
Unsure of Derek’s return, I peeled myself off the living room floor. In our bedroom, the sounds of Chad’s snoring and I Love Lucy ’s laugh track from the tiny TV on our dresser lulled me to sleep.
Chapter Three
I’m your boyfriend now, Nancy!” Freddy Krueger said, his tongue ramming through the receiver of Nancy’s phone.
I watched his slimy tongue attack Nancy’s earlobe with my mouth buried in my palm and my eyes peeking through the gaps between my fingers. A Nightmare on Elm Street reran often, especially on Halloween or Friday the thirteenth, and I was both enamored with and disgusted by Freddy’s antics. There was no scarier villain to me. Freddy stayed with me for years because he had a sense of humor, an actual charm that made me chuckle, even though he was a predator, a pedophile who took away a young person’s ability to dream.
The predator in my early life expertly blended good and bad qualities. Derek knew what attracted me and wielded that knowledge to target me. My inclinations made me all the more vulnerable to him, and my vulnerabilities made me easy prey.
Derek had me exactly where he wanted me the morning after our interaction on the carpet. As on all other mornings, I ate Cap’n Crunch in my plastic cereal bowl across the round kitchen table from him. As on all other mornings, Derek ignored the sound of me slurping the sugary-sweet cereal milk. But our silence felt irregular. Derek, chewing on the two eggs he’d scrambled to top a piece of burnt toast, was no longer just my father’s girlfriend’s son. He was no longer a fifteen-year-old basketball player. He was no longer my kind-of brother, my live-in babysitter, the guy who sent us to our room when we complained about him not sharing the TV. He looked different than he had on all other mornings because he’d opened a door inside of me that could no longer just be shut.
Through the view from that opened door, I noticed how pointy his dark brown ears were and how the angles were symmetrical with his rectangular haircut. I noticed his thin plum lips, his protruding hazel eyes, features he shared with his mother, Janine. I noticed his long, thin fingers and the way they curved around the edges of his toast. I had seen his features before but never taken note of them because Derek held no significance to me. Now he was the manifestation of a secret I wasn’t equipped to keep.
Derek dragged me across a threshold out of childhood. Before he grabbed me by my ankles and opened that door, I had jumped double Dutch and played jacks and stolen packets of Nerds that jiggled in my pocket as I walked out of the corner store during beer runs for Dad. I had run away from scraggly stray dogs and rubbed my knees raw by riding my skateboard on one knee.
Now that door was cracked open, creaking on its hinges, and I didn’t know when or if I should walk through it. My world shifted when Derek wrestled with me on that carpet. It wasn’t the wrestling or the grinding; it was the foreplay that had me yearning for his return, that planted a craving in my belly. As I would later experience, Derek had petted me, held me, spoken softly to me, and I liked the attention, the closeness, and the intimacy. I liked the fact that this well-dressed teenager who had all the latest tapes and outfits liked me. It was his attention, his wooing, that shifted my focus. And that was what I later learned that predators have in their arsenal of affections: They are able to make an isolated, outcast child feel special. Derek made me feel special when no one else was around, and especially when no one else validated the girl-child inside of me. Derek treated me like a girl, I thought, so I understood him to be my only ally, and my ally wouldn’t do anything to hurt me.
It took me years to recognize, label, and acknowledge Derek’s actions as molestation. I made excuses for him, from blaming my femininity to blaming his age. He was young, so he didn’t know any better, I often thought. But blaming myself and making excuses for Derek didn’t allow me to uncover the facts about child sexual abuse.
I later learned that the majority of sexual abuse offenses are committed by people who know the victim, including immediate or extended family members: a neighbor, coach, babysitter, teacher, or religious leader. According to the U.S. Department of Justice and the Crimes Against Children Research Center, over a third of all sexual abuse against children is committed by a minor. These statistics show a commonality between my experience and that of others who know and trust their abuser, who may be another young person. Though I now have empathy for Derek and am aware of his emotional immaturity, that doesn’t negate the pain his actions inflicted on me over those two years in my childhood.
Just a few nights after our first interaction on the carpet, Derek returned to me in the soothing darkness, shaking me awake in my twin bunk bed. “You up?” he said, framing his words with a smile, one I returned as he held out his hand. I took it, and he led me across the hall to his bedroom. I could hear Chad’s snoring from behind Derek’s closed door.
He took off his shirt and boxer shorts, and for the fir
st time I saw him fully erect. It was the length of a Barbie, with the girth of two dolls. I stared at it as he lay down in bed. This was a penis, not his privates or a thing or dingaling.
“Come here,” he whispered, and I followed him, fully clothed, under his sheets.
I could hear his steady heartbeat from his chest as if I held a cup to a closed door, listening to the secrets inside him. I felt chosen. So when he unlocked my linked fingers and put them around his penis, I did not protest. He led my clenched hand up and down, slowly moving the skin over his muscle. Once I got the groove, he said, “You should kiss it for me.”
Apprehensive, I went under the covers and placed my lips on it. Then he told me to open my mouth. Soon his hands pressed the sides of my face, guiding my head up and down. I imagined it to be a Tootsie Pop. I had a pile of wrappers in my room, hoping to find one with a star so I could redeem it for a free lollipop. I had a hard time breathing as Derek moved his pelvis up and down, crushing the top of my head with a forceful palm. Then my mouth was full of what tasted like warm, spoiled ice cream and Brussels sprouts. I spit it on his stomach.
Derek reached for his boxers, wiped himself, and told me to go back to bed, to walk softly and keep his door open. That door stayed open for me for nearly two years. Blowing him became my nightly chore. When Derek shook me awake and guided me to his crotch, he didn’t say much because he’d trained me to be numb, to be silent, to act on autopilot. I was a child half asleep, but my sense of obligation to him overpowered any exhaustion I felt. It was my duty to make him feel good.
As a survivor of sexual abuse, I developed a belief system that shaped how I viewed myself: I can gain attention through sexual acts; my worth lies in how good I can make someone else feel, even if that means I’m void of feeling; what I do in bed is shameful and secret, therefore I will remain in the dark, a constant shameful secret.
Derek didn’t command that I tell no one, that I keep what we did in his bed a secret. He knew I wouldn’t talk because I kept myself a secret. The fact that I was feminine and wanted to be seen as a girl was something I held close. I was prime prey. He could smell the isolation on me, and I was lured into believing the illusion that he truly saw me. I was a child, dependent, learning, unknowing, trusting, and willing to do what was asked of me to gain approval and affection.
I blamed myself for years for attracting Derek. That I, the victim, had asked for it. As I write this, it sounds ridiculous, but as a survivor of sexual abuse, I have to forgive myself for how I coped and how I learned to see and internalize the abuse. I didn’t take into account that because I was different, I was more likely to be at risk of sexual abuse. Being or feeling different, child sexual abuse research states, can result in social isolation and exclusion, which in turn leads to a child being more vulnerable to the instigation and continuation of abuse. Abusers often take advantage of a child’s uncertainties and insecurities about their identity and body.
Derek took something away from me when I was only eight years old and left me with a lifetime of murkiness surrounding issues of intimacy, sex, pain, love, boundaries, and ownership of my body.
By the time I was ten, when Derek grew tired of me, I found myself wanting to fill the void that his absence created. That was when I began acting on crushes. Junior was a kid who lived across the street from us. He was kind of an asshole, at twelve the eldest in our playgroup, and the only one who had underarm hair, which you could see through his dingy rotation of tank tops, stained yellow at the pits.
We produced dramatic reproductions of domesticity in ongoing games of house, where I demanded the coveted role of mom. It was during these games, with Junior serving as my husband, that I felt most myself. I had creative license to free my hair from its rubber band and lightly order my children—Chad; Maddy, a frizzy-haired girl with whom I was close; and her half-sister, Aisha, who wore the same pair of denim cutoffs daily—to run to the corner store for groceries and swish my hips as I served my family Now & Laters and Mambas for dinner. When our play children ran errands, I had Junior to myself on the grass. It was an innocent crush that flourished under the guise of husband and wife. He would rub his open palms against my hair. My budding attraction to Junior would surface in words: I would repeat movie lines that I’d heard girls say to boys, things that made them act silly, like “I love you.” “I wish you were really a girl,” he once told me during one of our make-pretend sessions.
Though Junior was a few years older and could easily dominate me in a fight, I was smugly confident in my premature sexuality. What we once fulfilled by lying on the grass side by side quickly escalated to something more adult. Junior kissed me in the back of our house by the berry gate, where no one could see us. It was my first kiss and awakened me to sexuality in a way that my nights serving Derek never did. Junior’s unexpected kiss made me feel out of control, so I knelt in front of him and unzipped his jean shorts. He did not object when I tugged down his briefs and pulled him to my lips. My knees dug into the cool brown dirt and the air-conditioning vents roared, silencing Junior’s moaning. I made him feel good, and it felt good to be in control, or so I thought.
I knelt in front of Junior only a handful of times, but after each tryst, he made sure to point out that he wasn’t gay because he didn’t do it back. As kids, we understood gay to be bad, a label denoting weakness. Junior was fine with accepting the blow jobs as long as he wasn’t the one being labeled, as long as we were pretending to be other people, as long as I kept quiet about our interactions. Even then I didn’t consider either of us gay; we both saw me as a girl in this context of our sexual playing, and there was nothing gay about girls sleeping with boys, I reasoned.
These trysts and my resulting questions about my gender and sexuality isolated me from my brother, who I felt could never understand me. I was blinded by an illusion that had me convinced that I was much more adult, more worldly, than Chad and thus had to carry burdens he could never grasp. Still, a part of me wanted him to understand me. Despite my isolation and uncertainty, he was my brother, and I looked forward to the routine of our evening communion, sleeping just a few feet away from each other.
“Hey,” I whispered one night after clicking the television off. “You still up?”
“What’s up?” he said, popping his head down to face me in my bunk.
“I feel like someone else sometimes,” I told him. “Like different from you and other boys.”
“I know that already,” he said, flashing his missing-toothed smile. “You don’t like boy things.”
“I guess I just wanted to tell you,” I said as he returned to his pillow. Though I didn’t have the words then to define what was going on and who I was, a part of me feared that Chad would look at me differently, and not love me anymore.
Years later, Chad told me he had “some memory” of Derek “touching” me in “some strange way.” He said, “I wasn’t fully sure if he was molesting you or not. I was too young,” and apologized for not doing something about what he’d apparently witnessed. I was struck that he carried guilt about something he couldn’t have done anything about. How ridiculous does it sound for a seven-year-old kid to say he wished he’d done something about the abuse his eight-year-old sibling faced? “I wouldn’t say that was one of the big reasons why you ‘turned,’ ” he said. “I can’t think of another word, but you know what I mean. It was always in you, and I knew you weren’t happy with being who you were when we were younger. You wanted to be a girl.”
I was apprehensive about writing about being molested because I feared others would make the same link Chad made, pointing to the abuse as the cause of my being trans—as if my identity as a woman is linked to some perversion, wrongdoing, or deviance. What must be made clear is that my gender expression and identity as a girl predated Derek, and my expression as a child made me vulnerable and isolated, an easier target for Derek.
Gender and gender identity, sex and sexuality, are spheres of self-discovery that overlap and relate but
are not one and the same. Each and every one of us has a sexual orientation and a gender identity. Simply put, our sexual orientation has to do with whom we get into bed with, while our gender identity has to do with whom we get into bed as. A trans person can be straight, gay, bisexual, etc.; a cis gay, lesbian, or heterosexual person can conform to expected gender norms or not; and a woman can have a penis and a man can have a vagina. There is no formula when it comes to gender and sexuality. Yet it is often only people whose gender identity and/or sexual orientation negates society’s heteronormative and cisnormative standards who are targets of stigma, discrimination, and violence. I wish that instead of investing in these hierarchies of what’s right and who’s wrong, what’s authentic and who’s not, and ranking people according to these rigid standards that ignore diversity in our genders and sexualities, we gave people freedom and resources to define, determine, and declare who they are.
Chapter Four
I look back on tailored lawns fronting freshly painted houses and teenage boys in white tank tops flaunting burgeoning biceps who push mowers and pull rakes. I see Chad and me in crisp back-to-school outfits and unscuffed shoes, soles not worn to the ground, as we walk so fresh and so clean three blocks to homeroom. I see Dad, his waves brushed on point and his uniform, starched to crease, beaming at the stage as I accept the “class leader” award at an assembly.