I Was Today Years Old When I Understood My Family Sent Me to Trans Conversion Therapy

Is yikes a trigger warning?

CW: disordered eating, medical treatment, family and intimate partner abuse, conversion therapy, transphobia, sexual assault

I had a physical reaction to letting something go this morning.

It happened when I sent messages naming and forgiving the sexual violence the people in my past had committed against me. Some of those messages went to the perpetrators. Some went to the people who enabled and empowered them. I’ve waited years — decades — for some of these people to stop lying.

I’m not crazy. These things happened.

HOW DO I KNOW THEY HAPPENED?

I know they happened because of the lengths my family went to bury those secrets inside me.

Keeping those secrets hidden in me meant I had to be contained. Controlled. Diminished. If it killed me, so what? Those secrets would die with me.

I’m not crazy. These things happened.

I came from an offshoot of a cult where a man’s reputation always meant more than any harm he inflicted to a woman.

And you know what’s true for this woman? Once, I was a little girl named Stephenie.

DEAR PREDATORS

Something shifted in me recently.

I’ve taken up a lot of space lately. And not just space for the sake of it. I am me and letting the world see who that is.

I finally feel free. Or at least enough to do what I thought would never be done.

Certainly not by me.

My childhood was overwhelmed with abusers, pedophiles, and predators. Most of them came from the collection of churchgoers and coffee drinkers those same abusers continue to call family and friends.

I came from an offshoot of a cult where a man’s reputation always meant more than any harm he inflicted to a woman.

I sent messages to those predators and waited for the horrifying fate my family had assured me would happen as soon as I opened my mouth. They’d beaten the certainty into me in every way a person can be beaten.

Physical abuse is bad enough, but they didn’t stop at physical harm. They went far deeper.

They corrupted what was good. If it didn’t serve their vision for what would give them a limitless supply for their addictions, it was wrong. It had to be disciplined and punished.

That meant *I* had to be disciplined and punished.

***

I tried to tell my parents about the sexual abuse I endured from their friends. From the children of their friends. But my parents hurt me until I agreed it didn’t happen.

Why wouldn’t they? My parents were abusing me, too. The only thing “wrong” was that it had been anyone else who did it to me.

They corrupted what was good.

My father believed the reputation of his minister friend was far more sacred than admitting what his friend’s son had done to me. I confronted that minister friend recently, and he responded with the same verbal abuse you’d expect from a man who has spent his life using the word of God to control and silence women.

I tried to tell my friends about the sexual abuse happening in my own family. They laughed and said only a pervert would have questions about incest.

I tried to tell people who just met us and hadn’t yet been blinded by my brother’s charm. One of them assumed I was my brother’s girlfriend. Or boyfriend. Those were confusing years in the wake of my parents sending me to Trans Conversion Therapy over, and over, and over.

In public or in private, my brother caressed my shoulder. My arm. My hand. He knew better than to go too far — not with his own hands, only someone else’s. He learned from an early age how to manipulate people as his sexual playthings.

I spoke with one of his most recent conquests about the abuse. She told me it’s awesome when it’s what you want. But can your own sister consent to such abuse?

Those were confusing years in the wake of my parents sending me to Trans Conversion Therapy over, and over, and over.

I know it wasn’t love. It was abuse by any other name. But it felt like love. I guess it looked like love, too.

If only those outsiders knew that my identical twin brother treated me, his sister, with the same entitlement he used to abuse and control any other woman. We were all there to serve his pleasure. To validate his frame. To somehow give him enough love and validation to fight past how little he truly allowed into his heart.

Like any cult leader or would-be guru, he promised that by empowering him, he would empower you.

NO ONE WOULD LISTEN

I tried to tell each new abuser what each prior one had done. Sometimes just to let them see how much it hurt. Sometimes to share the facts of what had happened.

One of those abusers was the father of my childhood friend. A frequent member, at least when I was a child, at Southside Assembly of God in kudzu-lined Mississippi.

I was just a little girl clinging to his shadow for safety from my own family. My parents touched me in ways that weren’t right. Their friends also touched me whenever and however they wanted. My friend’s father had his own ideas about what was right and wrong to do with a little girl, too.

Our families merged during one of my brief stays at home from the hospitals. That father’s son came to my house late at night. He and my brother took me to the edge of the park behind our house. Wouldn’t it be fun, they said, if I took off my clothes, exposed myself to the busy nearby road, and rolled the dice whether anyone could see this little girl’s naked body?

Does it excuse what my brother did because he was the same age as me?

(okay…two minutes younger)

Does it matter that the older boy was five years older? He was an adult. He knew what he was doing.

I want to forgive my brother — he was just a kid, too — but the things he’s done since then put common predators to shame. His actions are monstrous and have had a monstrous impact. I no longer waste my time trying to find the words to persuade him to simply acknowledge the monstrously abusive impact of his actions toward me and so many other women.

MOTHERS DON’T LET THEIR CHILDREN SUFFER ALONE

Once my biological mother left my dad and disappeared into a battered woman’s shelter for a while, my sister took over the motherly duties. She filled the refrigerator. She made sure I was alive. She brought over friends who groomed and molested me.

Her friend Sherry — yet another redhead whose abuse I’m ashamed to say made me feel whole — groomed me for months. I resisted her at first because I had a girlfriend far off in Vermont. But as soon as I met that girl in person, she discovered what everyone else had discovered.

Something had happened to me. Someone had hurt me. And much as it scared me to admit, someone else would hurt me as soon as I went home.

Me and that girl broke up in short order. I wouldn’t touch her. I wouldn’t let her touch me. I had been groomed to only open myself when being possessed and abused. That girl was too healthy to stay with me.

But the redhead at home? My sister’s friend who’d groomed me for months already?

I’d never had a drink before, but when my sister brought me camping with her, that redhead, my brother, and a slew of other friends, I had more than a little to drink. For a skinny little girl who’d already been sent to the hospital to make sure she didn’t starve herself to death, I had more than a little. More than a lot. More than I ever want to have again.

I tried to talk to my sister the next day about what happened. What her friend had done.

“I think she did that to everyone,” my sister said.

I don’t want to hate my sister for bringing that woman into our lives, but they were nearly the same age. I was barely thirteen. My sister is four years older. Her friend was an adult.

I don’t want to hate her, but I have as much power over that as I did over whether she and her friends abused me. Forgiveness, sometimes, is a work in progress.

THE CONTRA CODE FOR CONSENT

The hospitals made their mission clearer each time they welcomed me into their padded rooms. I wasn’t there to tell the truth. I wasn’t there to get better. I was there to endure Trans Conversion Therapy. I would be there until I returned to my parents as the boy they insisted I become.

In their own way, I think they were trying to protect me.

When the money ran out and the hospitals sent me home, my step-mom told me it had nothing to do with money. I was simply broken. Beyond repair. The hospitals had given up on me. The best I could do was weep. Beg for forgiveness. And pray a strong predator would take me as I am.

The two friends who should have made me feel terrified were named Todd and Sean. Todd worked at Diamond Jims, an arcade in the Metro Center mall in Jackson, MS. Sean worked downstairs in a variety of clothing stores.

They liked me. All of the men in that arcade did. Most of them liked having a little sister that knew more about video games than they did.

Todd and Sean liked having me around for something else.

My dad sent me to their place once. Twice. Again and again. I don’t know what he would have done if he’d found out how often they tied me up and left me in the closet.

AN ADVANCED EDUCATION

When I was an adult, one of those abusers included my ex during grad school. She laughed at me when I froze at her question whether I had any experience with men. Humiliating me was just one more source of entertainment for her.

I tried to tell each new abuser what each prior one had done.

While I had a shaved head, a single blush turned my head purple. She provoked that feeling of humiliation, massaged it, then crushed what was left of me into submission with the power of her will and her words, her neglect and her cruelty.

She got off on power and validation as much as my twin brother. They used whoever was around them — especially me — as their next supply. Maybe that was why they hated each other so readily. Abusers who need a high level of control either become each other’s fiercest allies or fiercest enemies.

She got off on sex like him, too. One of the last encounters between us — after that, I declared myself asexual — involved her coercing me into a threesome, getting blackout drunk (not unusual), and then passing out to leave me to clean up the emotional aftermath (even less unusual).

It’s not that I can’t have sex. An asexual orientation doesn’t work like that. I can even enjoy it! But I don’t blame younger me for losing any hint of desire for a person who used and abused me, then refused to show up when I tried to share the harm she’d caused.

I BLAME MYSELF

My decision to hang on to those abusers and addicts as long as they would have me…

That decision always left me hurt in a way that was ultimately my fault. Reacting to an awful situation and an awful person makes a lot of sense. You’re just doing what anyone else would do when their life is at stake.

But at some point, I chose to stay long past when it was clear that no matter how I begged for them to stop — THAT HURTS, PLEASE STOP — I had to accept a lesson that has come to define me when confronted with another person’s illness.

I didn’t cause it. I can’t control it. I can’t cure it.

IT WASN’T RAPE UNTIL IT WAS

I tried to tell my siblings about the new experiences of abuse when I returned to them broken and wounded from each new partner. The ones they’d warned me would only hurt me just like the old ones. The ones who ended up hurting me just like my siblings did, too.

I feared what would come if I faced what happens if I didn’t accept the comfort of an abuser. Be that my father, my mother, my identical twin brother, my sister, or any of the dangerous lovers I foolishly hoped would take their place.

They used whoever was around them — especially me — as their next supply.

I accepted the bargain each time. Their comfort brought cruelty and neglect, but also the safety of a bodyguard.

I feared what those bodyguards would do if I told them no.

I feared what they would do if I stopped lying for them.

I feared what they would reveal if I asked them to show up for me the way I needed them to. Just this once. I couldn’t always serve as an extension of them.

It’s strange. Sometimes, you just can’t know what it will be like until you do it.

Did I really think me coming to them any measure of healthy and whole would ever make a difference in whether they showed up for me?

I didn’t cause it. I can’t control it. I can’t cure it.

SO I TOLD THEM NO

I’m not afraid of them any more.

Whatever remained of that fear came out of me when I vomited up their poison.

You just can’t know what it will be like until you do it.

I accept that rather than confront the people abusing me, my parents blamed me as the motivation for any bad behavior. Fix me and they would fix the abuse.

My parents sent me to Trans Conversion Therapy. They tried to turn me into a gay man. Sinful but acceptable.

Go here if you want to read about my life inside those hospitals.

A year or two after I got out that last time, I cried into my step-mom’s shoulder and told her how sorry I was that I’d fought against what she’d tried to turn me into. It’s taken me twenty years to crawl back from that shame-filled apology.

DEAR ABUSERS, YOU FAILED

I reached out to my step-mom recently. I gotta say I understand why she didn’t reply. What was I really going to say besides demand an explanation?

There will never be a worthy justification for her abuse. Not hers or anyone else’s.

She will never have a good answer for why she never showed up to say she was sorry for inflicting some of the most horrifying child abuse imaginable. She will never express remorse for empowering my father to reach new heights of his own abuse in the name of God.

Trans Conversion Therapy is evil. I knew I was a girl long before I met that step-mother. But she knew better than I did. She demanded I live as a man. A gay man, if I had to. But never the person it was obvious I already was.

Best-case scenario, my step-mom would see my face and know she failed. She was never going to turn me into a boy. It doesn’t work that way. You can’t TURN a person into anything other than what they are. And I have always been a woman.

Maybe that’s why those tricks didn’t work with me.

MY IDENTICAL TWIN BROTHER

My identical twin brother is now an adult predator who argues that people like him are a stabilizing force in a world of sharks, prey, and penguins. How could he have turned out otherwise? For all my resentment toward the hospitals that tried to turn a little girl into a gay man, they at least protected me from the worst of the abuse that was happening at home with my family.

She was never going to turn me into a boy. It doesn’t work that way. You can’t TURN a person into anything other than what they already are.

I went into hospitals at nine years old. I was essentially raised in those hospitals. I was surrounded by people who — however ill informed — told me I deserved to be free of the abuse they said was obviously happening at my home.

My brother? My sister? They remained at that home. They were stuck with the cruelty and abuse from our parents. First our mom and dad, then our step-mom and dad, then the countless abusers who taught them the paths that have plagued their footsteps ever since.

ESCAPING MY BROTHER’S SHADOW

To think of all I gave trying to be worthy of my brother’s protection. To think of all that so many other women have given to that abuser. That predator. A man with a long history of violating and silencing women. A man who once bragged to me about the girl who dared to tell him she’d felt violated last night, but not to worry.

He’d taken care of that.

SEDUCTION STRATEGIES FOR ALPHA CHODES

My brother bragged that he’d intimidated and manipulated his latest sexual assault victim into believing she’d been wrong to even bring up that she’d experienced last night as a violation.

Next time, she would know better than to blame him for her unwanted feelings. Those were her fault. He’d intended no harm, been so careful not to cause any harm, so he took no responsibility for any harm.

It took me until now to understand what he did to her.

It took me until now to understand how he did the same thing to me.

To think of all that so many other women have given to that abuser. That predator. A man with a long history of violating and silencing women.

It took me until now to understand that I excused his cruelty because I believed his lie that it was meant to turn me into a better person.

He has since then crafted an entire philosophy rationalizing why anyone who expresses any boundaries with him that he disagrees with is clearly and obviously the one with greater fault than he.

Sure, he is often at fault. He is many things, but never what you say.

I think back to all of the ways in which he intimidated, manipulated, abused, and silenced women. I think back to all the times those same tactics worked with me. I’m ashamed to say that I took comfort in being one of his abused women. I felt seen — and what a powerful drug that turned out to be.

That drug kept me in the prison of his abuse and addictions until only a few years ago.

ONE FINAL FIGHT

Late in 2020, I moved back in with my sister. I didn’t know until recently why she almost instantly pushed for me to go back to another hospital. Back to the place that had nearly killed me.

I didn’t know why a part of me had always yearned to do just that. To return to the one place that had given me an occasional five minutes of peace.

There was safety in the hospital’s rules. At least they had structure. Order. Predictability. And a promise that if I did what they said, they could turn me into the only thing my parents insisted would make me worthy.

And if that meant I had to play a part for the rest of my life, at least they’d die knowing they’d accomplished that much.

Cruelty, as the saying goes, was the point.

I’M PUTTING DOWN MY SWORD

Saying that out loud feels like throwing up. Vomiting poison that has consumed me for thirty years. Literally retching like something is coming out of me.

I gotta say though…for me? Whenever I throw up? It’s the worst experience of my life when it’s happening. But once it’s over, once the poison is out, I almost always feel better.

And I can only hope to convey to you that setting myself free from their lies has, indeed, brought me to a place I am finally able to call home.

WHAT I AM NOT IS NOT WHAT I AM (a Rare Poem From a Never Poet)

I am not trash.

I am a woman.

I am here.

I am in my body.

I am alive.

They will never again take my truth from me.

They will never again inspire me to hide.

Not as long as I am here.

Not as long as I can rise.

I know my truth belongs to me.

I know I am alive.

UPDATE: What Do I Do Now That The World Didn’t End?

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