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Recently, podcaster Drew Afualo got into some controversy when an old podcast clip about transgender women went viral. Their non-binary guest, ER, said the following:

ER: Truest Thought on this is that I think that trans women have a more beautiful understanding of what womanhood is.

Drew: I agree.

ER: I think that unfortunately, the programming for cis women is, is, it is, it, it’s kind of sad sometimes.

Drew: Yeah, it is. Yeah.

ER: and I, I’m like, actually, no, your womanhood is not your role. Your womanhood is not your status in society, and your womanhood is not your ability to be sexually assaulted. Yeah. And this trans, this trans debate that’s, like, centering all on, well, like, if a, quote-unquote, “man in a dress”…is in a bathroom … he will rape me. Mm I’m like, okay, well, the, then it sounds like the problem that we have- Is with cis men is that men are going to rape. . And women are fearing rape their whole lives.

Drew: Right.

ER: And when you talk to trans women about their womanhood, they talk about… It, like, almost gets me choked up. They talk about it in such this, like, beautiful, expansive way. Yeah. Of like, it’s, it’s this feeling I always had. Yeah. Yeah. You know? It’s this truth I’ve always known. It’s the most beautiful parts of me. Mm-hmm. It’s my softest self. And I don’t feel that from cis women right now because I think the propaganda is so strong.

ER: I agree.

It’s not surprising that cis women online are upset about this take. Honestly, I have a lot of thoughts about it, and I want to dig into them here.

Upon listening to this clip, my immediate thought was that, as a survivor, sexual violence is something I can’t entirely disconnect from my experience of womanhood. I transitioned quite young, and I remember a shift that happened in my life where suddenly I was receiving a certain amount of attention from men that I didn’t exactly understand. As a child, I started to develop breasts; for reasons I’m still not exactly sure. It was likely just your classic gynochomastia, but coupled with my generally feminine voice and way of carrying myself, it was not that uncommon for people to assume that I was a little girl. I remember when I would go to Hollywood by myself as a pre-teen, and I started to experience street harassment. Men would pull up alongside me as I walked down the street, asking where I was going and whether I needed a ride. My parents didn’t raise me like a little girl with any education about how this sort of attention from men wasn’t good. Unfortunately, several men would take advantage of that ignorance, and I spent my youth in a wave of hypersexuality where I was attempting to repeat some of the more coercive experiences I had with men in a way that felt empowering, instead of disempowering. Of course, ultimately all this meant was that more men had access to me when I was a minor, and it’s actually taken me a while to recognize and accept that I was trafficked as a child.

I guess for me, for quite some time, it was very hard for me to separate these experiences from my own conception of self because it often felt like my femininity was the reason I was being assaulted. It took me a while to accept that my first rapist, who drugged and raped me, was actually an adult who decided to prey on what was obviously a child. Beneath my hypersexuality was this confidence that, because of the shape of my body, the way I was dressed, and the way I carried myself, I was to blame for why I was assaulted multiple times. I’ve experienced sexual violence routinely for most of my life. As recently as a year and a half ago, my Uber driver sexually assaulted me, and to this day, I still have nerves around taking Ubers to and from the club because I still occasionally feel like the way my body is shaped is part of why I experience sexual violence. It’s an idea that is hard to get out of my mind because of trauma and how my assault seemed to line up with my overtly feminine expressions. It doesn’t help that oftentimes when I speak of my experiences with sexual violence, cis women often respond with “ welcome to womanhood,” as if I haven’t been a transgender woman for most of my life. The truth is, there have been so few phases of my life where sexual violence was not a constant threat and fear, and what I know is that no one particularly cares when a trans woman is assaulted. I’ve never reported, and likely never will.

I get where  Drew and ER are coming from. For cis women, being raised as girls means these experiences are baked in from the start. A lot of cis women end up believing their femininity is the reason they were assaulted, and that informs their often conflicted relationship with their femininity, and shapes how they move through the world. Some will even change everything about themselves, hoping it will keep them safe. Many women endure sexual violence in silence. In a culture where Epstein’s associates run the world and influence culture, it often feels as if sexual violence is an inevitable and central part of our culture that objectifies women and fights tooth and nail to limit their possibilities. I get the real sense in my life that sexual violence was weaponized against me; utilized to humble and immobilize me. The reality is, sexual violence shapes how you exist in the world, and it’s something women are forced to keep in the back of their minds all the time.

I think what ER was really trying to say is that a lot of trans women start out with a kind of hopeful, maybe even idealized, view of womanhood. When you’re reaching for femininity for the first time, it can feel new and exciting, and you haven’t yet had years of being told your body is the reason for the violence you face. Trans women often embrace things that cis women have learned to let go of just to avoid harassment. Remember when Dylan Mulvaney shared her ‘girlhood’ online? A lot of cis women saw that as making fun of femininity, even though that probably wasn’t the intention. I get why women who have lived through the rough parts of being a woman in a misogynistic world might feel like she glossed over all the hard stuff to celebrate the hot pink artifice of it all. For many women, the reality of having a uterus and living as a woman in this culture is complicated, and all of it- the good, the bad, and the ugly- shapes how they see themselves.

Another thing that comes to mind is how this idea of a trans woman having a positive relationship with womanhood usually comes from someone who’s still pretty new to living as a trans woman. I notice people talk about trans women like we only get a few years to live in our ‘truth’; and sometimes it feels like people don’t expect us to live this long. People often don’t understand that while dehumanization can of course come in a less than flattering form, deification- the elevation of a person to an almost fictional, god-like position- is also dehumanizing. We get reduced to symbols or hypotheticals, and the complexities of life get left out of the conversation. Deification is dehumanizing because it will always inevitably result in someone not living up to  the over-idealized standard they’re held to. When I saw that clip, I knew it would open the door for more attacks on trans women, all because of what two people who aren’t even trans women said about us. Sure, that first taste of femininity can feel inspiring, but over time, reality sets in and the story gets a lot more complicated.

I love being a transgender woman. If I could go back, I wouldn’t change much, except maybe how naive I was about the world when I first transitioned. I wish I’d understood sooner that the men who hurt me were always going to do that, no matter what I looked like or how I acted. I’d like to say I don’t still blame myself, or my body, or my femininity, but that wouldn’t be true. I know it’s not reasonable to live in constant fear, but trauma often gives you fears that feel irrational until they’re confirmed. When I was last assaulted, it shocked me because I felt as if the era of my life where assault happened to me had come to a close. I naively believed that my consciousness about sexual violence would in some way prevent it from happening to me, but it still did. I’ve never really had the luxury of not being afraid of sexual violence because it’s happened frequently enough to me for it to feel like a common part of life. Rape changes you, and I’m still learning how to live with that.

I think one of the most alienating realities of being a transgender woman is that, yes, we do actually experience many of the same things as cis women. Still, trans women are more likely to experience sexual violence than most survivors. It’s certainly not a competition, and at the end of the day, most of these things come back to misogyny and a rape culture that creates a circumstance where trans women, because of their dehumanization, become the perfect victims who, because of their circumstance, never report the violence that happens to them. Those who abuse trans women can count on transphobia to create a barrier of protection for them. Frequently, trans women are assaulted, and then criminalized once they report it. When I was raped for the first time, it was at the start of me being trafficked, and I remember feeling like no one would ever believe me, and that even though he’d done these things to me, I was still much safer with him. Of course, that’s how grooming works, but still. I haven’t reported it to this day, and likely never will. Those who harm trans women rely on that. When trans women are imprisoned with men, they often experience v-coding, where they are trafficked to violent inmates to absorb their violence, physically and sexually. Many trans women only end up in prison because they are forced to do survival sex work on the streets, all within a culture that is increasingly removing civil rights protections for them, where a genocide is indeed happening to them.

The situation for trans women is quite bleak, and it often feels reductive to fixate on the fluffier, more shallow aspects of how a trans woman is experiencing her life. We can celebrate trans women’s relationship with femininity without comparing it to a cis woman’s. I don’t know Drew or ER, but it seems like their relationships with trans women don’t go very deep. Maybe the trans women they know are still early in their journeys and need that kind of validation, so hearing ‘trans women have a more beautiful relationship with womanhood’ feels good to them. But to me, those kinds of statements just sound like empty flattery; they’re so over the top, it’s hard to take them seriously. Maybe Drew and ER really do find something refreshing in how some trans women see their femininity, since it’s not weighed down by all the baggage that comes with being a woman in this culture. Still, I think drawing a line between how trans and cis women understand womanhood just isn’t helpful.

It’s interessting that so many cis women have misinterpreted ER’s statements as “trans women are better women than cis women”; and, ironically, in response to that idea, they did indeed affirm that their relationship with their womanhood is related to their fear of sexual violence and the way their biological functions have traumatized them. So it’s less that ER was wrong; it’s that they dared to compare a cis woman’s experience to a trans woman’s. There’s a very meta layer of this conversation because on both ends, there’s this idea that a trans woman’s womanhood relies greatly on validation or affirmation from cis women, and those designated female at birth. The desire to over-compliment trans women and deify them is often paired with the subtext that trans women need the affirmation of others for their womanhood to be valid. There’s this sense that her womanhood is conditional, and every time a trans woman steps out of line, suddenly she/her becomes they/them, and it’s reinforced that she isn’t quite a woman after all. What I’ve had to recognize with time is that I could choose to disengage from feminism. I can deny the existence of misogyny, but whether I do that or not, I will still experience misogyny. To my point, sexual violence will still be something I have to fear because of the reality of the world I live in. I cannot separate myself from women and their experiences. I cannot pretend that misogynistic violence will never happen to me. It is, in fact, naive to believe otherwise.

The truth is, if you ask any woman about her experience of womanhood, you’ll get a different answer every time. Black women will have a different perspective than white women. Women from different religions will see their womanhood in their own way. You’ll meet both trans and cis women who have a bright, hopeful view of femininity, and you’ll meet trans women who can’t separate their experience of womanhood from sexual violence. For me, what matters most is recognizing and respecting all those different experiences, rather than using them to judge or rank one another. That only helps the people who want to keep us divided. The clip from that podcast is actually a year old, and it’s trending during a time when a lot of other negative stories about transgender women are trending. From where I’m sitting, there is a very clear and concerted effort to engender hatred towards transgender women specifically. The point is to dehumanize us to the point where, when violence does happen to us, no one will care.

While we debate who has a more beautiful understanding of womanhood, a trans woman named Autumn Hill is sitting in men’s prison for simply going to a protest opposing ICE. She’ll be in prison for 50 years, meaning she’s getting more time than the people who trafficked little girls for Epstein. It’s worth noting that the girls taken by ICE are mysteriously getting pregnant in ICE facilities around the country. A trans woman named Ava Cordero was one of the first people to call out Epstein for his trafficking of herself and other girls, but when she came out, all people could do was invalidate her womanhood. We are all suffering under patriarchy and misogyny is a weapon wielded against women whether they are transgender or not. Misogynists are the only ones who benefit from our division.