Possible Triggering: Violence against butches.

[EnderD_503]

Originally Posted by Heart

Many butches who experience violence are experiencing it as women, (whether they personally id that way or not). They are being targeted for being non-conforming women in the eyes of the attacker. To derail that by talking about violence towards men seems inappropriate to me.

I disagree. There are butches out there who have been assaulted not for being a non-conforming woman, but for being a non-conforming or "unidentifiable" person. In that way, many who are identified as "queer" "not straight" or "non-cis" in some way are not necessarily being seen by their assaulter as a woman or even as a man. They are "freaks" which is another aspect of the dehumanization that occurs in violent and sexual assaults against non-conforming people.

Of course, there are also butches who do experience rape as women, and who are raped for being non-conforming women. But plastering that one experience on every butch is an incorrect generalization...and vice versa of course.

The second issue is that if one does not experience themselves as a woman, if one does not identify as a woman, then I believe it's wrong to generalize and say that they experienced the assault as a woman. Thinking back to the assault of Branden Tina as an example, after his death so many tried to write him off as a "lesbian" and even the movie they made about him tries to portray him as a woman following the sexual assault he experienced. I think that it is really important in these conversations to recognise that differences in experience, as far as saying whether someone experiences something as a "man" or as a "woman." I would never say that a transwoman who has been raped experienced her rape as a "man," for example. Saying that butches who don't id as women or female experience assault as a woman also feels like the aggressor who is trying to "correct their orientation/gender" through rape has achieved their goal both in their own eyes and in the eyes of outsiders looking in on the situation...that male id'd butches or trans id'd butches are "guys until they get raped." In such traumatic cases I think we should be more understanding of how each victim perceives their own assault.

Instead of bringing instances of XY men being raped, or non-butch women being raped into this thread, why not just stick to how butches feel about the issue no matter if they id as a woman or not.