WHY DOES IT HURT WHEN I HAVE SEX PART 2: ENTANGLED IDENTITIES

This piece was originally written and published February 16, 2020 on www.queerfutures.com by sav schlauderaff

I often return to this quote from Eli Clare’s (2015) piece “stones in my pocket, stones in my heart”: Gender reaches into disability; disability wraps around class; class strains against abuse; abuse snarls into sexuality; sexuality folds on top of race...everything finally piling into a single human body. To write about any aspect of identity, any aspect of the body, means writing about this entire maze. This I know, and yet the question remains: where to start? (p. 143) In fact here are my thoughtfeelings from my MA thesis (2018): “This is why I find it so hard to understand the usefulness of categorizing myself because how am I meant to examine my life through a monist lens rather than intersectionally? How am I meant to find where my disability ends and my transness starts? Or meant to ignore the formative and controversial seeds of my abuse? Do I not wrap and bind my painful joints to subdue the sharp pains to a dull ache? Is this not akin to binding my chest to subdue the sharp pains of dysphoria?”

These entanglements of my queerness, transness, my disabilities and chronic illnesses, my trauma due to domestic abuse and sexual abuse/rape have left me with unclear and often contradictory feelings about identifying as aromantic and asexual. And they have left me with a lot of very clear, sharp pain around sex. I wrote out my feelings on this in August of 2018 “Aromantic? Asexual? SA victim/survivor? Dysphoria? ...or why does it hurt when I have sex?” Which is consistently one of our most viewed Sunday Sentiments posts. I often find myself returning to, or being forced to return to, my memories and feelings about my abuse during the spring. Namely because spring semester of the school year has always been a time where my past partners have picked more fights, or when they ramped up their abuse. It also is inherently, in my opinion, a more stressful time of the school year. And as someone who has never not been in school since pre-K my personal calendar is unfortunately the academic school year. Spring has become ingrained as a traumatic time moreso since 2018, the year I finished my Master’s degree, and also the specific time when my chronic illnesses and disabilities became worse. My mobility and energy vastly decreased and my nerve pain/numbness quickly skyrocketed. On top of this, in spring of 2018 I was sexually assaulted on more than one occasion by close friends, and due to the forced isolation of writing a thesis I felt very distanced from my close friends/chosen family and didn’t have the support I needed at the time nor the resources to be able to reach out. I was alone, and in pain, and fatigued—and had turned to harmful coping mechanisms aka various forms of self harm. I still find myself trying to process this time period, because shortly after, that Summer of 2018 I was getting ready to move again for my PhD program. And although that summer was one of the happiest times of my life, as I was surrounded by my chosen family in a city I finally felt at home with, it was very painful because I knew I had to leave.

Trauma, domestic abuse and anorexia have also exacerbated my chronic illnesses (and are chronic illnesses). Chronic illness/chronic pain are isolating and heavily shift your relationship to your body. And it is hard to feel present and connected within my body when it is either numb or on fire with nerve pain? Where is the pleasure? I was holding, and still am holding, so much pain and trauma from this time. And because of this, I have spent the past year and a half actively avoiding sex, relationships, and making new friends. Because I have been too exhausted, and in too much pain, and too depressed, and too sick, and too afraid. I am so afraid of being harmed again that I have isolated myself. I suppose this is an attempt at opening myself up again, to finally start to create a new home and repair my relationship to my bodymind. --- I hold so many contradictions within myself about love, sex, relationships etc. These are some thoughtfeelings I have been sitting with namely around my fear/disdain for romantic relationships, and its relation to my sexual abuse and experiences of forced & coerced sex. Cw: discussions about domestic abuse and sexual violence. tldr; experiences of trauma around sex and relationships and my sexuality & gender make it hard to easily parse out my feelings and identities. I also can never detangle the impact domestic violence & sexual assault have had on me and by extension my identity as aromantic, queer & trans nonbinary (and fluctuatingly as asexual). Do these identities have to feel "inherent" to be valid? Or can we acknowledge our "messy" and contradictory lives? --- I've only ever been in two long term "serious" relationships in my teens/early 20s, both of which were abusive in different ways, and led to me engaging in harmful behaviors/self harm toward myself. Both of these relationships, my partners were sexually abusive in different ways. Whereas my first partner violently raped me on more than one occasion specifically as a way to assert his power over me, in my second relationship I was often coerced into sex or assaulted while they were very drunk. However, I believed in all of these instances of being sexually abused that I was deserving of the abuse. Or I had convinced myself that I wanted to have sex but just not that kind of sex or sex at that specific moment, which is what I also told myself after I was drugged and raped in high school—which both of my partners told me I deserved because I was “such a slut.” This is to say that I had internalized the sexual and verbal abuse I experienced, and turned my hatred in on myself. I starved and cut myself, I binge drank until I blacked out and vomited, and then would have a lot of casual sex/hook-ups to again convince myself that I actually was okay with the abuse I experienced. It was also easy to trick myself into believing this because of the nature of abusive relationships, that it would always return to the “honeymoon phase”. They would take me out on nice dates, or cook my favorite meal, apologize and cry profusely, and assure me that this would never happen again. And also because I had become convinced that this relationship was necessary for my happiness. That I was nothing without them except for some sad person who had been raped and abused, and they were there to rescue me when no one else wanted to. I was worthless to everyone except for them. Moreover, these relationships made me feel shame about my sexuality, and led to sexual abuse and coerced sex specifically because of my queerness. My second relationship ended because I came out as nonbinary and altered my appearance in ways they thought were "ugly" and "unattractive". And when you have built your relationship around sex, or when sex has been used as a way to stop abuse, this was devastating. Romantic monogamous relationships (especially with cis men) have really truly fucked me over, and I have never actually desired to be in one. I was often teased by peers and my family in high school for never being in a relationship (namely because I was very closeted and grew up in northern Minnesota). So, I felt pressured into making my relationships official, and then felt a panicked need to hyper-perform romantic gestures and to have sex that I was not comfortable with. There was a need to perform happiness in my relationships even though I was often crying every night, and would frequently have explosive fights with my partners. These fights would often be in front of our friends, and even still so many people would tell me how great my relationship was. Showing how much we normalize couples fighting with each other, and also couples over-performing romantic and sexual attraction to each other. Romantic relationships have always made me feel unsafe, like that person has access to too much of me. And so much of my sexuality (both my sexual identity and they ways and how often I had sex) is wrapped up in my abuse and how I coped after being abused. Sexual trauma has made sex physically painful for me. And sexual trauma has also led to hypersexuality and me using sex as a way to self harm. And my feelings slide between sexual repulsion and sex as self harm, and I'm still trying to parse out if I am capable of having feelings in the middle. Or if trauma has just entirely ruled this out. --- I felt so unsure about claiming asexual My past felt too tainted from me trying to convince myself that I needed to have sex to be worthy of Something Worthy of love And kindness Felt too tainted by the countless times my body had been claimed by someone else Felt too tainted by trauma And did this trauma make me asexual? And if it did should I even talk about that? Had I just been using sex as yet another harmful coping mechanism? A way to prove that I was still ‘normal’ after the assaults and violence. But I can’t think of a time where sex hasn’t been painful And I mean Physically. Emotionally. Mentally. Spiritually Painful. I can’t truthfully answer if I think I actually enjoy having sex. Did sex ever make me feel empowered? Or did I only realize how much I didn’t enjoy or desire sex after I started to address my sexual trauma, my eating disorder, and self-harming? After I came out to myself? Is the genealogy important? --- what do you need what do you need what do you need what do you need what do you need what do you need what do you need what do you need what do you need just let me know !! what do you need what do you need silence what do you need what do you need what do you need what do you need checking in you don’t seem ok what do you need what do you need what do you need what do you need what do you need time what do you need what do you need what do you need what do you need you know you can talk to me anytime what do you need what do you need how are you feeling ? what do you need what do you need what do you need what do you need what do you need what do you need what do you need overwhelmed what do you need what do you need what do you need what do you need what do you need what do you need what do you need how can I help? what do you need what do you need what do you need what do you need what do you need what do you need what do you need are you still not feeling well ? ? what do you need what do you need what do you need what do you need what do you need what do you need // \\I don’t know yet. I’m not sure I will. --- There is so much pressure to enjoy sex To discuss it loudly In my gender studies classes So much pressure to prove I’m not “afraid” or “uncomfortable” to talk about sex To not be embarrassed or “prudish” So much pressure to not ruin the fun atmosphere of the classroom with my traumatic relationship with sex Am I queer enough if I’m not having all the queer sex? Or not having sex at all? Am I queer enough if I claim asexuality loudly. --- I still feel unsure discussing these unsure feelings But I am learning. I don't feel the need to define my worth by the number of people who want my body, who claim it with their words and their hands I just want to know what it feels like to feel at home in my body, and not in pain, not overwhelmed by numbness, not dissociated or depressed or full of shame. I want to feel love and care and kindness towards myself.

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Sav is a trans, queer and disabled PhD student in Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Arizona in Tucson. Their research in critical disability studies questions the ways chronically ill individuals engage with mainstream medicine, biotechnology, biohacking and alternative forms of healing. As well as the interconnections between trauma, chronic illness, pain, (embodied/felt) memory, and self care/community care for the bodymindspirit. Sav utilizes their academic training in genetics, molecular biology and gender studies with autobiography, poetry and new media. They graduated from San Diego State University in 2018 with their M.A. in Women's Studies, where they completed their thesis "Rejecting the Desire for 'Health': Centering Crip Bodyminds in Genetic Testing"--bridging their undergraduate degrees in Genetics, Cell Biology and Development (GCD) and Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies (GWSS) from the University of Minnesota--Twin Cities. Beyond, and intertwining with, their academic research, Sav is passionate about education, activism and community building especially around the LGBTQIA+ communities, trauma/PTSD, eating disorder recovery, and disability--in addition to the multiple intersections of these topics and identities. They always strive to create accessible, intersectional, collaborative and intentional workshops and lectures. They have worked to create interactive workshops, classrooms, internship programming, and mentorship connections with undergraduates and high school students centering the values of radical vulnerability, kindness, listening, and meaningful reflection. Outside of research, they are currently the Graduate Assistant at the Disability Cultural Center, a Safe Zone facilitator at the LGBTQ+ Resource Center, and a member of the Disability Studies Initiative at the University of Arizona. Sav is a co-founder of "The Queer Futures Collective" where they experiment with different forms of writing, workshops, and performances in-person and online. Sav integrates reflective journaling with theoretic work in their Sunday Sentiments articles, and creates accessible teaching materials and handouts that are free for users to download.

February 16, 2020