I am fighting this month and every month for those many, many of us who were sexually assaulted for being queer, even targeted by corrective rape or imprisoned for fighting off attackers.
We bring out the ugliest in those claiming to be "normal". We place higher value in our and other's consent, love, vulnerability and authenticity than in cultural norms or even laws. Within living memory, homosexuality was criminalised in my country and still is in many places, while our genders have never not been under attack.
Our very bodies and souls are criminal, abberant, shameful to those who feel entitled to use violence to prop up their fiction of "normalcy". They can not help but steep so low because what they have sold their souls to is based in lies and cruelty from the very foundation.
We, the victims of corrective rape and similar forms of targeted sexual violence, deserve a space where we can heal, where we don't have to be strong but can be vulnerable, where we're not kept small but can be strong and fierce. We contain multitudes.
One day we or our kin in spirit will inherit a world in which it is unthinkable to let anyone, no matter who, get away with rape.
#RapeCulture #pride #QueerPride #CorrectiveRape #RapeSurvivor #Feminism #QueerFeminism