“I have a hard time thinking of myself as a survivor,” Jane said to me. We sat at a Vietnamese restaurant in Chinatown. Jane and I had both been abused as kids; she categorizes what she went through as psychological sexual abuse; I call what I went through both psychological sexual abuse and rape/molestation.

“I worried when we first started being friends, that we were only friends because of this weird connection,” she said. “I was telling you things that I wasn’t telling anyone, really. Least of all not anyone I was dating.”

I said it felt similar to me: that she was one of the only people I knew who I felt like really got me, because our experiences had been so similar in some ways.

My therapist used to ask me, is it necessary that someone understands, having been through a similar experience? Or is it enough that they seek to understand?

I was stuck on the topic, as I often had been, of how abuse had affected my dating life. I asked Jane, how had it affected hers?

“I don’t think I would be a lesbian if I hadn’t been through what I’d been through,” Jane said. “I know some really lovely men. I was in love with a man once. But I can’t envision being with a man unless I was a man.”

“That’s so real. I feel safest dating trans women, but that feels really stifling sometimes. I really like men, but I’m terrified. I catch myself clinging to crushes on boys who are sweet to me, but live across the country.”

“You’re inducing a crush.”

“YES!”

“Yeah, it’s like, why am I attracted to straight women? I hate that I feel this. I’m chasing someone who doesn’t want me, categorically.”

“I feel like I’m always following crushes that are bad for me, out of a feeling of scarcity. And it all has to do with me internalizing messages from abuse and transmisogyny. And I know I’m doing it. I see it so clearly because I know the patterns of addiction so well. But I do it anyway.” Jane nodded. She had called herself an alcoholic, and I had been addicted to weed for years, and we were both sober.

We walked out into the cold night, where Jane unlocked her bike. We hugged and kissed each other on the cheek goodbye. I watched her ride away.

***

I decided to ask this trans girl off OKCupid—we’ll call her S.—who I was planning on having a date with if she wanted to Skype, and it was fun. The next week I took her up on her offer to come to her house. Ordinarily I would never have met someone off the internet in a private rather than a public place first (at least, not anymore, after I realized how stupid I had been doing that in my early-mid twenties…) but because I had felt so comfortable with her on Skype, I went to her place. I wanted to do at the moment was hang out with this girl and play with her cats.

As soon as she opened the door, I got a sense of something feeling off. The apartment’s extreme clutter gave me a whiff, and so did S.’s cracking voice as she almost immediately unloaded to me about her difficult day, about her professor having disrespected her concerns with the all-male reading curriculum of the class. I find there are generally two ways that a person might talk about their rough day: In one, someone asks if they can talk about it, and if you agree, they let you in a little bit by being vulnerable. You feel might feel needed and warm. On the other track, the one that goes straight down, a person implicitly positions themself as the burning sun, and makes it clear that you’re a small orbiting planet to the center of their galaxy.

We sat on her bed upstairs and her cats jumped all over. I read the superficial symbols that I used to assuage my doubts about this near-stranger. She’s a punk trans woman, I told myself, and we share political views. Sitting on the bed, S. said that one of her cats would often come up to her, and in miming her cat’s behavior, she picked up my wrist, pulled my hand over her bangs, and over her mouth. I told her that that wasn’t OK. She looked horrified, and said that no, it wasn’t, and that she couldn’t believe that she had done that. I was stunned. We sat there for a long time. I drew in my notebook casually, as I do in almost any social situation, and she pulled out her journal and started furiously writing. She eventually asked what I was thinking.

“I think… I am going… to go now.”

“I think that’s a good idea. Because if we kept hanging out, it would be like pretending that what I just did wasn’t fucked up, and it would be like asking you to feel OK about it.”

She walked me out, with me half-wanting her not to. I felt her presence like a ghost’s when I turned my back on her to fill my water bottle at the kitchen sink.

Her emotionality, her being close to tears at this moment scared me. It felt dangerously close to a dynamic I had been in many times before: When someone had hurt me, and I had said so, and they had gotten upset about it in a way that implicitly asked me to drop my emotions and take care of theirs.

I decided to walk a ways north to clear my head, rather than get back on the bus. I cursed, walking through the sludgy snow and melting ice, and a thought disturbed me. In the past year or so, I had been sexual with a number of other trans women, at least half of whom had broken my boundaries multiple times. Each of these girls had good theoretical models of consent, and they always felt terrible and apologized profusely when I pointed out where they had ignored the boundaries I’d set. “I don’t want you to feel bad,” I thought, “I just want you to not do that.” My friend Jetta once said that there’s no such thing as being bad at sex: you’re either a good listener, or you’re not.

Was it because I was for the most part, only dating other trans women that I was seeing this pattern come from trans women? Was it because our culture makes it easier for anyone to break a trans woman’s boundaries, even if you’re another trans woman? And/or is the omnipresent blurring of trans womens’ boundaries—through stares, comments, fear of physical attack—that trans women are left with a shitty conception of real-life boundaries, even when we know that we know better?

***

Later, I would do what I’ve always done when I’ve gotten hurt: I told. I told my friend Jess on Skype, Jane as we walked through falling snow, Janice at a diner, my friend Katie (who’s in a band that my band has played with) over coffee at my house. Sometimes it’s been hard for me to let my emotions in until I blithely tell a friend that I went through something terrible, but I’m mostly OK, and then I see their face racked with concern. At that moment, the fucked up-ness of what I went through hits me.

I didn’t tell my trans women friends—and maybe I should, very delicately—because I didn’t think S. posed a real danger to anyone, and I was afraid of her getting shut out by a community that she badly needs.