I have long been very open about the fact that I was molested and raped as a child and that I attempted suicide once and I have spent a lot of my life suicidal. My suicidal tendencies were an ongoing issue when the first version of this piece was published but are no longer an issue and haven't been since some health event that occurred in the fall one year, probably 2022 if the date of publication of the original version of this piece is accurate.
I spent a lot of years being very circumspent about certain details. I didn't want to name the person that raped me and giving certain details amounts to "naming" him because he's my brother and I only have one brother. So stating that my brother raped me amounts to "naming" him.
I wanted to tell MY story. I didn't want to drag his name through the mud. He was sixteen years old when he assaulted me, and twenty years later, I concluded it was a really stupid, tragic misunderstanding and he never meant to hurt me. And he spent a lot of years genuinely making amends, which I have written about elsewhere.
So although I eventually "named" him, I still tend to not want to talk too much about it because I don't want him hurt.
But I can't tell this story today without really highlighting the fact that it was, in fact, my brother who raped me because that's an essential detail as to why I was suicidal for so many years. And this is a story I think needs telling.
He raped me the summer I turned twelve and he molested me until late February the year I was thirteen. I turned fourteen about 3.5 months later in early June and I went to visit my sister at college where I really hit it off with one of her friends who happened to be a 21-year-old statistics major.
I was a math geek. He was a math geek. I was so tall and smart, everyone at UGA thought I was just a freshman there, not someone's younger sister visiting.
So this ended up being my first boyfriend.
The summer I was fourteen, I was falling in love for the first time. And it ended abruptly when the family had a meeting -- without me -- and discussed the matter and decided that this 21-year-old man had an unhealthy interest in me and they were going to put a stop to this.
So my brother, the person who actually had molested and raped me and had only stopped molesting me a few months earlier, was at that family meeting deciding that this guy that I was involved with of my own volition who had always treated me with respect and wasn't pressuring me for sex -- they decided he was the bad guy. And my brother, who had actually raped me, got to play the role of "protective, concerned family member looking out for my welfare and protecting me from sexual predators who prey upon children."
So for many years I believed that was the crux of why I was so suicidal and batshit insane, though I'm not longer suicidal and now feel clear there was some medical issue that was a primary root cause. But the entire world agrees that young adult men who date younger women who maybe aren't yet 18, are all pedophiles and rapists and perverts and men like my brother, who actually raped me but pretended to want to "protect" me when I'm reality he was probably merely jealous, are the good guys.
My family threatened to throw the guy in jail if he ever contacted me again. So I never even got to say "goodbye" to him.
It was a really awful experience and I ended up really depressed for the next few months, which my mother blamed my boyfriend for "abusing" me and not on the family doing this bizarre shit to me of denying me agency over my own sexuality and letting my rapist participate in that event. Which, unfortunately, isn't really all that uncommon in some sense because the world at large tends to not want to let women have any agency over their own sexuality, which is all kinds of messed up and problematic.
At age sixteen, I told my sister I had been molested and she told my mom and yadda. So it eventually came out.
I want to say up front that my relatives are all, every last one of them -- including my brother -- good people who mean well and try hard but don't always get things right. An awful lot of girls who are victims of incest get told flat out "Stop telling lies about your brother/father/uncle, you little whore, you." And nothing like that was ever done to me.
They believed my story and they wanted to be supportive and they just didn't know how to be supportive.
How do you choose between your two children? My parents had a duty to both of us, me and my brother alike.
So while they wanted to help me, in contrast to how they railroaded my boyfriend, they were much more sympathetic to my brother's bad behavior. They didn't promptly call the cops on him or anything like that, which just reinforced prior warped messaging that happened two years earlier and added to how poisoned I felt.
The drama came to a head the following year when I was seventeen. My mother wanted the family to have a nice Easter meal at some local German restaurant and my brother was being an ass and I had not eaten anything yet and had slept too little and I ended up getting up from the table and walking home.
I have a genetic disorder, which hadn't yet been diagnosed. With not eating, not sleeping enough and walking home, I ended up in a real frazzled state.
So it was later that day I cut my wrist open and I ended up being taken to the ER and I got stitches. I blatantly lied to the doctor and claimed it was an accident because I didn't want to end up in a psych ward but they could tell by looking at it I was lying. Still, without an admission of a suicide attempt, they couldn't put me in a psych ward.
After that, my relatives backed the hell off and gave me some space. They didn't know how to deal with what was happening, but they didn't want me dead over it either.
These experiences informed my views of what happened with Genevieve and the kind of support I chose to give her -- knowing that most of the world would be judgy and feel I was doing a bad thing. She contacted me when she was like just about to turn 19 years old I think and we promptly began spending a great deal of time talking online together and we did so for about nine months.
She had attempted suicide at least twice. She overdosed once and I think, like me, she cut her wrist once.
That I know of. There may have been other attempts that weren't discussed.
Her parents never took her to a doctor for her suicide attempts. They let her sleep off the overdose. I don't know what they did about her cutting herself. But she never saw a physician and she justified it to me with "Well, suicide is illegal where I live."
So they didn't get her treatment and -- unlike my family -- they also didn't quit their shit. She was suicidal because she was trans and they couldn't accept it.
I eventually concluded that when push came to shove, the reason that her mother was so adamant that she was a boy is because her mother had molested her. This woman was okay with being a child molester but she could not accept the implication that if the son she molested was a daughter, did that mean she was actually gay?
So it was better in the mother's mind to have a dead son than a living daughter because then at least she wasn't gay. Thus, the enormous family pressure insisting Genevieve absolutely could not possibly be a girl.
So I concluded that her family was trying to kill Gevnevieve. They were trying to commmit murder by suicide.
I concluded this because when push came to shove in my family, my family decided they didn't want me dead. And they backed off.
This was part of why I helped Genevieve flee her parent's house. I felt if I didn't, she would soon be dead. And I stand by that.
Lots of people who are trans are suicidal. The literature I have personally seen tends to attribute that to dysphoria, which Genevieve also suffered from.
But I don't think dysphoria is why she was suicidal. I think she was suicidal because her family was basically trying to kill her.
And I think this story needs to be told because I think murder by suicide is probably a fairly common story for the LGBTQ community and it needs to stop.
Footnote
This is a cleaned up and modified version of a piece by the same title originally published here on April 20, 2022.