You want details? Here’s details. Even though I do not believe that as a survivor I should not be forced to relive this bullshit for the sake of placating the public, I am doing this because friends of mine who are standing by me are now being harassed as apologists simply for knowing the truth and standing by the truth. I am doing this in the hope that maybe y’all will leave them alone. If you’re mad at anyone please just direct your shit to me.
Twiggy and Jamie have burned bridges throughout the Bay Area. Nobody who actually knows both them and me well at all has any doubts about what actually happened. A lot of people who I have told about my experiences with Twiggy and Jamie have responded by telling me their own traumatic experiences with them. I wish I could actually post all of the information I have collected about them here, but some of it is not mine to share.
So here, I’m sharing what’s mine.
If I am not believed and am instead belittled and blamed, well, lemme tell ya, it wouldn’t be the first time.
Buckle up. This is gonna be triggering and LONG.
JAMIE
-Constantly made sure I was aware of how much physically stronger and better at fighting Jamie was through displays of physical strength, remarks like “I could beat you up so easily,” and stories about people Jamie had beat up and how scary Jamie could be when angry.
-Penetrated and fucked me anally without asking. I have ulcerative colitis, a.k.a. I bleed out of my ass all the time. This is a condition I developed after being anally raped several years ago. Jamie did not know about my condition, but did know my survivor status, and also did not obtain my consent for that particular activity. By the time it was happening I was too triggered to stop it. I’m not calling it rape at this time. I do know that I didn’t feel I had an option to withdraw consent, that I felt pressure to continue, and that I was physically afraid of Jamie—and that Jamie wanted me to be afraid. (See the point above.)
ETA 8/2/2012: OK, I’m ready to call it rape now. I was flashing back to a point in time when I was literally bound and gagged. I had no ability to say anything or stop what was happening. Pretending I could withdraw consent is absurd. Twiggy is culpable too because Twiggy did know that anal was a hard limit for me (“No death, dismemberment or anal” is how she summed up my limits after I told them to her) and she didn’t say anything when Jamie penetrated me, she just kept fucking me.
-Made indirect death-threats and threats of violence against me constantly. The way this worked is I would do something that upset Jamie for some reason (real example: daring to imply that most victims of rape are women and most perpetrators are men, which was somehow read as transmisogyny, even though trans women and trans men are clearly included in the categories of women and men!). Directly after becoming upset with me, Jamie would post something like “I want to punch all trans men in the face until they are bloody” or “I want to kill all CAFAB trans people.” These “general statements” were defended under the rationale of reverse oppression not existing, which is true, but they were timed unmistakably to make me specifically feel physically unsafe.
TWIGGY
-Threatened to kill my cat. Later acted like it was a joke.
-When I confronted her about deliberately trying to trigger a self-injurer to relapse, she said she was a horrible person and asked me to beat her up. When I told her I had no interest in harming her, she continued to ask me to commit violence against her, saying she deserved it. Eventually Jamie told me to stop texting Twiggy because I was “making her suicidal.” This is the occasion on which Twiggy’s self-destructiveness was used most manipulatively that Twiggy wrote about Char calling her on.
BOTH TWIGGY AND JAMIE
-Touched me without consent as a rule. Coming up behind me and grabbing my butt was a normal way of greeting from Twiggy and Jamie. The fact that I engaged in the behavior that they normalized is now being held against me as unforgivable assault. (NOTE: FAILING TO ENGAGE IN BEHAVIOR NORMALIZED BY TWIGGY AND JAMIE, WHETHER SEXUAL OR POLITICAL, WAS GROUNDS FOR VERBAL PUT-DOWNS OR THREATS OF VIOLENCE.)
-Physically intimidated me. Sometimes through superior strength and fighting experience, but they also always carried knives and other weapons at all times, and were constantly flashing them around.
-Treated consent as a given.
-Pressured me, and everyone else who knew them, to agree 100 percent with their crappy politics, and became verbally abusive and sometimes physically threatening whenever there was even slight disagreement.
-Isolated us from our friends. They didn’t like anyone, and no-one liked them. If we wanted to go out and hang with other people, staying in and taking care of them was supposed to be more important. As a result Char and I pretty much dropped out of sight of our friends.
-Constant verbal put-downs. The fact that I tried to respond to these put-downs as if they were banter and in fun seems to now be the reason I am being accused of “bullying” Jamie. I cannot recall a single occasion when Jamie verbally asked me to stop teasing. I also have a hard time thinking of an occasion when I initiated the teasing.
-Put me down sexually despite my survivor status. Made fun of things like my gag reflex, even though they knew that one of the things I had survived was oral rape.
-Talking about genital essentialism—they treated me exclusively as a hole without external sex organs of any kind, and never once tried to pleasure me, except for a time when Jamie started to go down on me without asking and I had to stop Jamie from doing a triggering and dysphoric thing that I hadn’t consented to.
HOW WE WERE PULLED NONCONSENSUALLY INTO THEIR ABUSE OF EACH OTHER
-Twiggy cut Jamie with a knife. You can read about it here. After it happened Twiggy called me, and told me that there had been an accident and Jamie needed stitches. I told Twiggy to call Char because Char had the car and could drive them to the ER, which Char ended up doing. Neither of them told us how it really happened. I’m ashamed to say we didn’t ask. We just wanted to assume it was innocent.
-Jamie would try to restrict my access to seeing Twiggy, and Char’s as well. I remember one time Jamie called me and told me that Twiggy had done something bad and “wasn’t allowed” to hang out with anyone but Jamie for a while. Later I heard a rumor that Twiggy had hit Jamie. I didn’t do anything about it because I trusted them to tell me what had really happened.
-They constantly used the internet, including forums that I moderated, to bicker with each other and complain about each other publically with passive-aggressive or outright aggressive statements. You can still seem them doing this behavior on their blogs.
HOW I WAS PULLED INTO THEIR ABUSE OF OTHERS
-I moderated two trans-oriented internet forums. One was for survivors. One was a general radical trans discussion group. Twiggy and Jamie were members of both. Eventually both were banned from both groups, but not nearly soon enough. In the political group I tolerated behavior from them up to and including death threats against other members, because I was dating them and didn’t want them angry at me. (They were scary when angry.) Eventually both were banned by other mods, with my consent. After I broke up with them I stepped down from modding both groups. I actually handed over the survivor group to someone else while Twiggy and Jamie were still members. I eventually came back to the mod team and banned them myself, but not before allowing them to use the survivor group as a venue to abuse each other in public, in front of abuse survivors.
-I treated a lot of people who I really love really crappily while I was with Twiggy and Jamie. A number of friends have told me that it was like I had a personality transplant while I was with them, and that it’s good to have me back.
-Twiggy and Jamie were living with my friend Anja, who had taken them in. They continued to live with zir after we had broken up. I was unable to speak out against them because I was afraid for Anja, and felt that they essentially had zir hostage. This, as it turns out, was the truth. While Anja and I had been out of contact in the wake of the break-up, Twiggy and Jamie had been abusing and terrorizing zir. Ze eventually gave them notice to move out. They refused to leave. Anja was forced to move out of zir own apartment in order to feel safe. Eventually they left of their own accord and moved to Indiana. Anja is now back in zir apartment, and is trying to repair the damage that they did to zir home over the course of their stay.
MORE RED FLAGS
-They went through living situations extremely fast and seemed to always be getting kicked out of places.
-They had long, long sob stories about how awful everyone they had ever met had been to them, which after a while started to sound inconsistent and actually raised red flags, including stories about other people accusing them “falsely” of abuse.
-When I actually heard the other side of the story from people who T and J hated, or people who had kicked them out of living situations, it was always completely different, completely reasonable, and completely consistent with what I now know of Twiggy and Jamie.
-Most of our mutual acquaintances who had seemed to like Twiggy and Jamie later confessed that they had only been scared of them and didn’t want to arouse their anger by ending contact.
-They showed zero accountability, were unable to accept call-outs, and never expressed remorse.
IN CONCLUSION
Finally, I may be a little paranoid, but I can’t help feeling like their timing with this is a little too perfect, considering that I posted on tumblr about getting out of the psych ward recently. Kind of feels like kicking me while I’m down. Considering that Twiggy and Jamie’s move includes going to people’s blogs and finding out their triggers and then going after them— for example, sending dead animal photos to a vegan and graphic self-harm pictures to a recovery self-harmer— I am not sure this is a stretch.
Trying to paint me with the same brush as Ira Gray, a serial rapist who has had several victims come forward, is bullshit. People’s reading comprehension of Jamie’s post frankly sucks. Not only does Jamie openly confess to “physically intimidating me,” Jamie then blames me for “forcing” Jamie to abuse me, which is typical abuser logic. Jamie also does not accuse me of rape. Jamie accuses me of sexual assault, for doing something that Jamie did to me dozens of times.
Twiggy accuses me of making them lose their housing, when in fact I was not even talking to Anja at the time, because nobody was able to talk to Anja at the time, because Twiggy and Jamie had zir isolated and were abusing zir. They got kicked out because Anja was sick of it, as I detailed above.
I can’t control what people believe about this. The only thing I can do is continue to work on myself and try to conduct myself with integrity. I have told the truth as I know it. I have omitted information only where it would betray someone else’s confidence and compromise their safety if I were to share it.
My detractors should know that this shitfest is hurting my friends a lot worse than it is hurting me. I am maintaining cast-iron boundaries and not reading most of the crap that is coming my way, particularly from Twiggy and Jamie. And my friends are catching the flack. People I love are losing sleep, being unable to function at work, and generally tearing themselves up over this. Leave them alone. If you don’t like me, focus on me. But stop fucking punishing people who are accused of no wrong-doing, just for standing up for a version of reality that actually reflects the truth, rather than Twiggy and Jamie’s garbled gaslighting garbage.
Believing people who claim to be victims of abuse is a good thing, and a thing that I support.
Try to extend that ethic to what you read here.
