Losing friends

[Alonelonelylonersbadidea]

Hello Sisters

I just need to vent. Sorry. I just went on FB (I know. My first mistake) and saw that an old friend has unfriended me. We've known each other for 20 years. We were a reasonably tight group of friends but I've lost a lot over the last couple of years due to my (and I quote), "raving transphobia'. I only just saw that she's one of them. It hurts.
It is shit. The thing is I know that many of our mutual friends feel the same way about safe spaces and so on, they just don't say anything. I really cared about her. Suddenly realised that we hadn't chatted in a while and thought I'd check on her FB before messaging. And all I saw was that she doesn't want to know me anymore. Our mutual friends are still there.

The thing is, my opinion doesn't change, but I do feel sometimes like humanity itself is gaslighting me! I'm sorry. I hope it was ok for me to vent. I don't honestly know who my friends are anymore. It's like Hungary during the purges.

She has done exactly that @Ereshkigalangcleg

She is a DV and rape survivor. My heart breaks at the cognitive dissonance here for her to do that and think such things.

She is a DV and rape survivor. My heart breaks at the cognitive dissonance here for her to do that and think such things.

Yes

She is a DV and rape survivor. My heart breaks at the cognitive dissonance here for her to do that and think such things.

I agree. But victims of male physical and sexual violence (about which I know plenty, having been a victim of violent child abuse and two instances of rape) appear to be the group of women whom the virulent activists hate the most. They have targeted us from the beginning. DV shelters, rape crisis centres, have been among the first places activists have infiltrated.

I have a theory about this. Rape is about inflicting humiliation and exerting total power and dominance over someone else. Not content with that, the legal system is predisposed in the perpetrators' favour, and as #MeToo showed us, the overwhelming reaction to women who spoke, especially decades later, about these issues was to cry us down and tell us to stop jumping on the bandwagon.

Having visited the most invasive form of violence imaginable on women, in a form it's very hard to talk about and a culture in which we are not believed, misogynistic activists and even some mainstream (male) politicians would like to dictate whether and how we speak about that violence as well.

No. It's taken me 2.5 decades to be able to speak openly about my experiences and I'm not shutting up about it because it happens to make our chauvinistic society more comfortable at my expense.

If I thought rape victims were sacrosanct, and that surely no political movement could possibly sink low enough to target us, I was very sadly mistaken.

@MarieIVanArkleStinks thank you so much for your post. I too have been through the same and it has also taken me as long.
In fact my violent ex (one of my rapists) now identifies as a woman.
Yet up until now I've tried to maintain an emotional equilibrium about it.
Now? No. I'm so fucking done.
I'm so sorry you have experienced the same. I'm so angry for all of us.