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The gendercrits love to spin a good tale about how there's so many trans people who are "simply" sexual violence survivors, attempting to run away from their trauma by transitioning. As is often the case with arguments like these, the response is typically to try to refute them. And while refuting them is good in the broad strokes—that’s not the average trans person’s reason for transitioning—I want to take it a step further: I think it’s fine, actually, if that’s the reason someone is transitioning.

We all remember this story from the days when it was leveraged against gay people. The conservative argument frequently was that being gay was explicitly an expression of sexual trauma.

I remember hearing people talk about how women who were sexual abuse survivors were only gay because they were trying to "get out" of the kind of sex that traumatized them. Run away from men, run away from penetrative sex.

But arguments like this reveal so much about how people are conceptualizing sex. The very notion that heterosexuality is the normative experience, the default expression coded into your body, disrupted by trauma. The assumption that heterosexual sex is obligatory, unless you can really, really prove it can’t be cured out of you.

But what of it? Let's take it at face value. Let's presume a survivor is in a relationship with a woman entirely because she doesn't want the trauma of being in a relationship with a man. Does she not have that right? To live a life where her sexual pleasure gets to matter?

So much of how we talk about survivors presumes that their autonomy comes second, as though that isn't the entire package of sexual violence. Rape culture wants its hands on both the rape of someone, and their healing: to determine just what exactly is allowed to happen to their body. You are not allowed to be an active agent in your own sexuality, in your own bodily choices, you're too broken for that. Because you had your autonomy stripped from you, you get to always have your autonomy stripped from you. This is why sexual violence is one of the main ways patriarchy functions: it demands the right to fuck you so that it has the right to father you.

The sexual violence is only the first half of the control. The rest is about convincing you—and the world—that you need to be controlled, that your testimony is suspect, that you are untrustworthy, irresponsible with your body and your own recovery, and you need to be coerced, muzzled, brought in line, until you become the exact kind of “survivor” it wants.

Yes, there might be survivors who are transitioning to transform a site of trauma to something different. This is how surviving abuse works: sometimes you reclaim, sometimes you transform.

What sexual violence does is attempt to rip you from your own body, to chunk you into pieces, as though mind, brain, body are separate things that can be divvied up by others. “You are your own” doesn’t go far enough—your body isn’t “yours” your body is you, and only you get to determine what you do with it. What meaning you ascribe to it, what expressions you make with it, those are all your call to make, because it’s all you.

How beautiful, the survivor that transitions. To take your body into your hands, and love it outside of anyone else's say so, to make meaning, and comfort, and safety, and joy, and future, and story, and transformation out of the stuff you are is an incredible act of reclamation and I think we should encourage it. We should fill every survivor’s head with the knowledge that they do not need permission to alter their body, because nobody owns them. Nobody owns their trauma either, or how they want to engage with it. That’s the freedom, that’s the real recovery: the knowledge that you get to build a future in your skin that you want, no matter what that future looks like to others.

Sexual violence steals your autonomy, it does not make you someone who deserves less of it. So transition. Be gay. Have the body you want and the sex you want, even if it’s just because the other kinds of bodies and the other kinds of sex feel too triggering, too traumatizing. Fuck it then. Enjoy yourself. You get all of you. You get all of you forever, and nobody has a right to take that from you; not the people who abused you, or the people who want to use that abuse to deny you your autonomy.