I'm Afraid of Men.

by Vivek Shraya

“I know that many men and even women are afraid and angry when women do speak, because in this barbaric society, when women speak truly they speak subversively—they can’t help it: if you’re underneath, if you’re kept down, you break out, you subvert. We are volcanoes. When we women offer our experience as our truth, as human truth, all the maps change. There are new mountains.”

If I open Twitter or Facebook on the way to work, I brace myself for news reports of violence against women and gender-nonconforming people, whether it’s a story about another trans woman of colour who has been murdered, or the missing and murdered Indigenous women, or sexual assault. As important as it is to make these incidents visible by reporting them, sensationalizing and digesting these stories is also a form of social control, a reminder that I need to be afraid and to try to be as invisible as possible.

I realized only after I began transitioning that my lifetime of independence and self-reliance had been largely a result of male privilege. Being a girl has required me to retrain myself to think of depending on others or asking for assistance not as weakness or even as pathetic, but rather as a necessity.

Other times, I touch myself thinking about our hallway exchanges, despite your repulsion for me, or worse, because of your repulsion for me. I tell myself that this act is a form of revenge, that this is how I reclaim my power. But when I’m not feeling as confident (or delusional), I’m afraid that this is actually how I express my self-loathing. I’m also afraid of the ways in which the threat of violence from men has shaped, or even damaged, my sexuality. How many sexual desires and fantasies are formed out of potential or actual male violence? Or rather, to what extent is sexuality shaped and constrained by childhood experiences of male violence? What might desire feel like if the construction of sexuality didn’t take place in tandem with childhood experiences of violence from men? Would I have been as allured by your soft curls and passion for reading had I not already experienced the violence of other boys?

“I hope you don’t mind, but I invited a friend. He’s gay too,” she says after her buzzer rings. “Cool,” I lie, and sip my water, maintaining my composure. Aside from generally preferring one-on-one interactions over the claustrophobia of group socializing, meeting another gay man in Edmonton is particularly nerve-racking because there are so few of us. On the rare and hallowed occasions when we do collide, we’re often expected to be attracted to one another or to sleep together. Friendship alone is never a possibility. I especially can’t afford to be choosy. My brownness turns out to be a form of queerness in and of itself and makes me too queer for gay men.

When I look at photos of myself from my late twenties on, I feel mournful about how much my body has been shaped by men.

I quickly learn that gay men will find me desirable only if I’m muscular. Simultaneously, I learn that it’s partly my skinniness that makes me appear gay to straight men. In both instances, my thinness amplifies my femininity, which is consistently seen as a loathsome quality that needs to be eradicated. Gaining weight becomes a miracle solution to both my problems. Consumption is a key to masculinity. In grocery stores, I observe what foods men chuck into their carts and fill mine with the same, hoping to eat my way to a body like theirs. For years, I gag down pounds of meat and gallons of protein shakes. I lift weights despite incurring injuries, hoping to be both wanted and left alone, all the while reprimanding my body for not conforming, for never quite looking buff or white enough. What would my body look like if I didn’t want affection from gay men and protection from straight men? What would my body look and feel like if I didn’t have to mould it into both a shield and an ornament? How do I love a body that was never fully my own?

Why is being touched by strangers—strangers who refuse to identify themselves—a form of flattery? Being brown, bisexual, and feminine, I have longed to feel seen and desirable in gay bars, and as a teenage brown fag, this kind of random touching felt like all I deserved, all I could aspire to. But when the momentary visibility fades after someone conveys their interest by pinching me, I inevitably feel devalued and dehumanized.

I’ve come to expect being groped in gay bars. Complaining about this unwanted touching is often deemed sex-negative, un-queer, or even homophobic. Touching in gay bars is generally seen as an acceptable form of cruising and supposedly pushes against the repressiveness enforced by heterosexism.

queerness is associated with freedom from boundaries. Thus, any boundary is inherently un-queer. And yet this entitlement has only reinforced my cautiousness with gay men.

Although this exchange lasts less than a minute, you effectively jolt me back into my trained state of fear, my rightful place. Trans people aren’t afforded the luxury of relaxing or being unguarded. Mere steps away from “the world’s largest trans march,” trans people are still seen as perverts who touch strangers at crosswalks.

Any flirtation with or small gesture of admiration toward a man (for instance, commenting “beautiful” on a Facebook photo) was consistently met with the expectation that we were going to fuck. This has always been baffling to me, but it was especially frustrating during this period, because I’d explicitly and repeatedly expressed my intention not to date or hook up with anyone for at least a year. One man even told me he’d made a calendar of the remaining months of my singledom, counting down the days until, he assumed, we would sleep together. Once it finally settled in that I wasn’t going to put out, men would call me a tease, accusing me of sending mixed messages or of giving them blue balls. Any interest in getting to know me outside of a sexual relationship would dissolve. Every time this happened, I would blame myself—for I was the common denominator—for not being more clear.

Early on, you confess that you’d harboured a crush on me when we first met, but when I proposed friendship, you were happy to change how you saw me, as you too had been looking for new friends. As our buddy intimacy grows, you never once cross a line with me. I never feel like you’re secretly wooing me or waiting for me to change how I feel about you. My friendship with you marks the first time in my adult life when a man not only makes me feel that I can offer what I’ve chosen to offer, but also that it will be welcomed.

the process of exposure is especially protracted by how jarring it feels to see my skin against your pale white skin, the skin of the oppressor, especially after ten years of affection and self-discovery alongside Shemeena’s sienna-brown body.

I didn’t say ‘I love you’ because I wanted you to say it back.” “You didn’t?” “No. It kind of bothers me that ‘I love you’ is treated like the destination in a relationship. I told you because that’s how I feel and I wanted you to know.”

FALLING IN LOVE WITH another human is terrifying. As our language insists, romantic love is always preceded by a fall, the necessity of losing control and potentially hurting yourself in the process of connecting with another. Despite the risk of injury, I have always taken that plunge, even when love hasn’t looked or felt the way I’ve been told it should, even when people around me have criticized my choices.

My first instinct is to not tell any of my friends what you’ve done, because you’ve become the embodiment of masculine hope to all of us, an anomaly that we’ve grown attached to. I don’t want anyone to think less of you. I don’t want anyone to lose hope.

Perhaps I don’t want to lean on my friends because this incident is proof that I was the one who wasn’t an anomaly. I had been cautioned that “few relationships survive transition” and that “Nick ultimately wants a man.” I tried to brush these warnings off, telling myself that we were different somehow. Every time I shared what other people had said to me, or discussed my own feelings of undesirability now that I was no longer the bearded, muscled guy you fell in love with, you reassured me, saying, “You are the most beautiful person I have ever met.” How could you hurt me so sharply, at this particular time, when you knew I was feeling more repulsive than I had ever felt?

I’M AFRAID OF MEN not because of any singular encounter with a man. I’m afraid of men because of the cumulative damage caused by the everyday experiences I’ve recounted here, and by those untold, and by those I continue to face.

I have always been disturbed by this transition, by the reality that often the only way to capture someone’s attention and to encourage them to recognize their own internal biases (and to work to alter them) is to confront them with sensational stories of suffering. Why is my humanity only seen or cared about when I share the ways in which I have been victimized and violated?

Reflecting on this broader picture of Nick and our relationship, I had a choice. I could either mourn the loss of the idealized man I had thought Nick was, which somehow rendered me both powerless and at fault, a victim of my own imagination, or I could see Nick for who he is—dependable, devoted, and also fallible.

This praise highlights another problem with the idea of the “good man”—the bar is ultimately a low one, and men are heralded every day for engaging in basic acts of domestic labour like washing dishes. It is this low bar that also renders the experiences I’ve shared unexceptional and therefore so often unnoticed. Sexist comments, intimidation, groping, violating boundaries, and aggression are seen as merely “typical” for men. But “typical” is dangerously interchangeable with “acceptable.” “Boys will be boys,” after all. If we want masculinity to be different, we must confront and tackle the baseline instead of longing for exceptions. Loving your mother, holding a door open for a woman, being a good listener, or even being a feminist doesn’t make a man an exception. Experiencing oppression—including racism, homophobia, and transphobia—doesn’t make a man an exception. If we are invested in perpetuating and glorifying the myth of the “good man,” we are also complicit in overlooking, if not permitting, the reprehensible behaviour of the “typical man.”