All fucked up and I make it look good

(Moorish Idols are reef fish and naturally will seek shelter in the nearest nook or cranny if they get scared.)

I decided to flip the book around and pressed it against the glass. Fish lost it

Swam away then came back with MORE FISH

I accidentally trained a fish once through playing.

Let me explain.

The small-time aquarium I worked at about 4 years ago had a decent sized female Sheephead. Sheephead are bright red with the males sporting a black head, and get big. I’m talking almost 1m long at full maturity (and may or may not transition from female to male depending on the number of males present). Point is, even though not fully matured, this Sheephead was a bit of a heavyweight in her kelp forest tank with a length of about 1ft making her the resident Biggest Dog In The Yard. And she absolutely knew it. She would bully her tankmates if she wanted to steal their food.

The thing about this Sheephead- let’s call her Red- is that she had one heck of a ‘tude. Red was known to splash aquarists whenever they fed the tank, and at almost a foot long with a wide tail, her splashes had quite a bit of heft and would soak you from the torso down. We were advised to bring a towel or two to protect ourselves from most of the drenching. When it was my go-around to feed Red’s tank, I was fairly new to the little facility, but I had been warned in advance of Red’s penchant for food thievery. I noticed she would follow my hand movements, so I slowly moved to drop her food in a far corner, and fed her tankmates directly from my hands or by tong if they were too deep. I always made sure Red had plenty to eat, but I didn’t want her to associate the food with bad behavior, so I treated her to a bit extra food whenever she didn’t steal food. One day, she made a beeline to the surface so fast that she did a small jump, her entire head breaching the water. She wasn’t bothering her tankmates or doing anything remotely dangerous- and full disclosure, it was cute seeing a fish jump for joy- so I laughed and gave her another piece of food.

Naturally, positive reinforcement led to her connecting the dots that jumping at the surface, even the tiny jumps she was doing, meant she got more food.

This started to become an everyday occurrence, whenever I was assigned to feed Red’s tank. She would jump, just enough for her head to pop out, then she’d wait patiently for me to give her the treat she CLEARLY earned. It even got to the point that she’d open her mouth and I’d drop the food right into those massive jaws- this was preferable to her Kenghis Khan-ing her way through a shower of chopped squid like the Tasmanian Devil, as there was less risk of her accidentally (or purposefully) biting a tankmate that got too close. Red became a polite eater for the first time.

It wasn’t until I noticed she followed me around outside of feeding time that I realized Red was playing with me.

She's cut off my a section of Lil Nas X's song Montero, specifically the line "... Me in the the mornin', i'll be on...". As the line plays, she looks to the side down, as if something nearby is falling. The music fades in, gets louder, and fades back out. She pauses after it fades all the way out.

Even when I was “cis” I had an incident where my gf at the time, a drunk cis white woman, literally spent an hour trying to pin me down and rip off my clothes to fuck me as I was trying to care for her, despite repeated refusals. It reached the point I had to leave the room after escaping her and hold the door shut until she gave up, and any time I mentioned it to others back then the concern was not her trying to sexually assault me, but that if she had succeeded I’d have been at fault for being a Black “man” having sex with a drunk white woman.

he told me point blank that if I called the cops, he'd lie and say I was the abuser. we both knew who they would believe. I was more scared of losing my cool and fighting back than I was scared of being hit. I preferred being hit to the screaming.

it didn't start out like that, of course, he started out by guilting me about the fact that I didn't want to fuck him. I didn't fuck him because he was abusive about other things. it's always stuck with me that sex was essentially the last thing he got abusive about before I left, I think it took him that long and had to start slow because he was protecting his image of himself as a victim.

he had to build that protection up before he could try to actually force me to fuck him. he did not, of course, ever threaten me before I said no. that would've made things too clear to ignore, it was always a day or a week later. it always started as "I feel undesirable because you don't want to fuck me".

you understand that this is rape, right? I waited until now to mention that we were both "cis" at the time because "husband beating his wife" is understood differently than if the genders were the other way around, especially for transfems.

i am a trans woman, but i only realized this two or three years ago.

i am a single mother with sole custody of my 7yo daughter.

do whatever bioessentialist math u gotta to parse this situation.

my ex could give classes on ignoring boundaries. i recently saw the movie obsession, and to say it was triggering for me would be an understatement. i was never allowed even a moment to myself. she would hover over me at all times, and every miniscule thing that i did was noted, logged, and tallied against some master formula in her head to determine whether i was being a sufficiently good "boyfriend". failing this metric would lead to bouts of screaming, sleep deprivation, psychological torture, and physical violence. i still have the scars.

the *only* reliable way for me to mitigate the damage being done to me, was to fuck her. at first i could avoid the fights this way. then i could only interrupt them. eventually this became simply a consequence. she would scream at me until i was too dissociated to properly understand my situation, and i would wait for the tone shift that meant i should get ready to... be raped.

and then i discovered in the worst possible way that she had been lying to me for months abt being on birth control

i wasn't given any say in the situation. she ran back to her family some 1500 miles away and told me i could either go with her or have no presence in my child's life. the things i suffered there were worse. it took years of legal action for me to get away from her with my child. this informs my relationships to this day, nearly a decade later.

for years. YEARS. i was unable to understand what happened to me as sexual assault. because trans women aren't oppressed before they come out. because tops can't be assaulted. because the big strong "man" can never be a victim. because there simply isn't vocabulary for these experiences. because because because.

the first time i ever read the phrase "self-inflicted corrective sexual violence" i spent hours sobbing uncontrollably. this doesn't come close to capturing the essence of all my experiences, but it does fit several of them. the idea that not only were such things possible but also that *what happened to me WAS sexual assault* is the only thing that's allowed me to start healing.

THE ONLY THING because not a single person in my life even considered the notion. my mother berated me for not thinking abt the consequences of *my* actions. my friends laughed abt how it was too bad i got "baby trapped". my subsequent relationships constantly pressed for more and more details digging for the part where i must have done something to deserve it. even my therapist at the time suggested that it was "fear of impending fatherhood" that gave rise to these feelings.

none of that is true. i was repeatedly raped, in a way that resulted in a child, that i now am solely responsible for. she's the light of my life, and the best kid i know, and none of this is her fault. i'll do anything to make sure she has a better life than me. that's the only way i'll ever rlly make peace, i think, with the fact that i will never fully recover from this trauma. there's only so much healing to be done. the rest is scars.

so please. please. please understand that just because i was "topping". just because i was "stronger". just because i was a "man". doesn't mean that it could never happen to someone like me.