Pitcher plants are a genus of plants that have one unusual adaption in common - they are all carnivorous. Most pitcher plant feast on flies and other small insects, although some of them attract larger prey, such as lizards, frog, and rodents. They lure their pray to their mouths by eliciting an enticing smell - in the case of insects, the smell of rotting flesh - and when the fly becomes trapped in the sticky goo in the flower’s throat, its fate is seated, and its escape is in inevitable. 

On the heels of a traumatic and difficult breakup, I tried my hand at entering the queer dating scene and almost immediately met a transwoman – I had never dated a transwoman before, had never thought I would, had never been attracted to transwomen, but fearing the fact that these things would be obvious and brand me as some kind of traitor. I was looking to make new friends; I had no queer nor trans friends at this time, and she seemed nice – but from the moment she messaged me there was a sense of obligation to reply, to engage, to accept her offer to meet up. Spending time with her, it was an overt and very conscious effort for me to think of her as female – something that caused me a huge amount of shame, which meant I overrode it and until now have never been allowed to look at it. Her way of speaking, of interacting with other women, of interacting with me, her expectations of me, her expectations of the world – all of these things felt ‘male’. This is a gut feeling that is so difficult to put into words when you’re afraid to even speak up.

She told me often about physical violence in her last relationship. “I hit him, but he would hit me first,” she’d say. She’d put her hand on the back of my neck and say, “But I would never hit you. I don’t want you to think of me as violent,” and then she would cry. On the tail of these admissions, of the implicit threat I felt was there, I would have to reassure her that I knew she was not capable of something like that. But she was - she had already done it, and here I was, expected to tell her that she didn’t, and I did what was expected of me. She knew the relationship I had just left had been difficult and left me feeling very alone, and I feel, still, she used this to manipulate me.

She was obsessed with my body. Not with me, as a person – I was an accessory, the person she introduced to her friends as her ‘trans boyfriend’. “He’s a transman,” she’d say as I shook someone’s hand and said hello. “He’s cuter than the last one you dated,” her friend said back. They’d ask her if I was poly. I would feel my gut tightening. She would point out her friends that she had slept with – all transwomen – and tell me cheerfully I could sleep with them too, it would be a ‘fun thing’ for her and her friends to share (a fun thing – my body. Me.).

She asked to watch me shower. I would say no. She would do it anyway. She would tell me she wished we could trade bodies, and I would say nothing back, sick with anger at the idea that she would think I ever wanted her body. She told me she had never met a transman who wasn’t jealous of her dick. Au contraire.

I would wonder what I was doing there – the answer was serving her, performing these labours to keep her self-esteem lifted high, to convince her daily she was female. She would ask me what me and my female friends talked about. She would ask me probing, tone-deaf questions about the periods and cramps I used to experience (comparing them to her hormone treatment). She compared my hysterectomy (something that has, for a long time, caused me a huge amount of emotional pain) to her having difficulty getting erections on her hormones. She forced these same conversations on my friends, talking explicitly about her penis as if this was an experience all women should have. It made her laugh when we were uncomfortable.

She had no problem accessing the pieces of her masculinity that suited her. I was with her when she would drop her voice and yell ‘HEY’ to scare women who were moving too slowly or were in the way. She did this to me when I wasn’t paying attention because it made her laugh how I jumped, how much it scared me to hear a man yell at me.

She had no idea who I was. It did not take long for all of these things to crush down on me and make me recognize how I was suffocating – I was not a person, I was Her Boyfriend - how I had to get out now before she actually, really hurt me. These realizations all happened in a blur. I didn’t want to have sex with her, I didn’t want to even touch her, I didn’t want to look at her (I never, once, in the time that we dated, looked her in the eyes. I have intense difficulty with eye contact as is, but not to this degree,   unless I am afraid. My own body was screaming warnings at me and I was deaf to it). I was afraid of her. It’s humiliating to admit these things now, to see how beaten down I allowed myself to be. Her body repulsed me before her personality did. I had quickly confessed to her early on that I was a victim of sexual violence in the hopes it would give me a pass from having to have any kind of sexual connection. I told her I was asexual before I even realized what I was saying. She said, “Me too,” and told me the story of her rape while she broke down crying. Shaking from my own admission, I comforted her. She told me she had never and would never tell anyone again about her experience. I found out very quickly how much of a lie that was. How much of what she said was really a lie.

Two days later, she told me she never felt as safe as she did with me before. She told me of the transmen who had used her just for her body, then left when they got what they want from her. She told me she trusted me and loved me and I nodded my head like a simpleton because I knew what was coming next. Saying no would have been violence. Saying no to her because I was not attracted to her, did not want her, did not feel anything except cold around her, that would have been the worst crime I could commit in this community. It isn’t because of sexual abuse I didn’t want to be with her, it was because she was a man. This was made horribly clear to me very fast and when the realization hit me, it came with a dead feeling of resignation. 

She ignored me when I told her I had to go make a phone call, she ignored me when I tried to keep my shirt on, she smiled when I cried and told me ‘I know, it’s so beautiful’, she ignored me when I went numb and stared at her DVD collection. She fell asleep while I cried again.

I don’t know how much of my body is left to be taken away from me. I have never said out loud that she raped me. When I try to, the words turn to stone in my mouth. But she did. She did. She did.

I wish I had been strong enough and smart enough to leave sooner. I wish I didn’t feel like I deserve to carry this weight with me because I was so stupid. But I do. I do. I do.

It was my sign that I had to leave right now - and I stayed for two more weeks, because I was afraid.

I told her later again that I was asexual. Again she said, “Me too,” then would send me countless, unwanted, unsolicited nude photos all day while I was at work. I stopped answering my texts because I was repulsed by what I saw. My mental health was already in a rapidly deteriorating state but any sign of distress from me would cause her to ‘disassociate’ and require my full attention unless I wanted her suicide on my hands. One night, when I told her I needed space, desperately, she walked to my house in the middle of the night and cried outside my door until I let her inside. I felt nothing but numb all the time. It seemed like she was concretely rooted in my life now, because no matter what I said to her, she would inevitably do only what she wanted.

This all occurred over a rapid span of two months – the time escaped from me and I was anxiously asking my friends how to leave her. My best friend told me she was worried for me, that she saw changes in me, that she had been worried since early on but too afraid to say anything. I broke up with Meg over the phone – I told her we needed to focus on ourselves, I had just recently left a very long and toxic relationship, that I could not take care of her, that we should be friends, that I wasn’t happy. Her reply was, “Well, I’m happy – you can’t just hold out for me?” Then, as ever, I only mattered as a body to serve her.

After leaving her, she posted messages online and texts saying foul, vile things about me. She called me her sloppy seconds. She said I was just like every other man in her life who had ‘gotten a taste’ and left. This is still darkly funny to me. Her sexuality was so aggressive, so self-serving, and so oblivious to my pain and discomfort and fear that even now, it is the only thing that mattered to her, the only thing she ever wanted, and the thing she had laid so many lures to trap me with. The behaviours in her I immediately had recognized as male socialized – her selfishness, her arrogance, her entitlement, her violence, her self-serving and belligerent sexuality, her claims that she could perform womanhood better than my friends (because they don’t wear makeup nor dresses), her insistence I stand at her side and allow myself to be shown off to her friends like a new trophy (I was someone new, someone from outside the community, a brand new commodity), her ownership of my body, her quiet ways of turning me into less of a person and more her caretaker, her complete ignorance of female sexuality but her apparent birthright to mouth off about it and claim it as her own, her belief that womanhood is distilled down to makeup and long hair and girl talk – these are stories I see everywhere now, commonalities in so many narratives.

I feel very alone in my experiences even despite that fact – this is not something I can ever talk about in person, not in this detail. It has been made to be my fault, or something I should move past (because, to quote one friend, ‘it’s not like she actually ever hit you, is it?’), or something that was a strange abnormality and not at all reflective of transwomen. There are various reasons that I am met with these schools of thought; trust me, I know, because I think them myself whenever the words try to come out.