Allison Washington
2 min readNov 6, 2016

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Thank you for this, Eli.

I am a trans woman who was socialised as a girl. This was, in part, because I was raised as a girl. But mostly this was simply because I was a girl.

Kindly allow me to include here an excerpt from a conversation I had elsewhere on Medium. The context was regarding how the socialisation of women, including trans women, positions us for sexual assault.

We are, of course, taught not to fight back, to be kind, give the benefit of the doubt, tolerate impositions. You’ve nailed it. The training is deeply ingrained, personally and culturally, and difficult to impossible to counter.

As a side note, I find the socialisation argument that some use against us — that we were not socialised as female — naïve and utterly ludicrous. As children we imprint on peers and role models of our gender, regardless of appearances.

This shows up in our behaviour — how else would we be so consistently marked for bullying? Later alterations to our behaviours are defensive, learnt in response to abuse. Transition consists, in large part, in the unlearning of these pseudo-masculine defences. This may explain some of the difficulties had by late-transitioners — long practice makes behaviours harder to unlearn.

In my opinion, the external pressures opposed to our female identification only serve to ingrain this imprinting all the more deeply. It seems to me that, as a class, trans women may be even more susceptible to abuse than is typical.

The full conversation is here: https://medium.com/@allisawash/ha-id-not-made-the-connection-that-s-funny-bd76d9448a82
The story it related to is here: https://medium.com/@allisawash/another-transitional-moment-ffe700f5618d

Thank you for reading and, more importantly, thank you for writing, Eli.

❤ Allison

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