This piece is dedicated to femmes of all genders who have survived—and our sisters and brothers who did not.

Femininity has always attracted all manner of predators to me.

I’m eight when the first adult male sticks his tongue down my throat and unzips his pants.

Nine when the elderly neighbor invites me and my friends over to his apartment only to realize he isn’t wearing pants. Or underwear.

Ten when I walk by a car near the abattoir behind my house and hear a low voice say to me, “You wanna get inside?”

Twelve when my grandfather picks me one night and not my sister. I never know why.

So by thirteen it’s too fucking much and the girl in me attempts to go underground.

My cash-poor high-femme mom doesn’t under- stand why I haven’t followed in her footsteps. She tells me hopefully, “You’re allowed to start wearing makeup.” I take up shoplifting makeup that I won’t wear. Later she buys me lingerie for Christmas—a lacy green baby- doll. The slip sits in my drawer for years till it disappears.

I disappear.

To some extent it works. No one at school notices me in my big sweaters and jeans and glasses with my initials monogrammed into the corner. No boy at school will be seen with me.

But it also fails. I am still shoved into a phone booth by a guy screaming that he wants to hurt the bitch dyke. That would be me—the still-straight fifteen year old. Creeps on the street grab my tits, my ass, my cunt. I get followed, stared at, cat-called a whore, a cunt, a dyke, a slut no matter what I do. The boys at school joke loudly about how much beer they’d have to drink before they’d bother to rape me, and one cool summer night, a guy with a gun chases me and my two best friends down the street screaming that he’s going to kill us. When the cops find him, they shrug and say, “He was just playing around. Boys will be boys.”

I am scared all the time. By seventeen, I sleep with a knife under my pillow. The most important thing I know about being a woman is that is makes me prey. I don’t know what to do to feel safe. My first choice— kill the men—doesn’t seem that feasible, though I in- hale every man-hating radical feminist tract I can find.

So at eighteen I erase all further evidence of my femininity. What has for five years been a sort of soft androgyny becomes masculinity. I only wear combat boots, hand-me-down chinos, and plaid shirts. Off comes my hair. I start to hear things like “you’re such a pretty girl, if only you’d…” and I am delighted. I stop being the kind of girl who seduces Roman Catholic virgins and get a monogamous boyfriend.

I thought that if I could disappear as a woman, I could become safe. That still didn’t work, so I tried disappearing from men. At twenty-one I come out into the fantasy-safety world of lesbianism, where I feel hidden from men. Slowly, tentatively over the years I let my femininity come back out. Newly single, I sign up to lap dance at my first women and trans bathhouse. I’m so terrified that I have refused to practice in front of anyone unless it is my lover and she is blindfolded. I nearly throw up from fear the night before.

I get there and a short, voluptuous blonde says, “Oh great, you’re here now, I could really use a break.”

“Okay, uh, I wasn’t supposed to start till later and uh, I…I’m not changed yet.”

“Oh here, you can wear this,” she says and pulls off the one tiny scrap of clothing she has on, then tosses it to me.

I’m dying of fear, but I control my shaking enough to change and start sliding myself up and down over the hot, brown-eyed butch who is slowly losing her cool underneath me. She licks her lips and says, “Can I touch you, baby? I can tell you want me to.”

I don’t, actually. So, referring to the clearly posted rules of the feminist bathhouse, I say, “No.” She puts her hands down. With a rush, I feel it—I am the one in charge. I am nearly naked, sexy, feminine, and Still. In. Charge. Nothing will ever be the same again.

I know without a doubt that I am femme, but while in hiding, my girl hadn’t learned anything about pleasure and femininity. I discover accessories, eyeshadow, sparkly things, tits, ass, pink, and crying. I get my nineteen-year-old sister to help me buy my first pair of high heels. Since she is a stripper, going to “her shoe store” means that when I choose the smallest heels they have, I still stumble out of there in four inches. I manage to get two blocks before I can’t walk and put my big boots back on.

First I learn that femininity can be fun. Then that it is a tool. And as the song goes, “Any tool is a weapon if you hold it right.”

Weapon #1

If you’re looking at me as a sex object, you can pay me for it. Because now I charge. I don’t give it out for free so much anymore since I found out this shit is powerful.

Weapon # 2

I’m at a summer party for a straight friend in my prettiest lavender mini-dress. I get cornered in the kitchen by two mildly drunk white guys with plastic beer cups in their hands. They’re increasingly overbearing and eventually White Boy #1 leans in and jokingly pinches my ass. He and his friend chuckle. Before I’ve thought about it, I’ve reached out, grabbed hold of both his nipples and twisted them. Hard. I may or may not say, “You’ll pay for that.”

A look of profound shock crosses his face, followed quickly by confused rage. He stares at my breasts and says, “I…want to do that to…you.” I say, “But you can’t,” and take a step back for good measure. His friend and I both laugh while White Boy #1 stands there, mouth gaping open. Of course he turns out to be a secret masochist and tries unsuccessfully to flirt with me for the rest of the night. But he never puts his hand on me again.

Weapon #3

Many years after that first experiment lap dancing, I’m cycling home from another bathhouse along a gentrifying working-class street in Toronto and a huge SUV pulls up alongside me and slows down. I glance over. A guy leans out the window, smiling and trying to get my attention. I realize they are uniformed cops and one of them is talking to me. I shiver and quickly decide to try out “cute” because I’ve seen it work for middle-class white girls.

“Sorry, what was that? A red? Oh you mean I should have a red light on my bike? Oh I know! I keep forgetting to get one!”

“Oh, no, honey,” he says flirtatiously, “you ran a red light back there.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah, and you know what you get for that, sweetie?”

“Um…what?” I say, now forcing a smile on my face.

“A spanking,” he says and slowly mimics a spanking while smiling and leering at me.

Everything slows down. It’s 3 a.m. I have a backpack filled with sex toys, latex gloves, and a trashy slip. I’m wearing a short skirt and heels, biking past deserted alleyways. I don’t want to know how the story ends if I’m pulled over and “invited” into their unmarked SUV. I keep smiling while my eyes go cold and hard. I have a split second to come up with something that will keep me safe. When the answer comes, I don’t like it, but I’m grateful.

I giggle.

Then, gazing into his hateful little pig eyes, I bite my lip, slowly and seductively, dripping with the imitation of desire. It’s a calculated risk. The cop smiles, smugly satisfied. They continue to follow me, leaning out the window, harassing me—until they speed off in another direction.

The moment they’re out of sight, I stop my bike dead, take a breath and feel a wave of fear pound through me. I wonder if the cop liked my flirtation— or the fear he saw in my eyes. I feel scared, and in a dirty way, victorious and proud: scared that my working-class femininity has always made me a target, and proud that I have finally honed the skill of protecting myself through its artful use. I did it. I brought out my girl and with every means I have, I am protecting her.

My friend Leah says, “Sometimes you’re so busy surviving you forget you have.” That night, high from a night of parading around in my short skirt and candy apple red heels and giving head at the glory holes, I remember that I have survived. I am the matador who takes the red flag of my pretty dress and turns it into a cloak.

Femininity is a choice to be myself, even though it puts me in danger. I know how many queers think that being femme is complicit though. They look upon our divine and chaotic femininities and see them as normative, boring, conservative, straight, or just confusing. They say we’re shallow, drama, too much, too sexual, too angry, too emotional—even as they come to us for safe space to be these very things.

They think this must be the easy choice. Easy. Because a life lived under constant gender violence is natural, obvious, and inevitable—if it happens to feminine people.

But I see you, my dearest femmes. I see your defiance, your courage, your strength, your softness, your sweetness and humor, your wisdom, how badass you are in the face of all this. I worship you and am honored to call myself your sister.

To be feminine, we have had to learn how to use an arsenal of weapons, to be ready and to never let the risks stop us from loving and from loving our femininities. The older I get, the higher my heels and the more tender my heart. From my femme sisters and brothers—I find new ways to navigate the world and honor our precious divinity. If I can handle being alone in a client’s home, know how to assess and de-escalate, shut down every sleazeball who’s ever thought my pretty dress made me his property, then I can handle the queers who think I just don’t under- stand my own fucking liberation.

I survived.

And in every moment of vulnerability, every swing to my step, every hustle I work, is evidence that I continue to survive. After a long hibernation, my femme emerged and she is not going back into hiding—so I keep my cunt open, my skirts short, and my heels sharp.

This writing is excerpted from the forthcoming (January 2014) Dear Sister: Letters from Survivors of Sexual Violence edited by Lisa Factora-Borchers and published by AK Press.