SHE IS LGBTQ AND #METOO
Sarah McBride was sexually assaulted within months of coming out
Sarah McBride wasn’t sure she could do it. She wasn’t even sure she should. She watched that Sunday in October as her Twitter and Facebook feeds filled with stories from survivor after survivor – accounts that eventually would stir the conscience of a nation that had long failed to reckon with its culture of sexual violence. After a restless night contemplating whether she was strong enough to lift the weight of silence, she gathered her courage and tweeted those devastating words: “Me Too.”
Until that moment, McBride, national press secretary for the Human Rights Campaign and the first transgender American to address a major party convention, had disclosed her sexual assault to only a few people.
She said she stayed silent for years because she feared she wouldn’t be believed.
“There’s this baseline level of disbelief that survivors of sexual assault ... face,” she said. “And then there’s this extra unique barrier that transgender people face around this notion that ... we are somehow so undesirable that people wouldn’t sexually assault us, which is a fundamental misunderstanding of both who transgender people are and how sexual assault works.”
While the perception of the LGBTQ community is that of increasing visibility and acceptance, especially during Pride month, it is a population that continues to face discrimination that makes it more vulnerable to sexual violence.
A 2015 survey by the National Center for Transgender Equality found nearly half of respondents were sexually assaulted at some point in their lifetime, and 1 in 10 were sexually assaulted in the past year.
Overall, people who identify as LGBTQ are at greater risk of sexual violence, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention:
Headlines followed a formula
While McBride found the #MeToo movement personally empowering, she said other members of the LGBTQ community felt their experiences weren’t reflected in the conversation. Some gay voices helped launch the movement – Anthony Rapp led the charge against Kevin Spacey’s alleged sexual misconduct – but #MeToo headlines were largely dominated by the stories of white, wealthy, straight, cisgender women.
There was a feeling when #MeToo exploded, McBride said, that the people most at risk of experiencing sexual assault and sexual violence weren’t as included as they should have been.
The stories given most attention fol- lowed a formula: a prominent female survivor and a powerful male perpetrator. Many felt these stories were elevated at the expense of poor survivors, survivors of color, disabled survivors and nonbinary or queer survivors – people whose identities put them at greater risk for sexual violence.
“Queer people ... around the world who are also chiming in – we have to pay attention to them, too,” #MeToo founder Tarana Burke, who started the campaign more than a decade ago to raise awareness about sexual violence among women of color, told USA TODAY in October.
Getting help gets complicated
Discrimination also means LGBTQ survivors are less likely to seek help from police, hospitals and rape crisis centers.
Some worry about being “outed,” and many worry about being discriminated against further. In 2016, 39 percent of LGBT survivors interacted with law enforcement after an incident of intimate-partner violence, according to the National Coalition of AntiViolence Programs. Seven percent said the police were hostile in their interactions, and 12 percent said the police were indifferent.
McBride, who said she was sexually assaulted during her junior year of college in Washington, D.C., six months after coming out as transgender, didn’t report her assault to police.
She said she remained silent not only because she worried people wouldn’t believe her but also because initially she wasn’t sure what she believed herself.
McBride said she had internalized transphobic messages about her selfworth, at one point thinking, “You’re lucky he’s even interested in you.” She also worried that speaking out could harm the LGBTQ community at large by reinforcing myths that LGBTQ people are “overly sexual.”
To combat sexual assault, states must have comprehensive anti-discrimination protections for LGBTQ people, McBride said.
“We need to know that we are safe and protected from discrimination in accessing the kind of services, care and support that every survivor of sexual assault deserves,” she said.