This is a story I have not said out loud in its entirety, not even when I was in trauma therapy for these events. It contains descriptions of sexual abuse and indirectly the sexual abuse of children, so read with caution.

When I was very newly 18 I met a 21-year-old MTF person through the internet. He lived a 5 minute drive from the library where I worked at the time, and I agreed to meet up with him because through my (online only) contact with “queer community”, I had accepted the idea that transwomen are real women and lesbians should be attracted to them. I had MTF online friends who seemed normal and nice and I had no reason to think he would be any different.

At this time, though I was 18, I was still in high school and hadn’t yet learned to drive. I was looking for a way out of my parents’ house and our oppressive Ohio town and I believed that this man and his house would be my “queer safe space”.

We quickly entered a romantic relationship in which I faked every kind word to him— I was so lonely that I alternately believed either this was love or that I was so broken that this was the best love I was capable of feeling. He was very interested in niche internet porn, especially furries and anime porn, which I tolerated and even tried to enjoy. He had this thumb drive entirely consisting of saved porn, and it was METICULOUSLY organized. After a while he revealed his penchant for porn featuring underage anime characters.... which is illegal in our state and country as far as I know. He even told me that the reason he had all his porn on a thumb drive was because he was afraid of his favorite things being outlawed and he didn’t want to lose access to them.

We had been in a sexual relationship for some time when I learned this about him. I was a “submissive” in BDSM for him, despite being days out of high school the first time he tied me up. He put his penis in me more times than I can count, and truthfully, more times than I can remember. I spent a lot of my time in his house mentally somewhere else and pretending I wasn’t being hurt by a human piece of mold.

Of course, the ... child ... material ... came up a lot. He wanted to roleplay as a child or, more often, with me pretending to be a child. Usually he wanted me to pretend to be a little boy and call him “Mommy”. He thought of himself as a “femdom”. When I shaved my head, he told me that I was his “little teenage boy” and often told me that I looked like a little boy and that he found it cute or sexy. Of course, I was a teenager in real life, so I was made really uncomfortable by that. I asked him to stop with the age play and incest play, but then when we were having sex he brought it up anyway. I mostly just laid there. I never put up enough of a fight that he backed down, even though I could have probably fought him if I’d really tried. He even told me once during intercourse that it was sexy when I cried or told him that being penetrated was painful for me.

Late in our relationship he wanted to try being polyamorous. I didn’t have any problem with this because my feelings for him were all fake, and I thought if he had another partner or partners it would be easier for me to break up with him. We met another MTF person online who lived in a minor city about 45 minutes away, and we all became friends. Eventually we started “dating” in a sort of triangle formation, and the other transwoman was nice enough (read: also a manipulator, but never abusive as far as I know). Transwoman #2 was also very obviously lonely and friendless, and wanted to escape his mom’s apartment. Transwoman #1 had him over to his house a lot for the same reason he had me over, and I learned later that he (#1) made the second transwoman “femdom” him in a way he (#2) was deeply uncomfortable with. Ironically #2 and I decided to kill the triangle together and were uneasily friends for a few months after that. A year later I was in trauma therapy, and a year after that, due to further bad experiences with male transgender people, I became gender critical. I’ve spoken about small details of my experience but never all of it, and I’m sorry that this is a total novella. It probably seems super fake too, and I know that. But truth is stranger than fiction, I guess, and it feels good to tell it all. I have PTSD symptoms and a hell of a rage backlog, so I really hope I never see him again. I did get out of that Ohio town, though.

Long live the lesbians, and let’s make sure no other girl ever experiences this.