I have always been a lesbian, but when I was younger I had a lot of self-hatred and didn’t want to come out. I wanted to be straight, I forced myself to date men and it obviously never worked. When I was in an especially dark place, I ended up pressured into dating a male who claimed he was nonbinary. He acted so nice to me that he made me feel guilty for not being attracted to him, so I eventually agreed to travel to America to give him a chance, and to meet some online friends. He offered to share a hotel room with me to “keep me safe” but not ten minutes after we arrived he raped me. I was alone in a foreign country, trapped with him. That weekend, he raped me countless times. I threw up, blacked out, cried, and couldn’t eat nor sleep. I thought it would be over once I got home, but my friends kept going on about how we “were such a cute couple” and they were “so glad we were finally together”. I went along with them because we were all very deep into trans ideology, my friends were constantly saying “it's a hate crime to not sleep with someone with a penis” and “all TERF lesbians should kill themselves”. I was so desperate to not be hated I stupidly agreed to a relationship with him. After that he “came out” as a transwoman and a lesbian. Our relationship was thankfully mostly online at this point, but for a few months out of every year he would come and stay with me, raping me whenever we were alone. He ended up telling me that he got off to hurting and raping me. I tried in vain to tell him I didn’t want sex, claiming I wasn’t attracted to penis due to PTSD (no, it was just because I was a lesbian). He said he would “train me to like dick” and “unlearn my vagina fetish” trying to guilt trip me for being a lesbian. This went on for months, and if I cried or fought back, he’d just hurt me more. He raped me in my sleep and bashed my head on furniture to concuss me. He got off to me trying to fend him off. He got off to me hating dick. He’d fantasise about raping me until he “cured me of my penis trauma”. He drove me to attempt suicide just so I could have a week of safety from him in the hospital. I finally found the courage to leave him after a few years, when some of my friends noticed how abusive he really was and reached out to me. When I escaped from him, I told everyone we knew what he had done to me. He even admitted it, and then claimed he would get therapy for it and he “knew he had a problem”. Some of my online friends, however, said I was transphobic and racist for calling him out. They claimed I “had privilege” as a white female, because he was a “trans woman of colour”. One even told him what he did was “OKAY” and that HE could heal from it. One of my so-called best friends even invited him to live with her and her four children to “help him heal”. That she would invite a known rapist to live with her children purely to spite me caused me to cut ties with all who knew him unless they made it crystal clear that they supported me. I have had to go through so much therapy to heal and cope with the PTSD he gave me, but the worst part is that the online community STILL insists that male rapists who prey on lesbians are actually female, and that by pointing out their male privilege, we are the oppressors.