Content warning: This article discusses sexual assault and trauma in detail. It also mentions mental health, substance use, self-harm and suicidality.

I’ve been surrounded by survivors for years. Throughout my undergraduate degree, I was one of the dozens of student advocates fighting to hold universities accountable for the rampant sexual violence on campus – a fight that dates back decades, throughout generations.

I fell in with a good crowd. Many of my friends are survivors, and loud survivors at that. They’re lawyers, artists, academics, mothers, social workers, journalists; they’re many of these things at the same time.

One day, when I teach my children about the history of feminism in so-called Australia, they’ll learn the names of the people I’ve spent my early twenties with. And yet, having been surrounded by so much support and truth-telling, the reality of my assault evaded me for years, my mind too busy processing everyone’s story but my own.

Image by: Baran Lotfollahi

Throughout my late teens and early twenties, I battled with what I thought was vicarious trauma from my activism work at universities. In the space of three years, I was admitted to the psychiatric ward three times to address my severe OCD, depression and suicidality.

I self-harmed and drank myself past the point of rational thought whenever I had the chance, and my newly budding post-grad job in media fell apart in months. I felt ridiculous, being so affected by rapes that never happened to me.

I couldn’t get over it – why couldn’t I get over it? I worried that I had become obsessive about sexual violence. It bled into every fibre of my being.

I know now that this was not only vicarious trauma, but also the trauma that resulted from my own assault. My body was holding onto something my mind could not – would not – accept, and I was losing the stamina to keep running from it.

The truth that I had tried to ignore for so long was making itself known to me, and I could no longer make it go away. I watched horror movies about possessions and parasites, and thought about this dark, evil thing erupting from someone’s body, leaving their host weak and trembling in its wake.

I kept thinking about the scene in Ridley Scott’s Alien where the Xenomorph larvae burst out of John Hurt’s chest, when only seconds before he had been laughing and eating with his crewmates. I could feel something in my chest too – a tightness, something trying to crawl up my throat.

There was something in me that I didn’t know how to get out.

In the months before I put a name to my assault, I found myself unable to read Emily Nagoski’s Come As You Are without dissolving into tears about halfway through, right on the chapter about stress and trauma.

I had to switch to the audiobook to get through it, carrying it with me as I went about my day, openly crying at bus stops and in Woolies.

You can see the shift between mediums play out in my copy of the book: sentences underlined in pencil and pages annotated, marked carefully with colour-coded sticky notes, suddenly drop off.

The last sentence I highlighted like a prophecy, a warning:

“But survival is not recovery; survival happens automatically, sometimes even against the survivor’s will.”

It wasn’t until I was seeing a new therapist that I was able to even think about that night in a different way. During a therapy session, what began as a perfectly ordinary conversation about sex turned into a disclosure without any intention.

There was no lightning strike of revelation, no wash of cold dread throughout my body. It was thoroughly undramatic.

I finished my story, and my therapist quietly confirmed what I already knew somewhere in the recesses of my mind: what happened to me was illegal.

I’ve thought about rape and gendered violence multiple times a day, every day, for the last six years.

Majoring in gender studies as an undergrad and pursuing a master’s degree in sexology, sexuality is not a subject I’m unfamiliar with. It’s always been something I’ve thought about, going back to when I was a child.

I wrote in-depth assessments on sexual violence, and as a student leader in the women’s collective, I was taught how to be a first responder. I’ve sat in hospital waiting rooms, called rape hotlines. I’ve been the person people spoke to when they didn’t know what to do after an assault.

And yet somehow, I was completely oblivious when it applied to me.

I wish I could say that I was ready – that with all my practical and academic knowledge of sexual violence, navigating assault was somehow easier. That the years of repressing my own experiences had somehow paid off, and my body and mind were finally on the same page.

But that’s not what trauma looks like.

It looks like cancelling therapy appointments for the remaining months of the year, like bottles and bottles of red wine. Like sexting random men I found on the internet for nothing more than the pure thrill of wielding control over my sexuality in a way that was completely meaningless to me. Like having completely silent meltdowns in my job as a nanny, ducking into the bathroom every hour to sob and splash my face with cold water, trying to hide my tears from the toddler I cared for.

When the adrenaline finally ran out, when the avoidant coping mechanisms stopped working, I collapsed in on myself. I lay on the lounge in my apartment and drifted in and out of consciousness in front of endless episodes of Bluey. I called 1800 RESPECT five times in 48 hours.

“What do I do?” I asked the counsellors at the end of the phone. “How do I deal with this?”

Their answers were textbook perfect, all in line with the best practice guidelines of receiving a disclosure of sexual assault.

I wanted to scream at them down the phone. I already knew all the answers to my questions. I’d done the training, too. All I wanted was for someone to tell me something new, something that felt like it would help.

Everything I knew about trauma, sex and survivorship turned to dust in my hands.

When we think about perpetrators of sexual violence, we think, overwhelmingly, of men.

But new research from the Australian Institute of Criminology, published in 2024, showed that one in five Australians had perpetrated one or more forms of sexual violence in their adulthood – a statistic that includes almost two in 10 women. (While there were a small portion of gender diverse respondents in this study, the research was disaggregated by binary gender – focusing on binary men and women only.)

When most survivors are women, and most perpetrators are men, it’s easy to only see the age-old story of assault. When I thought I had escaped university virtually unscathed, I chalked it up to sheer luck – and the fact that I had almost zero tolerance for men, especially cis-hetero men, in virtually any aspect of my life.

I figured that in removing myself entirely from men, I would remain safe from assault.

Of course, I knew that sexual and domestic violence occurs in relationships of all types: I’d read Carmen Maria Machado’s In The Dream House, a memoir of the author’s own experience with intimate partner violence. I’d seen the statistics indicating the high rates of sexual violence against queer people.

And yet I thought I would be safe from the horrors of sexual violence in my queer feminist utopia. But it was within that bubble, on that night, that I was assaulted.

There is shockingly little research on female perpetrators, and even less on sexual violence in the LGBTQIA+ community, especially when it comes to violence between queer women.

In the absence of these stories, I floundered.

The hypothetical story of my assault looked nothing like the reality: a brief act of violence by a nameless stranger at a lesbian party.

Sexual violence, we are often told, is an inherently masculine act, one deriving from the patriarchal notion of entitlement, especially when it comes to women and their bodies.

In mainstream discussions around sex, we traditionally think of someone being penetrated by a cis man, with the act ending when he orgasms. Anything else – fingering, oral, and non-penetrative sex – is reduced to mere foreplay.

It is reasoned, then, that rape can only be done with a penis, an idea reflected in Australian state law until the mid-70s, when the act of rape was expanded – now defined as “penetration of the genitalia by a penis, object, part of a body or mouth.” But what does it mean when someone without a penis is violent, or if a penis isn’t used at all?

“Women already live with the fear of sexual assault by men,” researcher Lori Girshick writes. “To add women to this pool of potential predators means no place is inherently safe.”

We distance ourselves from rape culture with the idea that there is something fundamentally wrong with those who rape. That they weren’t taught properly about consent, or that they were abused themselves, that toxic masculinity has eaten away at the soft parts of their heart.

We tuck ourselves away from rape culture in spaces without men so that, for a moment, we can let our guards down. But if anyone can rape, it means that rape culture has penetrated our psyches so deeply that nowhere is safe, not even among ourselves.

That culture was in me like a tick, fat with denial and repression. Perhaps it is the obsessive-compulsive in me, but I cannot help but wonder how else it has shown up in my life. Have I contaminated my writing? My advice to friends?

The culture was in my perpetrator, when she thought it appropriate to slip her fingers inside a drunken stranger while they were trying to get home. Perhaps we thought ourselves above these acts of violence: too female, too queer for it to replicate itself in our lives.

Sometimes at queer events, I wonder if they’re in the room with me. If we’ve been to the same parties or protests together without even knowing it. Surely if I can’t stop bumping into that random artist I went on a date with five years ago, I must have bumped into the person who assaulted me.

It’s odd knowing there’s just someone out there who completely undid me, so carelessly.

I tell myself stories about them – the music they listen to, the books they’re reading.

Did they do it on purpose? Have they been assaulted themselves? Do they call themselves a feminist?

All I had wanted that night was to get drunk and make out with girls on the dance floor. I was young and so badly wanted to be desired.  I am still young, and this wanting remains, but the foundation I built my relationship with sexuality upon is rotted through, and my understanding keeps collapsing.

Sex, fraught as it already is in the era of fourth wave feminism, looms over me, constantly. I’ve drifted from hypersexuality to celibacy and back again, desperate for my sex life to feel fulfilling, or even just average.

I’m not sure what is contaminated by assault and what is a normal yet daunting aspect of human sexuality. I find myself equally in awe and despair over the complex and ever-changing beast that is sexuality, and the ways it will constantly reintroduce itself to me.

I am realising that I cannot intellectualise my way through any of this. I am forced to make sense of it all by living through it.

I’m slowly beginning to come back to myself, discovering all the things that have changed in the years I was in my body last. I ache all the time. Taking up space is an effort.

For many years, I couldn’t conceptualise a future where I admitted to myself that what happened that night was wrong. It is not easy, but I find myself getting through regardless.

I wake, I read, I feed the cat, I work. I choose myself, again and again. It is August as I begin to write this, and I’ve almost made it through winter.

Slowly but steadily, the days are getting longer.

If this story has brought up any issues that you want to talk about, please reach out for support:

• Say It Out Loud has a list of the LGBTIQ community-controlled services for each Australian state/territory. The organisation encourages LGBTQ+ communities to have healthy relationships, get help for unhealthy relationships, and support their friends.
• QLife is the national LGBTIQ peer-support telephone service for people wanting to talk about issues including sexuality, identity, gender, bodies, feelings or relationships.
• For Victorian residents, Rainbow Door is a specialist LGBTIQA+ helpline providing information, support and referral to those experiencing a range of issues including family and intimate partner violence, relationship issues and sexual assault.
• There is also a growing list of mainstream domestic and family violence services, like 1800 RESPECT, that are committed to LGBTIQ inclusion.

You are never alone.