August 22, 2025 - The Banality of Violence

For our very first official “Forbidden Queeries” piece, I had imagined I might respond to a handful of questions about a range of topics like one would often see in a typical advice column. But, in a fitting turn of events, the first question I had submitted to me was one that seems incredibly important to bring to us all to discuss. So I’m dedicating this entire piece to discussing this question and present an ask at the end for all my readers, so I hope you will stick with me to the end.

Content warning: this piece will be discussing sexual assault in general terms, but not specifics of any particular event.

Q: Why does getting sexually assaulted feel so mundane? Like, it sucked and I’m processing it and uuuuuuugh. But on some level, why am I not MORE bothered?

I mean, I’ve spent a LOT of time working through it since Friday, so maybe the answer is my brain is trying to tell me it’s mundane while we work on it?

I don’t know, maybe this is a terrible question.

Maybe the fact that I’m asking it anyway is a message from my subconscious to me.

Surviving the Mundane

First and foremost, this is not a terrible question and I want to encourage you to give yourself some grace and time. It may take time for those feelings to fully come to the front, or it may be that you will find you were able to process the event in a way that leaves less of a wound than you might have expected. This may even change day to day. There is no one “right” way to react or process it, and it can come in phases as you move forward from the event.

Second, I’m going to repeat something you likely already know, but it is important to just put it into words and hear others affirm: You did not deserve what happened to you and you are not to blame. No matter what you did, what you wore, or where you were, it is not your fault.

Finally, the core question: why does surviving sexual assault feel so mundane?

A lot us carry an image of SA in our heads as something dramatic and intense. In movies and shows, it’s often shown as an act of visible force, the lighting brings the scene into stark relief, and the soundtrack plays music that makes it clear something terrible is happening. And it is almost always shown as a distinct scene separate from other scenes, and serves as an event that is important to the overall plot of the story.

Things like this often don’t work like that in real life. Trauma and violence can take place right in the middle of the rest of our lives, and the story probably won’t stop to take notice. It can even be ambiguous, and the meaning of the moment might not become clear to us until later.

One of my own experiences of sexual assault happened in the middle of a classroom in front of other students and teachers, and was laughed off as a joke. I didn’t recognize it as SA at the time. I went on with the rest of my day, with that just being labeled in the moment as an unpleasant but unimportant thing among all the homework and quizzes and extracurriculars I had on my mind. And yet, decades later, the mark that act left on me is still there and shows up in occasional PTSD nightmares.

While chewing on this, I found myself wanting to revisit Kai Cheng Thom’s piece Chronicle of a Rape Foretold (2019). Thom describes how so many of us thirst for a “Queerlandia,” a place that is “safe for our bodies, safe for our souls, safe for an infinite rainbow of diverse gender and sexual expression,” and free from the violence that characterizes so much else in our world. And yet, “...I have wondered for a long time now why my own experiences of living through violence within queer community went unnoticed for so long – unnoticed by community and disregarded by myself.” That’s when she names it and lays out how sexual violence, even in our communities, becomes so mundane:

“We live in a rape culture, as feminists like to say, queer community included. What this means, at least for trans women of colour like me – targets of violence who are among the least likely to be supported as survivors – is that our perpetrators are not limited to one bad person, or two. My intimate life – both sexual and non-sexual – has in large part existed on a spectrum of violence that encompasses the majority of my sexual partners and many of my friends.

The problem of intimate and sexual violence is not individual; it is cultural.”

We live our lives in a soup of violence. While particular experiences bubble up out of this soup, they are an extension of our world and our community, not separate from it. What you and so many others have experienced is something all of us that make up your community bear responsibility for letting it become a part and parcel of our mundane. But because we bear responsibility, we also have the power to change it.

Thom asks us a question, “What would it take to build a community where we were really safe? Not perfectly, rigidly safe in the sense of totally free from risk…but safe enough to pursue intimacy and adventure with the knowledge there really was a community that had our backs?” A world where “rape and traumatization...was not a foregone conclusion?”

This is what I would like to ask of us: what would it take to build a community where this was not mundane? I want to encourage my readers to have conversations in your own communities, whether on person or online, where we name these things that have happened to us and others, identify how our communities played a part in them, and what we can do differently. Let me be clear, the goal is not to go monster-hunting for the perpetrators, because this isn’t an individual "bad apple" problem as much as we may want it to be. The goal is to think in terms of our actual lived communities and social spaces, and how to make a world where this is no longer just another thing that happens amidst our lives.

If you feel like sharing with me or other readers about your own experiences and conversations around this, please feel free to email me at forbiddenqueeries@gmail.com. In the near future, I’ll collect these and bring them into conversation together in an extra post to help further this conversation.

And if you want to read the follow-up to this conversation, consider subscribing to the newsletter here so you can know when it is released: https://forbidden-queeries.ghost.io/