Member-only story
Name The Trauma, Tell The Truth
Stop minimizing my trauma to make yourself more comfortable
One of the things I hate most about certain platforms is the requirment to dumb down trauma for other people’s comfort. I was sexually assaulted time and time again, and reducing it to the initials SA minimizes it and that’s incredibly offensive.
A lot of people don’t even know what the fuck anyone is saying when they say SA, but when they use their words and say things like sexual assault, rape, or incest, those have definitions. Placed in a sentence, paragraph, and story, they acknowledge the trauma.
SA isn’t a fucking word, and it doesn’t tell anyone anything except that it is okay to minimize abuse survivors and their resulting issues. My step-father committed incest when he raped me and got me pregnant. He didn’t SA me. He sexually assaulted me. Nobody has the right to remove the words I need to tell people what happened to me.
When my pimp sold me to whoever wanted to have sex with me even when I didn’t consent, that was sexual assault. Nobody gets to tiptoe around the difficult stuff by reducing it to two letters. This is shit that actually happened to me, and I get to use my words whether someone else likes it or not.
