I Was Sexually Assaulted on a Train in 2019
He was a stranger. His friend, who stood guard, was also a stranger. There was a stranger sitting across from us, who they had also trapped, and she had mostly looked away out the window until he was done; a few minutes later, the train stopped, and we escaped. I had just turned 23.
I minimized this experience for five years. I did not allow myself to admit that it had affected me. It was easier to think I chose my life: I presented in my particular style of sexless androgyny because that was how I genuinely wanted to present; if I did not really feel sexual desire towards others, it was because I had castrated myself, first socially, then chemically, then physically; if I did not feel sexually desired by others, it was because I had chosen to be fat, trans, and ugly. Sometimes, I wondered if choosing to be an intellectual had precluded a good relationship to sex, and sometimes I felt I was weak for choosing to give up. Chronologically, of course, the explanation was obvious: as a boy, I was often horny, something which I had experienced as occasionally fun but almost always shameful; the first two years of transition, that shame had been inflected by a new kind of excitement, mostly future-facing, and the combination had, of course, led to a lot of confusion — but you can be confused and horny: it was only after the assault that desire felt largely like a formal exercise, empty.
I did not know how to make sense of the fact that my victimhood was impersonal. It is unusual for sexual violence to occur between strangers. In my first novel, School, a character who is supposed to be me-but-not-me says,
Did you know that with the exception of rape and car theft, most crime happens at pretty equal rates throughout the day? And while most rapes happen at night, most rapes happen at home, with people you know.
The character who says this does not have a name, though she uses the name “alex” — my birth name — as her fake, online alias; she also shares many biographical details with me and expresses a number of radical political opinions that, given the rest of the novel, it’s plausible I might share; it is a novel, however, so my personal investment in those ideas can only be read ambiguously, something you would know I was well aware of if you had read a somewhat theoretical essay I had published the year before, under the name Alex, arguing as much. Even within the world of the novel, this character does not actually exist: she is herself a fiction, generated using an LLM by another character, Parker, who is also meant to be a mirror figure for the version of myself that is the author of the book. Much of my fiction is concerned with these endlessly self-reflexive questions about identity and alternate selves. I think a lot about the self, often my own, and I have for a very long time. This is why I could not admit that such an important experience in my life began with something that had almost nothing to do with me.
A common intellectual move is to explain a totality — a whole — through one of its parts. For example, you might tell the story of global capitalism by telling the story of the car: the many things that laid the foundation for its invention, its invention, its growing popularity, its later power and entrenchment in American society, its ecological effects, the kinds of things about society it might signify, and, it almost goes without saying, its many contradictions: for example, I’d imagine that people in cars don’t get sexually assaulted by strangers as often as they do in trains, but I’m pretty sure they die a lot more.
If I had to explain the totality of global capitalism using a single thing, I would chose a concept: fungibility. Things that are fungible are interchangeable. When a commodity, like a car, is mass produced, it is not created with a single, particular consumer in mind. Roads are somewhat standardized, and cars are somewhat standardized, and cars also tend to allow you to do things like move the seats and adjust the mirrors, which means cars are designed so that most types of bodies could drive them. The money you use to buy a car can be used in many different scenarios to buy many different things from many different people. Even more abstractly, we have the very concept of abstraction, the ability to use the word car to refer to various different, particular collections of matter as if they were all the same kind of thing. It is not only very hard to think without using abstraction, and thus fungibility, but impossible, as to think is to abstract: without abstraction, we would simply experience the universe as a single thing: the mystical Oneness.
Some amount of information is inevitably lost when you think abstractly, as no two cars are really the same, and if you were to treat them as if they were totally identical, you would at some point make a mistake. But if you accept that much of our society is organized around fungibility — which would be hard to deny, given that many of the commodities you are surely surrounded by and actively using were not specifically created for you — you should get why it is easy to think abstractly, and why most people do it. Thinking another way is hard, not the least because it can sometimes involve the social costs of self-identifying as “dialectical” — at the start of his Negative Dialectics, Theodor Adorno says that
the name of dialectics says no more, to begin with, than that objects do not go into their concepts without leaving a remainder . . . It indicates the untruth of identity, the fact that the concept does not exhaust the thing conceived . . . Dialectics is the consistent sense of nonidentity.
The trick, then, isn’t to never use abstractions, but to always remember that you are using abstractions. This is why Fredric Jameson, in his book Marxism and Form, which features a chapter on Adorno, says,
Thus dialectical thought is in its very structure self-consciousness and may be described as the attempt to think about a given object on one level, and at the same time to observe our own thought processes as we do so: or to use a more scientific figure, to reckon the position of the observer into the experiment itself.
I’ve read Marxism and Form twice, but I haven’t finished Negative Dialectics. I read parts of it in college, and that bit above stuck with me. Philosophers and academics tend not to admit things like this in their writing, although I suspect it’s often true for many of them, but I’m a novelist, which means that I am generally concerned with the gap between ideas and reality as it is experienced by individual people — this is the main question about being alive that Miguel de Cervantes made more concrete in his very famous novel Don Quijote, which others have claimed big things for, like that it’s the first novel, or the first modern novel, or the novel that inaugurates modernity. Whatever it was, this gap is something people have been struggling with for a very long time, and now under capitalism, it has only become more intense and more legible.
When I was sexually assaulted, I felt fungible. It’s easy enough to think that part of the reason this man picked the seat next to mine — and not the one next to the much more conventionally attractive, and much physically smaller, cis woman sitting across from me — was because he knew he would have an easier time getting away with it; he knew, I think, that the rest of what I remember to be a decently crowded train would be less likely to step in and protect the ugly tranny than the conventionally attractive, petite cis woman sitting across from her. He was right, but this analysis also doesn’t really have anything to do with me. Using the phrase ugly tranny for myself makes me feel, among other things, fungible. In the years that followed, as I flirted with processing this experience, I often felt fungible: I was just like every other woman who had ever been assaulted; if I sat down to write about it, as I often do when I want to process things, I would be writing yet another “personal essay” or, if it was in fiction, “trauma plot.” I felt and feel neutral about those genres. What actually deterred me from writing this essay wasn’t that I thought that it would be boring or generic, but that I thought it would be useless: what would it do?
A few weeks ago, I was thrown into a six-day-long situation that began when someone I worked with, but did not really know, came to me and told me that someone else I worked with, but did not really know, had raped her and was under active criminal investigation for the possession of child pornography — in the initial conversation, she repeatedly used the phrase “light rape,” among others, to minimize constantly; she seemed to be totally unaware that many of this other person’s other social actions could and would be considered abusive. The organization I was a part of had almost nothing in place to handle this situation, which would not have been a problem, as this situation had really nothing to do with this organization, whose every member had absolutely no idea this was going on, except for the fact that the person who came to me was under the impression that this organization was accountable to her as her “community.” My involvement in the situation ended with her entering what I perceived to be the paranoid section of a manic episode and then turning on me, threatening me with lawsuits, and almost hitting me with her car as she drove back to the person who she had said raped and abused her, and then the two of them threatening me with more lawsuits and the threat of going public with everything that had happened if I did not immediately step back from my nominal role of authority in this organization in which I was an unpaid volunteer, something I, of course, immediately did — I could no longer help either her or the organization, and I am still unable to, so I will not try. In one of the emails that came later, she used my own history of being diagnosed bipolar, as well as my being sexually assaulted on a train in 2019, to say that I was unreliable and untrustworthy. In that initial conversation we’d had, I had shared my story with her, telling her that I had minimized my experience of assault for many years, at what I perceived to be a great cost to myself; after sitting with that for maybe ten or fifteen more minutes of conversation, she had stopped herself in the middle of again minimizing her experience and said something like,
Thank you for sharing that because now when I minimize my experience, I feel like I am minimizing yours, and I don’t want to do that to you.
This was, to date, the most beautiful experience of solidarity I have ever had, and despite everything, I left this experience with a much, much higher opinion of this woman than the one I had had in the weeks before I began it.
From what I have been told explicitly by most of the active members of this organization, it seems largely agreed upon that I did a good job handling the situation, all things considered, but my perception is that some of the other members believe that I became overly invested in helping this woman and that my empathy and personal emotions got the better of me. My experience of those six days was the opposite. My experience was that I had annihilated my sense of self primarily to do what I believed needed to be done for the organization to survive, while also attempting to treat this woman with the kindness, dignity, and respect I believe all people deserve, regardless of their lives. Further, my perception is that only I and one of the other people involved were willing, in this specific situation, to do that. Everyone in this organization is an unpaid volunteer, and in the weeks leading up to this, I had often said, explicitly, that this was both the root of all the systemic issues others had attributed to some nebulous organizational culture and also what made taking on a nominal role of authority there so exciting: figuring out how to effectively organize a group of people when there is no mechanism of compulsion — in this case, the wage — is what communists are generally working towards. I, like many others who have drawn something from the Marxist tradition, do not believe this is something you will sit down and figure out at your desk. It is something you learn by doing, through practice. What I have learned about mechanisms of compulsion, like the wage, is that they are also mechanisms of accountability. Absent something like that, in a situation like this, problems will only be solved if people choose, of their own volition, to solve them.
The concept I have organized my understanding of this experience around has been trust. Weeks earlier, I had been talking casually with someone tangential to this organization, and after that conversation, for the first time in my obscenely secular life, I had understood what it meant to believe in God. I have met many people who claim to believe in some external entity responsible for the way the universe unfolds, and who thus say things like “it’s out of my hands,” but she is the first person I have met who seems to live her life as if she actually believes that there is much of it she cannot control. The other people I have met who say this seem to feel shame and guilt and anger and frustration when the things they say they cannot control are shown to be just that. This seems to result in a certain contradictory style of learned helplessness, and with the people I talk to now, who tend not to believe in God, they attribute this lack of control to “capitalism” or “patriarchy” or “white supremacy” or some combination of those things, sometimes just referring to the abstract “structural forces” they believe to be responsible for the way everything is.
A young Karl Marx, writing about Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, said that
The weapon of criticism cannot, of course, replace criticism of the weapon, material force must be overthrown by material force; but theory also becomes a material force as soon as it has gripped the masses. Theory is capable of gripping the masses as soon as it demonstrates ad hominem, and it demonstrates ad hominem as soon as it becomes radical. To be radical is to grasp the root of the matter. But, for man, the root is man himself.
Here I was once taught by a professor to hear echoes of another book I have not read, Ludwig Feuerbach’s The Essence of Christianity, which I understand to have been influential to the young Karl Marx in its argument that the idea of God was in fact an outward projection of humanity’s self-understanding; that is, many of the things we attribute to God — mainly the unfolding of the human story — are not the result of God’s choices but our own. It is my general understanding that much Marxist criticism works this way: you take something many perceive to be simply a fixed reality of our world, and you show how it is the product of many human hands. To see so much of what we take for granted about the world as “socially constructed” is often scary because with it comes the acknowledgment that all of this could change, and with that awareness in play, the instinctual pain we feel when we see suffering — when we see, for example, ugly trannies being sexually assaulted on trains — can no longer be suffocated under the weight of our fatalism, our resigned acceptance of things as they are; instead, it remains alive inside us, burning, an ever-present hurt that forces us to live our lives as if all of this should change.
To have faith is to believe something will happen when you don’t know it will. I now understand trust to be faith in other humans. The hardest lesson I have learned in my nearly 30 years of being alive is that I will never know: I — who have been fighting suicidal depression since I was 12 — will never know that I won’t wake up tomorrow and decide to kill myself. I will never know that my next train ride will be sexual assault free. I will never know that when I get off that train, and I step out into the street, I won’t be hit and killed by a reckless driver. I do not control the future, and the world as I believe it to be simply is not the world as it really exists — in this respect, I am not alone: we are all Quijotes, one way or another. But at least we can try to be dialectical ones.
What happened a few weeks ago has been, without a doubt, the most clarifying experience of my life. As I have now left that organization before doing any of the things I wanted to do there, I consider my time there a failure, but I consider it an instructive one: a comrade, I’ve learned, is someone you can trust to do the right thing in a given situation simply because it is the right thing to do in that situation. Marxists are often quite evasive about the definition of communism, defining it, as Marx and his frequent collaborator Friedrich Engels once did, negatively:
Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence.
I agree, pretty much, although if pressed, I would say that the abstract idea of communism we are working towards is a way of organizing society in which we are all comrades, in which there are no mechanisms of compulsion, in which we all do the right thing in a given situation simply because it is the right thing to do. A comrade, it should be made explicit, is a fungible role. The dirty secret of Marxism — you learn as soon as you start reading anything an actual Marxist wrote — is that capitalism, while doing a lot of bad, also did a lot of good, and that much of the project of building socialism and later communism is about figuring out how to resolve that contradiction in ways that further the good and diminish the bad. Under communism, we will all, in this sense, be fungible.
So what about love? That was the other thing I thought about these past few weeks. How does love fit in to all this? There is a quote I half-remember, and that everyone I’ve asked seems to half-remember, and that none of us seem to be able to track down, about the experience of young love: the thrust of the quote is that every young couple believes what they are experiencing to be something new in the history of the world. This quote is often used to deflate the young lovers’ experience of novel love, but I think they should treasure it: it is, in my opinion, literally just what love is. Love is the novel feeling that arises when you develop a relationship with someone, of whatever kind, that exists in relation to, but firmly outside of, your abstract ideas about what that relationship should be; it is, in other words, the feeling born out of an overwhelmingly concrete social relationship. It is something new in the history of the world.
I have been in a relationship with the same woman for the past 10 years, one that began when we were both 19; we were broken up for a year early on, but, lesbianicly, we’ve agreed that year still counts. I do not really write publicly about my partner, either literally or through the many guises of fiction, both out of respect for her desire for privacy and also because it doesn’t really interest me as a writer: I write primarily to solve problems, and when I have problems with my partner, I talk to her so we can solve them together. Sometimes, I feel that this literary withholding is selfish of me: surely there are lovers out there who could stand to benefit from hearing about the particulars of our love. But in my experience, the “action item” at the end of relationship advice, when the relationship is not abusive, always boils down to the same thing: just talk to your partner — you’re going need them to solve the problem.
The times I have written about my girlfriend, she has been the only audience: we have, since we began dating, periodically written each other love letters and reflections about our time together, often to be shared around birthdays, anniversaries, and holidays, or sometimes just spontaneously. Towards the beginning of our relationship, when I was neither an experienced lover nor an experienced writer, many of mine were organized around my inability to express to her what I felt: my language has failed my love, I would write, as every other down bad loverwriter of the world has ever written before me. But that is, after all, why we all keep writing: to find new ideas for the world, because the world changes, and our ideas start to fail.
Our relationship has also changed: as of over a year ago, we are in an “open relationship.” We have not further specified using the seemingly endless taxonomy “poly” people seem to because we share a mutual distaste for that particular subculture — our current description, if pressed, is that “we’re adults.” I think most monogamous people are averse to the idea of non-monogamy because they are afraid of being fungible. Many lovers worry about being replaced, being abandoned, and/or being outgrown, and many lovers worry that they will want to replace their partner, abandon them, and/or that they have outgrown them already. These worries do not really make sense to me, given how I understand love, but I don’t really know: I’m not them, and I am, all things considered, still a pretty young lover.
What problem will this essay solve? For you, the reader, I truly have no idea: part of being a writer is trusting your readers to make use of your writing without you knowing what that use will be. For me, I can tell you that I wrote the vast majority of this essay — a few small, basically lateral edits aside — on a single morning — the morning of November 27th, 2025 — and made one judicious edit today, November 30th. I wrote the essay because I was sitting on my couch feeling an overwhelmingly powerful, enjoyably confusing, and, in the final analysis, pretty novel mess of desire that I knew I would have to wait a few days to resolve; I made the edit today because I made my peace with it still being unresolved.
Although in my writing, I tend to cite mainly other writers — usually novelists and theorists — a category of thinkers I think about a lot are musicians, usually women who make music sometimes called “art pop,” which, as far as I can tell, is a genre some people use to mean “music by women that we feel okay saying is good.” Well, here’s something Björk sang once that has never felt as alive for me as it does today:
I don’t know my future after this weekend
And I don’t want to
L’chaim!
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