Just want to start here with a quick thank you to everyone who subscribed after my much more lighthearted report last week! The support has been so much more than I ever imagined; I’m honestly overwhelmed. This is quite different from that piece, but I hope you’ll enjoy (if that’s the right word) nonetheless.
This is the story of a devout 18-year-old trans activist so mislead by her belief system that she agreed to share a 142 square foot dorm room (13.19 square meters for you non-Americans) with a “trans woman” (biological male) for weeks. This is a story about the importance of being able to name reality, even if it’s only in your own mind, and the dangers of conditioning yourself to accept the delusions of others as incontrovertible fact. This story is a warning, a cautionary tale about the importance of institutional safeguarding and of single-sex spaces. I know for a fact that I am not the only young woman who has experienced something like this. I want to apologise to the others for not speaking out sooner.
I don’t like talking about what happened in that room. I’ll joke endlessly about the absurdity of my later cancellation, of the way that former friends acted towards me, of the way my sorority quaked in fear of a 19-year-old girl with two broken wrists and no hair. The room, though? I tend to skate around it, using vague descriptions of the type of behaviour I was subjected to, to avoid having to remind myself of the specifics. Every time I allow myself to delve into the details, I am quite unpleasantly plunged back into that little dorm in Justice Bean Hall, into the mind of the scared teenager who lived there. I’m reminded of just how dire it was, and of the fact that I was, much to my chagrin, the girl who stayed. I’m not proud of anything from that time. I don’t like thinking about it. Still, I think it is important for me to speak specifically here—if nothing else, to set the record straight, so I never have to again.
I want to note also here that most of what I’m going to describe is based on my writing in the months immediately after leaving; quite scarily, I don’t remember most of that time. I have moments, images really, but not much else. I know there are things that happened that I’ve completely forgotten, and that I’d even forgotten by the time I got to writing about what happened. I am quite unsettled by that. What follows is, to the best of my notes and recollection, an account of that time.
The first time I met Sam* was in a coffee shop just off campus. We were both due to move in the next morning, and we figured it would be a good idea to meet before living together. When I walked into the coffee shop, two very tall men stood up to greet me, clearly a young man and his father. I suddenly realised that the young man was, in fact, the “trans girl” I’d been speaking to on Snapchat and iMessage for a few months (we were put in contact via the university’s housing portal—he was listed under my “same-gender” roommate options). At 6’5”, he was a full foot taller than me and was, frankly, making negative effort to pass. His hair was slightly longer than was maybe typical for a guy, but nothing terribly out of the ordinary for a town like Eugene. I believe he was just wearing a basic flannel and jeans. If I didn’t already know him from the Internet, there would have been absolutely no way for me to distinguish him as “trans”. He just looked like a normal dude.
I remember wanting to cry, to run out the door back to the Airbnb my mother was staying in and tell her I was making a huge mistake and to help me out of this. But this was my decision. I was an adult now. I’d already had an argument with my parents about rooming with him; I didn’t want to look like a fool in front of them, reneging last minute. I was a proud to a fault, and I felt it was my responsibility to live out the consequences of a decision I had made. Anyway, it was horribly transphobic of me to think these thoughts of this “girl”. Imagine if I had a black girl for a roommate and ducked out last minute—how horrible would that be for her? I had been conditioned to believe that it would be the same to do so to this man.
I swallowed my fear and dread and shook his hand. Welcome to the real world, Serena.
From the very first night we moved in to our room, Sam treated me as an unpaid, untrained therapist. He would keep me up for hours every night telling me everything that had happened that day, especially as it pertained to his transition. Every time someone called him a man, every time he had to use a public restroom (thankfully, he was too “scared” to use the women’s), every little apprehension he had, it all was my responsibility to help him process it before I could sleep. Every. Single. Night. After about a month, I was absolutely exhausted and started occasionally pretending to be asleep when he tried to start our nightly session. He did not take this well. The following day, he would passive aggressively imply that I was a bad roommate, that I was transphobic, that I needed to be more attune to the feelings of others, always not-so-subtly reminding me of how high the trans suicide rate supposedly was. He would disappear while we were out with friends, leaving me responsible for tracking him down, out of fear I would be blamed if he were to do something to himself. He took to loudly sobbing on the nights I would pretend to sleep. One night, I was feeling particularly homesick and cried a bit myself. He pointedly pretended to be asleep. In the morning, he told me that we needed to set better boundaries in our roommate relationship and that he couldn’t be expected to always help when I had a problem. At least he stopped forcing me to be his therapist after that.
To be fair, on occasion I would ask him for help with something I was dealing with. He was always quick with advice; usually, it was my mother’s fault and I should really consider cutting her off. I told him that I was thinking of changing my major to journalism; he helpfully informed me I wasn’t nearly good enough of a writer for that. When I shared my ambitions to one day work in the Middle East, due to my love of the Arabic language classes that were the only good part of my life at that point, he begged me to reconsider, as it wouldn’t be safe there for him, a heterosexual man who had a fetish for being a woman. My homosexuality, atheism, and femaleness would keep me safe and sound in the region, of course.
Let’s talk a bit more about that fetish of his. I remember every week while picking up my clothes to do my laundry, I would inevitably find a dirty pair of his women’s underwear on my side of the room. Somehow, at the time, I wrote this off as an accident, despite the fact that I had quite literally never done that. Within days of moving in, he forced me, despite my repeated refusals, to take the BDSM Test. This is an online questionnaire in which users answer questions about various fetishes and paraphilia they have. It’s like a worse version of the Rice Purity Test. Sam was absolutely obsessed with his results, taking every opportunity to remind me that he was breaking the stereotype of the “submissive transfem”. I took every opportunity to ask if we could please change the subject. Strangely, he seemed not to pick up on my discomfort.
During one of our nightly sessions, he got upset that when he hung out with me and our mutual female friends, they wouldn’t act like he was “one of the girls” or do “girl talk”. I’m still not entirely sure what he meant by this. My best guess is he had a sort of pornified image of tween girl slumber parties that he wanted to experience. Maybe also something to do with talking about boys, which I myself have very little experience with, for obvious reasons. Whatever it was he meant, I misinterpreted it. The next time we all hung out, we got on the topic of our first periods. Girl talk, right? Wrong! He got even more upset that night. I don’t remember the details, but I do remember the fear I felt, and the volume of his deep voice. The room was tiny, and he was huge. He could lie in his bed and quite easily reach my bed with his arm across the room. When he’d finally calmed down, he told me about how the idea of menstruating gave him “ew-phoria”—something “gross” that would give him “gender euphoria”. Having now read what many of the men on r/MTF—a forum he frequented—consider “gender euphoria”, I think he meant that he got off on it.
He would constantly make comments about my body. On reflection, I think he was trying to get me to sleep with him; after all, sleeping with a lesbian is the ultimate “validation” for these men. At the time, I brushed it off, telling myself that I needed to “grow up” and that this is how adults talk to each other. Last year, I found a copy of my later explanation to the university why I wanted to move out of the room. In it, I wrote, “She is very physically clingy, which is something I have told her I do not appreciate, yet she still does it.” I had no recollection of that previously. That detail continues to concern me.
Sam told me he was bisexual, but the way he talked about his attraction to men was a textbook case of what Ray Blanchard calls “pseudobisexuality”—he believed that sleeping with a man would make him feel more feminine, not experiencing genuine attraction. He had only been involved with women when I knew him.
I bought my parents fun tea collections for Christmas. The one for my dad was Harry Potter-themed, because we love watching the movies together. They went missing sometime before I left to go home for Christmas. Sam feigned ignorance when I asked if he knew where they’d gone. I assumed they must have just gotten lost somewhere in my things. Upon moving out, I realised that he’d stolen them, presumably due to his hatred of J.K. Rowling.
Through all of this, every time I felt uncomfortable with his behaviour, every time I accidentally thought of him as a man, every time I felt my skin crawl with that deep unease that all women know, I was consumed with guilt. I couldn’t believe how horrible of a person I was. Years and years of listening to trans voices, of working hard on my cis privilege, of trying to be the best ally I could be, and I still couldn’t get myself to view this person they way I would a woman. I felt like I was equivalent to a racist, being intolerant to a “women” just because she was different to me. Every time I’d mentally misgender him (I never actually did out loud—I was far too conditioned for that), I would follow the advice I’d gotten from trans people on Tumblr and Pinterest: come up with 3-5 sentences in my head in which I used his preferred pronouns. Given that he was 6’5”, I slipped up a lot. The mental work of defending against it was exhausting.
Still, I desperately wanted to be free of him. I knew I couldn’t go on like this forever. I set my sights on sophomore year, trying to scheme some way to make sure I didn’t have to live with him again, where I could just let the friendship fade and finally get rid of him. I realised that I wouldn’t be able to do that without coming across as transphobic—unless there was a structural reason why I couldn’t see him. The only way I could come up with to fully leave with my moral standing intact was to transfer universities. I started filling out applications for various schools back home in the Midwest and on the East Coast, though I never submitted any.
Winter Break came, my saving grace. Over a month out of Eugene back with my family. It reset my subconscious understanding of what was normal. The frog had been taken out of the heating pot and put back in her nice, cool pond.
I moved back in in early January for Winter Term. I arrived a few days before Sam, allowing me to adjust to a normal level of stress. When he came back on the Monday, I could no longer handle it. I started waking up at 5:30am to be out of the room by 6 with a bag fully packed with everything I could possibly need for the day. I would return at 8pm and immediately pretend to go to asleep so I wouldn’t have to deal with him. In between, I would do my academic work, but there wasn’t much of it. Most of my time was spent wandering aimlessly around the neighbourhoods around campus listening to music, mind blank with the stress.
On Friday night, I cracked.
I logged in to the University of Oregon housing portal and took a look at the roommate change request form—just out of curiosity, I told myself. Said curiosity ended with me tearfully filling it out alone in my hall’s common room, suddenly realising that if I didn’t leave soon, something bad would happen. What exactly, I wasn’t quite sure yet, but something bad. By the time I submitted the form, the sun had long since set, and I sat in the dark and cried, feeling like the worst person on Earth. No one would ever understand why I had to do what I had to do. I was convinced I was going to lose all my friends.
I calmed myself down eventually and headed across the street to grab dinner. When there, I ran into some old friends from the start of the year. They’d drifted away from my roommate and I for reasons I hadn’t quite understood at the time. Importantly, they were all female. We chatted idly about the new term, catching up on what we’d done over the break. It was nice. Eventually, though, the weight of what I’d just done that evening made me blurt out that I was moving dorms. Immediately, a look passed throughout the group. They knew why. One of them even apologised for the fact that they’d drifted and lost touch with me—it had been for the same reasons I was leaving. Still, when I tried to talk more about what was going on, largely in an effort to figure what the hell was going on, they were uninterested. They knew this was radioactive.
I’d unfortunately made the crucial mistake of filling out the change request at 5pm on the Friday before Martin Luther King Jr day; the housing office was closed until Tuesday morning. This meant I was stuck in the room for at least another three days. Theoretically I should’ve gone to my resident assistant (RA). Of course, she was a they/she (“but I’ll love you forever if you only use they!”) who was quite sycophantic about Sam and his transition. It didn’t even occur to me to go to her. She would’ve called me a bigot and washed her hands of it. Instead, I hastily packed a suitcase and holed up in my friend’s girlfriend’s dorm for the weekend. Whatever came after, I will forever be grateful to her and her roommates for that kindness.
Tuesday came and I called the university housing office. Sitting in the field behind the university’s main library, I dialled the number, hands shaking from the January chill and the fear. An annoyed, “We really don’t process these requests until Week 3. Are you really sure you want to escalate this?” was all the response I got. I don’t remember what I said next, but I remember receiving an email with a new housing option two hours later. I looked up the new roommate on Instagram, saw that she was female, and hit accept. I emailed my professors to let them know I wouldn’t be in class the next day.
I knew Sam’s schedule, so I knew I had a four hour block where he wouldn’t be home in the middle of the day. I moved all of my things in three hours, almost running back and forth with a dolly. A few of my old friends agreed to help. While I enormously appreciate their aid, I never heard from them again after. The fear I felt while moving was like nothing I’d ever felt before or since.
I remember the moment my friends left and I was alone in my new room. I collapsed onto my new bed, cluttered with all of my things piled on top of it, crying in relief. Whatever the hell had happened in the previous months had ended. It was over. I was safe. My God, I was safe.
My new roommate didn’t leave her dirty underwear on my side of the room. She and I weren’t really friends, but we coexisted peacefully, living parallel lives in the same space. She never kept me up for hours ranting about how unfair the world was to her. She never raged at me for perfectly innocuous comments she had decided were somehow bigoted towards her. I never heard any of her sexual fantasies. She never stole from me. Even when things soured later in the year, I was never afraid to come home. The very normal feeling of security I had in that room felt like such a luxury after the months that had come before.
I spent the next few weeks reeling. What happened? Why had I left? While I no longer felt like a bad person for leaving, given how much relief it had given me, I was still puzzled by why. I again turned to wandering the streets of my college town, though this time I was pondering, not disassociating. After a few days, I realised that he had abused me. That in itself was a revelation. Still, as I was mulling over various memories from that room, it felt like I was missing several pieces. Something wasn’t adding up. I kept walking.
Towards the end of the month, I had a very scary idea. Glancing around me to make sure no one was watching (I was alone aside from a few stoners getting high on a bench), I thought to myself, for the first time, He’s such an asshole. Immediately, I whipped my head around, making sure that mind reading was not in fact real. The stoners hadn’t even noticed I was there. My next thought was, You have got to be kidding me. I couldn’t believe it. Were the TERFs right all along?
See, back in 2018 when I was 14 and first came across the word “TERF” on the Internet, I had initially been intrigued. Raised by parents who encouraged me to read every opinion I could find on any given issue, I wanted to hear them out. I started reading radical feminist Tumblr posts eviscerating the concept of gender identity as a sexist, homophobic farce. As far as I was concerned, those ladies had a point! Still, in my investigation, I realised that while some randos on Tumblr were making great arguments, all of the famous adults online who I usually trusted to have the right opinions not only disagreed with them, but saw them as fascists. In my efforts to find out why, I watched hours and hours of video essays proclaiming to explain why the TERFs were wrong, but try as I might, I could not understand them. It always felt like I had missed the part of the video where they made their devastating argument. Unfortunately, I came to the conclusion that I must just be too stupid, or perhaps too immoral, to understand why they were correct. After all, who was I, a random 14-year-old girl, to go against the word of adults with PhDs? Clearly, there was some deficiency in me. I committed myself to trying to understand the mystery of faith and, in the meantime, living as though it were true.
It was at this moment, at 19, that I realised that I should’ve stuck to my guns. I was smarter at 14 than those PhDs were in their thirties. I had wasted five years of my young life trying to logic my way to understanding a false premise. You can imagine my frustration. I know many of you have felt it yourselves.
More disturbing than that, though, was the horror of realising that the person I had been sharing a room with for months was a man. This may sound crazy—after all, he was 6’5” and made negative effort to pass—but I had conditioned myself to think of him as a woman. I truly believed it. To realise that he was a man brought on a sense of violation I still feel whenever I think too much about what happened.
A few weeks later, coincidentally, I was meeting my mother in Phoenix, Arizona, for a weekend away in the sun. In Eugene, I was deep in the Trans Bible Belt; I didn’t feel comfortable looking at TERF posts just yet. I can’t point to any real reason why other than a general climate of orthodoxy. In purple Arizona, though, I did. I redownloaded Tumblr and started revisiting what the radical feminists had to say. I told myself I would just take a look to be sure; if they were horrible and bigoted and illogical, then I’d know I had been right all along to see them as fascists.
Of course, they were not horrible and bigoted and illogical. I instead found a community of intelligent, compassionate, and extremely funny women of all ages from around the world. As I scrolled through those first few posts, I felt the cognitive dissonance that had plagued me for almost five years finally resolve. Their arguments were clear, simple, and unassailable. I suddenly realised why I had been told for years to “block and report to stay safe”; if I’d known anything about the women I was demonising, I never would have done it.
My next thought after that was that I was totally and utterly screwed.
*Not his real name. He goes by a similarly unisex nickname for a longer woman’s name.
This piece is already far too long, so I will be splitting this story into two parts. Part 2 will be posted next weekend. Thank you all again for your incredible support <3
What happened in Oregon, part 2
Thank you all for the support for Part 1! I hoped to publish Part 2 sooner but somehow managed to catch two viruses while writing it, in addition to finishing up Michaelmas Term here and dealing with the sun setting at 3:45pm (!!!). Here it is.
Your roommate wasn't a woman, and my rapist wasn't either. No matter how much people try to tell us otherwise.
Thank you for writing this.
This is extraordinary. I have forwarded it to friends and family. You have not only the writing to be a great journalist, you have the critical mind too. Thank you for writing this