For over a month, my office has been going back and forth with ICE officials about Andrea's condition. We have been ignored, put off, and frankly, lied to about the treatment she has received while in detention.
Words such as 'relationship,' 'affair,' 'involvement,' or 'seeing each other' imply mutuality and consent. In the context of child sexual abuse, these implications are false. A child cannot legally or developmentally consent to sexual activity with an adult. Describing abuse using relational language risks distorting the inherent power imbalance and shifting perceived responsibility away from the adult perpetrator.
When I took the assessment, shortly after leaving my partner, he scored an 8/10. If I had gone through with our pregnancy, he would have scored a 10. But we didn't have children because five years earlier, in a Chicago clinic, I'd had a medication abortion. At the time, the danger only registered as a faint sense of unease, nothing like the five-alarm fire my life would later become.
"I'm not broken. I'm not fixed. I'm just different," trans Kentucky resident Dr Bobbie Glass, who endured conversion practices in the 1970s, told the group. "Conversion therapy did not do anything to get rid of my transness. It made me feel super ashamed. It made me depressed. It sent me into clinical depression and years of anti-depressants and suicidality."