Before We Go, A Word on Rape

• note: this is the beginning for a book I may or may not publish*

My mother didn’t want to have kids and we paid the price for it. I didn’t want any kids because I thought I wasn’t loved enough to do it right.

That is, I thought I didn’t want children until I finally fell in love. Trouble was I already had two miracle children and the person I love wasn’t available. Worse still, my uterus almost killed me shortly after these realizations and events. Thankfully, I did have kids (that I adore and do not raise the same way I was brought up) due to a treatment for my illnesses and I finally resolved those illnesses for the most part with my culminating surgery to have my uterus and an ovary removed.

But that’s not the story I’m telling here. Not quite.

No, this is a story about choice and the ones I didn’t get to make but that every person should be able to make freely: when to have sex and children, and with who. Because I almost died over lack of reproductive freedom and I know way too much about rape to not do anything about it.

So this is how I do it. By writing what I know.

Humans are animals and there are predators of man among us. These men hunt women, children, the queer, the disabled, and the otherwise vulnerable. They do kill us sometimes but the easiest form of attack is rape. Ghengis Khan was the most successful war rape strategist ever, a terrifying reality for the 0.5% of the population that’s related to him.