By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit

Exile in Happy Valley

(TRIGGER WARNING: The following story includes detailed descriptions of childhood sexual abuse.)

Once upon a time, there was a little girl named Nicholas, or at least that is what her parents named her. She wasn’t exactly sure just what she was, but she knew from a very young age that she wasn’t a boy. Her big brother was a boy and every time that her parents insisted that she be like him she became furious. The little girl didn’t know how to tell her parents how wrong they were with words so she showed them in every other way that she could. Anytime her parents told her that “if you want to be like your big brother” you’ll do this, she responded by doing the polar opposite.

Her big brother ate his fruits and vegetables, so the little girl refused to even touch another fruit or vegetable. Her big brother drank his juice from a sippy cup, so the little girl refused to drink anything but water even though juice was her favorite drink. Still, somehow, the little girl’s parents were not getting the message, but when it came to potty training, things went too far fast. Suddenly, people were policing parts of the little girl’s body that she found terrifying and confusing and then telling her to just behave like her big brother. Even worse, they demanded that she comply so they could send her away to the same Catholic school that was making her brother such a well behaved ‘big boy.’

The little girl didn’t know what to do so she did what she had always done and refused to comply, but her parents seemed to simply ignore her protests, cleaning up her messes and sending her away to that scary preschool anyway. This went on for nearly two years until the little girl’s mother finally realized that her ‘accidents’ were deliberate and reacted to this discovery with violence for the first and only time in the little girl’s childhood. Not long after this incident, the little girl’s preschool teacher did the same but took it much further, dragging her by the arm to the bathroom that she refused to use, stripping her naked from her shoulders to her ankles and beating her with her bare hands.

Before the little girl could even figure out what had gone wrong, a Catholic priest visiting the church next door to the school observed her misbehavior and saw an opportunity. The young man in the white collar offered his expert guidance to the clearly frustrated preschool teacher. She was more than happy for the help and seemed to have no problem with this grown man taking a young child into the bathroom alone to show her exactly how a man is supposed to behave. What he did was molest the child. He put his hands and his mouth all over her body and made it do frightening things. The little girl was horrified but every other adult was allowed to put their hands on her body so why not this this man of God? How could she possibly say no?

Incredibly, things got worse. One day the visiting priest stopped by the preschool playground and with the approval of the little girl’s teacher took her down the street to visit the rectory where he was staying. He fixed her a sandwich in the kitchen and then sent her upstairs to the bedroom. The moment the little girl entered that room she knew something was horribly wrong. Another man, a priest from her church was already in there naked. The visiting priest came into the room behind her, sat down on the bed in front of her, and removed his pants. The little girl knew right then and there exactly what these two men of God wanted her to do because one of them had already done it to her. She cried and begged the men not to make her do those things. She promised to be good. She promised to behave like her big brother.

The priests literally laughed in her face. The visiting clergyman joked to the other about how much the little girl had enjoyed what he did to her, about how big he manipulated the scary parts of her body into becoming. The little girl just kept sobbing and begging until the two priests lost their patience. One of them grabbed her by the shoulders and forced her mouth onto the other. She choked. She couldn’t breathe. She thought that she was going to die. When the first priest had finally finished, he attempted to pass the gagging child to the other, but the little girl threw up before he could. The priests got mad. They looked at their soiled victim like a broken toy who had just ruined their good time.

The visiting priest who had started it all leaned in close and told the little girl, “Look what a big mess you just made. Your parents and your teacher would be very angry if they knew what a big mess you just made.” The little girl believed the man of God but all she could do was cry and beg to see her mommy until the priest told her that if she didn’t calm down and clean herself up that they wouldn’t let her go home, that she would never go home again. As scary as the little girl’s parents had become, the things they did to her body out of frustration were far less horrifying than the things those men did to her body for fun. She finally decided to behave however she was told to behave.

After cleaning the child up a bit, the visiting priest returned her to her preschool and informed her teacher that she had made another mess in the rectory. The preschool teacher said nothing. She only looked at the petrified five-year-old as if she were some kind of diseased animal, perverting a house of God with her biology. She sent the little girl to the bathroom where she had been beaten and molested to continue to clean herself up before she could go home.

The little girl was terrified. She saw very little difference between what the priests had done and what her teacher and her mother had done. She didn’t understand the difference between the ways those people touched her. She only knew that every single adult in her life was putting their hands on her frightening body in increasingly frightening ways. She believed that this was just what all adults did to children when they didn’t behave, and all the adults seemed to want her to become a different species upon the threat of rape. The little girl couldn’t handle the terrifying confusion of her reality. She looked into the bathroom mirror and didn’t recognize the image staring back at her. She had no place left to hide. She had no choice but to make herself disappear.

I was that little girl, and I spent decades after being savagely abused by the church my parents held in such high regard in a fog. The first decade was spent at that same school surrounded by the people who broke me. I had no choice but to black it all out. I behaved like a boy, but I didn’t feel it. I didn’t feel much of anything. I would watch the other girls playing on the playground or chatting on their way to the girl’s room where they seemed to feel so safe, and I desperately wanted to be a part of this but something deep inside told me that those feelings were dangerous, and the church seemed to validate these fears with its teachings on compulsory heterosexuality and proper gender behavior.

It wasn’t until I finally rejected all this shit and began my ongoing gender transition that these horrific memories began to rush back to me in an avalanche of vivid flashbacks, violent seizures, and dissociative identities. I need people to know this horrific story and I need them to know every last gruesome detail of it because I wasn’t just a victim of systemic childhood sexual abuse. I was a victim of spiritual abuse and the dangerous ignorance that it fosters. My parents had no idea that I was transgender because they had no idea what transgender even was. They just believed that I was a stubborn child who refused to obey. The only people who seemed to realize exactly how confused and terrified I was were those predatory priests and they used this terrifying confusion and the ignorance that afforded it to their full advantage.

Sadly, this isn’t a rare case. It is a well-known fact that Queer children are far more likely to be victims of abuse because these are the children most likely to be too scared and ashamed of their own bodies to tell. It is also a well recorded fact that early childhood sexual education that includes just simply acknowledging the existence of LGBTQ people reduces the rate of this abuse exponentially and this is precisely what the Christian Right wants erased from the public square. This basic level of biological awareness that could save a child from the horrific trauma that I still struggle with every day is the “extreme gender ideology” that President Donald Trump condemns in his pompous executive orders. But he and his masters are the ones pushing an extremist gender ideology.

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