Work Text:
Are you male or female? Asks the form.
Raph’s hand freezes over top of it, the pencil’s dark tip hovering curiously over the words, inky black and nauseatingly haunting like the starless night above his head.
His pronouns are he/him, this marks him down on most people’s lists as a boy. He’s gone most of his life going around as a boy, his voice long deepened now and his period long gone. Everyone knows him as a boy.
Except for him. He knows him as a girl. He knows him in a girl in the most intimate way one can know someone as a girl, and he didn’t even offer Raph his name. His favourite colour, the town where he grew up, his favourite memory of his mother, the thought that haunts him late at night.
But he knows where he comes from, he knows him.
Raph has always prided himself on being a fighter, a powerful protector of his home and family. His muscles are expertly toned, his body and his prowess his art. Mikey may paint the world and Donnie may sketch the future, but Raph will always have the pride of sculpting himself into something great through the long hours of the night everyday of his life.
Would have the pride of sculpting himself.
The funny thing about art, though, is that no matter how long and how hard you work to make something, it can always be destroyed in a mere matter of seconds. The flame of a candle catching on the edge of a canvas making quick work of everything on it, a mug full of coffee toppling over and disfiguring the paper as it browns within mere seconds. Hands on the sides of a sculpture, throwing it to the ground and watching without eyes as it shatters over the floor.
He was a man, once. A boy, once. A fighter, once.
But men don’t get raped. The sites and groups say it frequently, sometimes quietly and sometimes loudly. The poems and the paintings, men are but a faceless beast with an insatiable lust for control. Men have an instinct to rape women, some sites say.
Raph has never lusted to rape a woman, but he is a man, isn’t he?
But he also wasn’t born a man, and when the man raped him, he raped him like a woman.
The man. What gall does he have to speak on the treatment of men, when it was a man himself, penis pressed into him, who did it? A strange man, a nameless beast – and don’t beasts’ function on instinct after all? The instinct to reproduce is vital, after all.
Did the instincts tell him Raph wasn’t a man? Was there something in the way he smelt, something in the way his eyes roved across the room, something in the way he held himself? Did the man take one look at him and decipher you have no instinct for power or control? Did he look at the way his eyelashes fluttered as he blinked and deciphered before Raph did that when forced into sex, he would do nothing but lie still and frozen, staring into the empty, black night?
Commonly, the moon and the night are women. As a ninja, Raph had always found comfort in the night, comfort in the privacy of shadows, just like everyone else in his family. He always looked to it with respect, but now he finds himself staring into it with fear, every hour spent at peace beneath its eyes pierced by one hour seeing it stare back in the worst moment of his life. When it gazes upon him now, he can only imagine it’s ashamed of him – this weird, ugly, not-boy not-girl boy-girl, suddenly lain out before it and fucked by a stranger like a prostitute.
He’d never had sex before him, before. He’d never really wanted to. But men are supposed to be sexual, which is why they rape women, and women are non-sexual, which is why they don’t rape others.
But women are non-sexual because women are pure. Raph knows, deep within his bones, that pure is not a word that can be used to describe him, now. It never was, and he was never bothered by it before, but suddenly the notion lies uncomfortably beneath his skin. He is not clean. He is not pure. He’ll never, ever be, and he can’t tell whether it’s because he’s a man or because he’s not a man.
Are you male or female? The form keeps asking. Why would there be a third option? Why would there be an I don’t know? Why would there be an It’s complicated?
It’s not complicated. It’s biology. Biology that dictates that sex is fluid, that gender and sex differ, that a brain can hold a different sexual makeup to the genitals.
It’s not complicated. It’s queerness. Transgender people are commonplace and accepted. What they’re trying to ask is how would you like us to see you? As though you can get anyone to see you as anything. If he saw you as a woman, it means that after all these years of sculpting yourself into the body your brain demanded, you couldn’t do it well enough. If he saw you as a man, that affirms everything homophobes hate about homosexuals, which means it would affect every innocent gay man to speak.
It’s not complicated. It’s rape. A man pins a woman down and sticks his penis in her vagina until he’s satisfied, and then he stalks off into the night. That’s what happened to him, wasn’t it?
Please, he begs he’s not a woman. Please, he begs he’s not a man.
The form is unaltered, Are you male or female?