Survivor Discourse: A Transman's #MeToo Story

Marilyn Frye (1983, p. 4) uses the metaphor of a birdcage to illustrate oppression. The framework suggests that saying “me too” may be a hopeful chirp, though without promise of a key to open the cage. I apply that metaphor to sexual violence. Since the online # MeToo campaign began in 2006, survivor discourse has become a focus of feminist theory. Narratives of sexual violence express both trauma and collective resistance. Yet, as Alcoff and Serisier remind us, the power to speak as a “credible” survivor is unevenly distributed. Alcoff (2021) identifies three obstacles preventing survivors from talking and being heard: epistemic injustice, the interrelation of language and power, and dominant cultural discourses that constrain intelligibility. Similarly, Serisier (2022) critiques the popular politics of belief, showing how certain survivors fit more easily within public expectations of victimhood. Together, these analyses invite reflection on who is authorized to speak, who is silenced, and how survivor discourse operates as both empowerment and exclusion.

This essay examines these dynamics through the public testimony of Jacob Diamond, a transman who’s spoken about repeated sexual assaults by transwoman Rose Montoya. Diamond’s narrative exposes how gender, embodiment, and power intersect to produce silences. Drawing on Alcoff and Serisier, I argue that Diamond’s experience reveals fractures in contemporary feminism. While the imperative to “believe survivors” has gained traction, some remain unhearable when their stories disrupt dominant narratives of gender and power.

The Problem of Epistemic Injustice

Alcoff defines epistemic injustice as “injustice in the sphere of knowledge” (2021: 55), when certain subjects are denied credibility as knowers or rendered unintelligible within prevailing frameworks. For many survivors of sexual assault, it manifests in disbelief, victim-blaming, and the structural devaluation of testimony. In Diamond’s case, epistemic injustice is compounded by the intersection of trans identity, masculinity, and the gendered expectations surrounding rape.

Diamond described a two-year relationship marked by escalating aggression, culminating in episodes of vaginal and oral rape, including one only days after phalloplasty surgery, when he was immobile, bleeding, and under pain medication (The Transparency Podcast Show, 2024). His fragmented account mirrors trauma theorists’ observations of cognitive and narrative disruption after sexual violence (Herman, 1992; Caruth, 1996). These markers of trauma are often read as unreliability. When Diamond spoke publicly, he faced condemnation. Members of the trans community accused him of stigmatizing transwomen and questioned his motives. Such reactions illustrate Alcoff’s claim that epistemic injustice limits survivors’ capacity to be recognized as credible witnesses (2021: 55).

Epistemic injustice operates through cultural norms of who counts as a victim. Serisier (2022) observes that “rape myths are archetypal cultural narratives that constrain the limits of what is hearable and the extent to which audiences are willing to find survivor narratives credible” (2022: 343). The survivor is imagined as feminine and powerless in relation to a masculine aggressor. Transmen’s assaults disrupt this schema. Diamond’s position as a masculine appearing transman, as someone engaged in survival sex, and the fact that his aggressor was a feminine transwoman, eroded his credibility. Linguistic constraints obscure the structural and embodied realities of this form of violence.

Within queer spaces, survivors face pressure not to “feed transphobic narratives.” As Diamond’s experience shows, epistemic injustice is not only imposed by patriarchal institutions but also reproduced within progressive movements that prioritize image over individual harm. The insistence on “accountability,” not “harm to Rose,” reflects the ambivalence of survivors seeking justice in communities equating disclosure with betrayal. Thus, epistemic injustice extends beyond disbelief; it shapes the conditions under which speech is permissible.

The Problem of Language and Power

The second obstacle Alcoff identifies is the entanglement of language and power. Survivors must speak in terms already authorized by dominant discourse, yet these structures often reproduce the hierarchies that made the violence possible. For transmen, the problem of language is especially acute: pronouns and gender categories carry political weight that can obscure the realities of sexual violence.

To tell the truth of what happened, Diamond must describe being raped by a person socially regarded as a woman, while he himself is recognized as a man. Feminist theory which conceptualizes rape as a weapon of male dominance over women, offers little vocabulary for articulating this configuration unless transmen concede to being “women”.  As Alcoff notes, “speech and power are constitutively related” (2021: 58). When survivors’ experiences do not fit available linguistic categories, they risk being rendered unspeakable.

Serisier’s (2022) discussion of popular narratives explains this dynamic. The # MeToo era, she argues, generated a standardized survivor script emphasizing violation, courage, and recognition. This grammar of sexual violence positions “woman” as the victim and “man” as the perpetrator. Diamond’s narrative—“a man raped by a woman”—produces cognitive dissonance. Even linguistic markers of empathy are destabilized: referring to Montoya as “she” risks minimizing the severity of penile rape, while using “he” would be seen as misgendering. Each pronoun choice is politically charged.

This linguistic impasse shows how power operates through language to delimit survivor speech. Diamond’s difficulty formulating his experience is likely not only a symptom of trauma but of the insufficiency of available discourse. His story lies between two silences: feminist rape models of men’s dominance of women (Brownmiller 1975; Dworkin 1987; MacKinnon 1989) without regard for transmen, and trans discourse, which resists acknowledging that material structures of power exist. As a result, transmen’s assaults exist outside the grammar of all language. Language thus becomes an instrument of constraint.

The Problem of Dominant Discourses

The third barrier Alcoff identifies concerns dominant discourses: cultural narratives that shape what can be said, heard, or believed about sexual violence. These discourses do not merely describe reality; they produce it. Serisier (2022) expands this point, showing how survivor narratives circulate in ways that privilege emotional authenticity, individual redemption, and moral clarity. The result is a “genre” of testimony that empowers some survivors while excluding stories that challenge dominant expectations.

Diamond’s story troubles this genre. His narrative does not fit the expected trajectory of a woman reclaiming her voice against male violence. Instead, it inverts expectations: the perpetrator identified as a woman, the survivor as a man, and the relationship between two transgender people. Such complexity resists linear, morally legible frameworks. Consequently, his testimony was met not with solidarity but with deflection and counteraccusation.

Dominant feminist and trans discourses both rely on stabilizing narratives about power. Feminist theory often situates sexual violence within patriarchy as male entitlement over female bodies. In much trans discourse, transwomen are more commonly positioned as targets rather than perpetrators of gendered violence. Diamond’s account destabilizes both, revealing the inadequacy of frameworks that equate gender identity with power position. The dynamic of power, in practice, does not always align with assumed hierarchies of masculinity and femininity, further complicating speech. As Alcoff writes, “certain sorts of speech from disempowered groups, carefully chosen and curated, may be taken up and given circulation, but it is too often co-opted by those higher up in the chain of institutional power” (2021: 63). When no existing discourse addresses transmen’s sexual victimization, such experiences become invisible.

The issue of consent further complicates these narratives. Consent is often treated as a clear dividing line, yet in intimate partner violence it is often compromised by dependency or manipulation. Diamond’s vulnerability, heightened by medical recovery and homelessness, reveals how conditions shape coercion. His reluctance to label the acts as “rape” shows how dominant discourses of agency and consent fail to capture the continuum of violation experienced by survivors.

Serisier (2022) contends that the circulation of survivor stories in media culture often functions as moral reassurance rather than structural critique. “Change,” she writes, “is equally reliant on an audience that is willing to hear and validate her story as true and meaningful” (2022: 350). Diamond’s story, messy and unsettling, reveals precisely those realities popular feminism cannot absorb. His suffering presents a double bind: it either calls into question the legitimacy of gender identity or weakens frameworks that understand rape as male dominance over women. The result is often silence.

Conclusion

Through the lens of Alcoff’s three obstacles—epistemic injustice, language and power, and dominant discourse—we see how transmen’s experiences of sexual assault remain unspeakable. Serisier’s analysis sharpens this critique: the injunction to “believe women” has generated cultural spaces of empathy, yet those spaces rarely include transmen. Diamond’s efforts to articulate his trauma thus confront multiple silences. Returning to Fry’s metaphor (1983, p. 4), uttering “me too” can add wires to the cage, set in place by patriarchy, community defensiveness, and feminist theory itself.

If feminist scholarship aims to dismantle systems of domination, it must attend to exclusions and find ways to articulate embodied realities alongside identities. The challenge is not only to “believe survivors” but to expand the category of survivor beyond what’s familiar. As Alcoff suggests, justice requires new languages and frameworks capable of accommodating complexity without erasure. Diamond’s narrative, painful as it is, gestures toward that possibility of a survivor discourse that recognizes the multiplicity of bodies, identities, and power relations through which sexual violence is lived and spoken.

Listen to Jacob's story here:

References

Alcoff, L. M. (2021) ‘To possess the power to speak’, Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement, 89: 51–64.

Brownmiller, S. (1975). Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape. New York: Simon and Schuster.

Caruth, C. (1996) Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Dworkin, A. (1987). Intercourse. New York: Free Press.

Frye, M. (1983). The politics of reality: Essays in feminist theory. Trumansburg, NY: Crossing

MacKinnon, C. A. (1989). Toward a Feminist Theory of the State. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Herman, J. (1992) Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence—from Domestic Abuse to Political Terror. New York: Basic Books.

Serisier, T. (2022) ‘What does it mean to #BelieveWomen? Popular feminism and survivor narratives’, in P. Dawson and M. Mäkelä (eds) The Routledge Companion to Narrative Theory. London: Routledge, pp. 342–353.

The Transparency Podcast Show (2024) Breaking Silence: Survivor Stories of Allegations Against Rose Montoya [YouTube video]. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=re5MSVz3Rtk&t=3s (accessed 12 October 2025).