[TW: SA] So when I was a kid, just before I turned 5, my family moved to kind of out in the middle of nowhere. Across the street lived a boy who was approximately a year younger than me. My parents made me go talk to him, and we became “friends.”

Not too long after we had gotten moved in, he started wanting to play doctor. I didn’t want to initially, but he eventually got me to participate. I’ve seen a lot of websites saying that playing doctor is normal for young kids. I don’t know if I believe that; I’ve been super gaslit into thinking the abuse I faced was normal and I have a hard time with trust.

For context, we are both AMAB. I did eventually realize that I am a trans woman, however at the time this occurred I had never even heard of the word transgender. I mention this because I consider myself to have always had a female brain though I didn’t realize that when I was a little kid. In addition to that I’ve also relatively recently discovered that I’ve had autism my whole life as well.

Anyways, he eventually wanted to do other things as well, some things I’m just not going to write because I don’t like thinking about it, but he repeatedly forced sexual acts on to me over the next 5 years. It stopped when I was around 10 because his family moved to another state.

One common thing he liked to do was oral sex. I always initially refused, but he would try to coerce me by saying that it’s a normal thing for friends to do, and that if I didn’t do it he wouldn’t be my friend anymore. If I continued to refuse and we were alone in the house, he would go and get a knife from the kitchen and threaten to kill himself if I didn’t participate in whatever sexual act he wanted me to do. So I always ended up saying yes even though I really didn’t want to.

I remember feeling absolutely miserable each time. Afterwards I would go hide somewhere and start dry heaving and crying. I’ve never told a single soul about the abuse I went through and it’s been eating me up for quite a while, especially when I hear about rape on the news or somewhere else and it just destroys me. When I was younger I didn’t know any better and he convinced me it was normal, but it’s also just a really hard thing for me to think about as well and I was worried people would just brush me off and say I’m overly sensitive. I’m now sharing because I just can’t endure it anymore and I can’t afford a therapist rn. I’ve cried so much and I just want the pain to stop.

I don’t blame him for it because he was just a kid and I’m pretty sure he was getting abused by someone else, specifically his mother. His father was an oil worker so he was rarely home, meaning he and his mother had a lot of alone time. He would also talk about his mother in a sexual context on occasion and she was the only person besides me that I ever heard him talk about that way, which is why I suspect her. Also I don’t think a young kid could possibly think of the things that he did to me. There had to have been an adult abusing him.