Ari James has experienced domestic violence as a lesbian and as a trans man, and he wants organizations to do a better job for the LGBT community

DAVID TAFFET | Senior Staff Writer
taffet@dallasvoice.com
Aricles “Ari” James spoke on the issue of domestic violence before coming out as transgender.
“My mother was a domestic violence victim,” he explained. “There’s a pattern to the way domestic violence works.”
He said that people who come from homes where there’s been domestic violence are more likely to become victims themselves, and once you’ve been a victim of domestic violence, you’re more likely to be revictimized.
But you can’t meet someone and know, “This is going to be an abuser.”
James said he’s been in a variety of relationship patterns that have involved domestic abuse — lesbian, poly and straight. But he chose to talk with Dallas Voice about his most recent experience when he was in a relationship with another trans men.
“I had gotten to the point in my transition that I was mostly comfortable dating other trans people,” he said. He met another trans man, and they began dating. The man was from “a blue state” but moved to Texas.
“We had fun,” James said. “He said the right things. We had long conversations. I got lulled into a false sense of security.”
James said he shared deep, dark secrets about himself with his boyfriend. They had similar relationship issues, and he felt safe being open about his secrets. He was sure that “Things that happened in the past wouldn’t continue.”
At the time, James lived in rural Oklahoma where he owned a home. He was about to have top surgery, and the trans man he was dating promised to come up from Texas after the operation.
“Looking back I can see the manipulation now,” James said, acknowledging the micro-aggressions that happened.
For instance, his boyfriend would ask, “Why don’t you have body hair like I have?”
“I’d say, ‘My, that’s hurtful,’ and he’d apologize,” James recalled. “But then he’d do it again and again and again and again.”
James said the man would push sexual things James wasn’t comfortable doing, but James felt he might as well give his boyfriend what he wanted. He blames that partly on still being in a post-surgery fog for a few weeks and not fully understanding what was happening.
Then James called a local domestic violence office. He knew the staff there as both a client and a co-worker. He felt safe contacting them for help.
“But when I called and they gendered me as masculine, they gave me the batterers intervention hotline,” he said. “No questions. No ‘What’s going on?’ That’s where we are in advocating for LGBT people.”
James stressed that people who work with domestic violence victims and perpetrators shouldn’t make assumptions.
“That’s why people don’t get the help they need,” he said.
He said that as a domestic violence advocate himself, as someone who knows the signs and who knew he needed to get out, if he couldn’t connect with the resources he needed, how can we expect other people to be able to find the help they need?
James said the most dangerous time in a domestic violence situation is after the victim has left the abuser. “More murders and physical violence happen after ties are severed,” he said, “when the perpetrator no longer has power.”
In James’ case, the man he was dating had just become a truck driver and was going to be gone. Still, James said, he thought about selling his house as a way of distancing himself. But it was after a physical altercation between them that he knew he had to get the other man out of the house.
“I went to work with bruises,” James said. “I went to the gym” with bruises.
So he changed the locks and upgraded the windows. He let police know the situation.
When James broke up with the man, he responded with threats of suicide. And although James knew that was just more manipulation, he said, “I’d [still] try to help him … . It’s not in my make up to ignore that.”
What James calls the last hurrah came when the boyfriend broke into the house while James was gone. James said that when he got home, “It looked like a bomb went off in my house. He wanted to sleep with me. When I told him that wasn’t going to happen, he got angry and called his father and told him he was suicidal.”
He cornered James and said things, James said, that most trans people would find hurtful coming from anyone. But coming from another transgender person, he added, it was worse.
“He used my dead name,” James said.
Then the man called police and told them James came at him, resulting in James being arrested. The ex did his best to share that information with anyone who would listen to him.
James said in the queer community, when someone who’s the victim of domestic violence has a bad experience reporting it once, they won’t report it again. He said many domestic violence victims have bad experiences with peers, and often the victim is shunned.
James will be part of a panel at Cathedral of Hope on Oct. 28 to talk about domestic violence in the LGBT community. “If we’re not talking about it, it’s not going to get fixed,” he said.
He said there’s no exhaustive list of warning signs of abusive relationships, but there are a number of patterns he’ll discuss.
Candy Marcum will moderate the discussion. Other panelists include 292nd Judicial District Court Judge Brandon Birmingham; Kylee Hawks of the Dallas Police Department’s Domestic Violence Unit; Angela Lee from the National Domestic Violence Hotline; and Roy Rios from the Texas Council on Family Violence.
Domestic violence panel from 1-3 p.m. on Oct. 28 at Cathedral of Hope, 5910 Cedar Springs Road. Free.