The Velveteen Rabbit: The Story of a Toy Who Became Real

Reflections on gender, trauma and hypersexualisation

Content warning: this blog covers and includes internalized misogyny, sexual abuse, discussion of age gap relationships, unsafe sex, allusions to bodily harm (cutting) and the butchering of a beloved children’s book.

The Velveteen Rabbit is the story of a toy who comes to life. The story begins when the Rabbit is gifted to a boy (of course). At first, the Velveteen Rabbit is very lonely; the boy doesn’t notice him and he struggles to make friends with the other toys. The other toys consider themselves Real things, they are mechanical so they already know how to function, they don’t question it – it’s part of their machinery. The model boat works like a boat. It floats, it has a use: it’s real. The Velveteen Rabbit’s purpose is not quite as obvious. He has neither seen a Real rabbit, nor has been modelled on one, for he has no hind legs. The Velveteen Rabbit is a Rabbit that is not a rabbit.

Life is quite bleak for the shy little Rabbit until he finds companionship with a toy horse who shares his wisdom with him. They take part in this famous dialogue:

“What is REAL?” asked the Rabbit.

“Real isn’t how you are made,” said the Skin Horse. “It’s a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real.”

The Velveteen Rabbit is taught to associate being Real with his interactions with the boy. The Rabbit’s existence is contextual and contingent on the boy’s playing with him; he becomes a rabbit when the boy treats him like one. But he’s not a rabbit. He’s still just a toy. He’s not Real. He only feels that way because he doesn’t know better.

I don’t blame him. I didn’t know better either.

As someone who has always struggled with their identity, much of who I was, was shaped by context. I was raised as a girl, I went to a girls’ school, I was a ‘late-bloomer,’ not confident enough to come out as bi, and advised that I should sleep with some boys so I could ‘make up my mind’.

So that’s what I did.

I learned about sex by fucking men.

Maybe that’s OK if you’re educated about the emotional gravity of it. Maybe it’s OK to learn about sex by fucking if you’re dating people closer to you in age, or at least people who are kind. Learning about sex by fucking probably isn’t the best idea when you fuck older men who don’t care about your feelings, or even worse, manipulate them. My first boyfriend treated me so badly that, to this day, I’m relieved that I’d previously lost my virginity during a one-night stand in a tent. I might not have known the guy, but at least he made sure I was OK and had a nice time. It was one of my most empowering fucks: I will always have VFest (how beautifully apt).

I think that continuing the trend of one-night stands would have been better than what happened to me. A 29-year-old man probably shouldn’t cut a nineteen-year-old girl, even if she asks him to. I still have the scars.

It’s hard to come back from that.

“Does it hurt?” asked the Rabbit.

“Sometimes,” said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. “When you are Real you don’t mind being hurt.”

There’s something extremely thrilling about that mixture of sex and danger. It creates such a potent high that it’s almost irresistible not to chase: that’s why we have BDSM – all the chemical rush, with managed risk, fully informed consent and appropriate aftercare to manage the sub drop. There is a difference between good but risky BDSM and bad, dangerous sex that feels good in the moment. It’s the difference between being a sex subject and a sex object. If you play with a toy too hard and for too long, then drop it when you’re finished with it, that toy will most likely break.

And I did.

I wanted someone to put me together again. So I met a boy closer to my age and we started planning our wedding on the second date. It was all very romantic at first. Then things got cOmpLicAteD. I was so used to being picked up, played with, and dropped on a whim, that finding someone who held me tightly and didn’t want to let go felt safe. It’s easy to mistake control for love, when you don’t know what Real love looks like.

That night, and for many nights after, the Velveteen Rabbit slept in the Boy’s bed. At first he found it rather uncomfortable, for the Boy hugged him very tight, and sometimes he rolled over on him, and sometimes he pushed him so far under the pillow that the Rabbit could scarcely breathe. And he missed, too, those long moonlight hours in the nursery, when all the house was silent, and his talks with the Skin Horse. But very soon he grew to like it-

I was functionally a wife and almost a mother. I think that on an unconscious level I believed that having such a defined role would make me feel more like a ‘real woman’. All we were doing was playing house and the longer I pretended, the less I performed and the more I became. I became someone I could not recognize.

And so time went on, and the little Rabbit was very happy–so happy that he never noticed how his beautiful velveteen fur was getting shabbier and shabbier, and his tail becoming unsewn, and all the pink rubbed off his nose where the Boy had kissed him.

When I left, it was difficult to know who I was away from the relationship. I felt real for a while, but I wasn’t Real. Toys are only real when they are being played with. I only felt like a woman when I was fucking some guy. I wanted the feeling that it gave me, I wanted to feel real all the time.

Having a high sex drive and hypersexualisation are two different things. Having a high sex drive is normal and healthy, hypersexualisation is a term used to describe having a dysfunctional relationship with sex. I have both – that’s a dangerous combination. As explained in a video by Survivor Tribe, I wasn’t having sex in a healthy way, in fact, I was absent a lot of the time. It was more Toy Story than Velveteen Rabbit; I was so used to being treated like an object, that I became one. As explained in the video, I felt my only value came from my sexuality: how I had been treated, in combination with my socialised femininity, made me feel as if I was a thing to be used by men. It made me feel seen, but only as an object is seen – in the context of its use value. Male gaze innit. Thing is, whatever my reasons, I wasn’t seeing them either; aside from literally disassociating during sex, I was as they say ‘hitting it and quitting it’. I was so used to sex being a game that I forgot that other people are Real. I was objectifying them – making them my toys. Then something strange happened: I found someone I didn’t want to quit. I found someone I wanted to talk to.

“I suppose you are Real?” said the Rabbit. And then he wished he had not said it, for he thought the Skin Horse might be sensitive. But the Skin Horse only smiled. […]

“That was many years ago; but once you are Real you can’t become unreal again. It lasts for always.”

I wish it was as easy as finding the right person and suddenly feeling whole. I thought that maybe being with someone like that – someone who really saw me – would make me stable again. Maybe having a healthy relationship would make me a normal, a Real. It didn’t work like that. Things started to get better, but they also got more difficult. I was scared of what the relationship might do to me; I was terrified of losing myself again.

The Rabbit sighed. He thought it would be a long time before this magic called Real happened to him. He longed to become Real, to know what it felt like; and yet the idea of growing shabby and losing his eyes and whiskers was rather sad. He wished that he could become it without these uncomfortable things happening to him.

I was also scared of losing him. It felt like, that by sleeping with him, I had put an expiry date on what could have been a wonderful friendship. I am a better friend, than a girlfriend, but maybe that’s because I didn’t want to be a girlfriend. I hadn’t been entirely honest with him, because I still wasn’t being entirely honest with myself.

I got scared. I started dressing femme when I didn’t feel like it. I was so used to my value being in my sexuality that I assumed that was all he liked about me. I felt like if I didn’t perform femininity I would lose my relationship. I turned myself into a toy: only this time, I wanted to break myself. It had been easy to maintain the illusion when I was hooking up with people, but glamour is hard work. The performance became exhausting, and he noticed. I’m not used to men caring about my feelings: it was very annoying.

I never intended to ‘come out’, but I couldn’t keep living the lie. At the same time, coming out felt like giving something up. It felt like I was letting go of an identity I had been desperately trying to cling to.

He thought of the Skin Horse, so wise and gentle, and all that he had told him. Of what use was it to be loved and lose one’s beauty and become Real if it all ended like this?

It didn’t end though. I hadn’t given him enough credit. He said that I am who I am. Gabe. He was hoping my coming out would be a nice thing, rather than a stressful thing. He wasn’t surprised… But, I had kind of come out on social media first in the form of changing my pronouns on Twitter and aggressively sharing every pro-trans meme that drifted across my timeline. Funny how I felt safer there in what is ostensibly a public space – I suppose I have intimacy issues.

I’ve used social media a lot over the past couple of years. Part of me thought it was because I got a thrill out of posting hypersexual statuses and getting comments from cishet men. I began to realise that wasn’t the part of social media I enjoyed. They were not who I was posting for. I was posting for… my trans and queer friends.

“They were rabbits like himself, but quite furry and brand-new. They must have been very well made, for their seams didn’t show at all, and they changed shape in a queer way when they moved[…] instead of always staying the same like he did. […] the Rabbit stared hard to see which side the clockwork stuck out, for he knew that people who jump generally have something to wind them up. But he couldn’t see it. They were evidently a new kind of rabbit altogether.”

I like Facebook, because that’s where all my trans friends are.

I’d been in denial and in hiding for so long that I thought I’d never been a part of a queer community and it took until lockdown for me to realise that the queer people in my life were there and had been supporting me the whole time. I didn’t want to come out to a cisman first, even a cisman I love. I was doing something for myself, even something that felt like putting my relationship at risk. I also didn’t come out to individuals because I didn’t want to make trans people feel as if they had to educate, or validate me, but I wanted to tell them so badly. I wanted to tell them how much they mean to me. So I’m telling them now. You are the role models I never knew I had.

“He was a Real Rabbit at last, at home with the other rabbits.”

I was concerned about writing this because I didn’t want to add another trauma narrative/dramatic coming out story which could shape the cishet perception of queerneess. I also don’t want to imply that femininity and masculinity are specific things with corresponding traits. I also didn’t want to write a coming-out post that leant into the politics of passing, to end with a masculine photograph, to somehow prove my transness. What I’ve come to understand is that being non-binary doesn’t mean I have to give up my femininity: the thing is, that version of femininity was never Real to me in the first place. Being a ‘woman’ was just something I used to do.

But femme, masc, androgynous… These are things that I am.

“Wasn’t I Real before?” asked the little Rabbit.

“You were Real to the Boy,” the Fairy said, “because he loved you. Now you shall be Real to every one.”