Why I Call Him X
People ask me why I call him X. It's almost always people who don't know me well, the same people who would call me Jessica. It's a fair question, and it deserves a real answer.
A couple of weeks ago I wrote about my names, and about how Jess belongs to my family and the friends who've been around long enough to earn it. I notice who uses which name. I've corrected people who reached for a closeness they hadn't built yet. Names matter to me, maybe more than they matter to most people.
So it probably makes sense that there's one name in my story I refuse to use at all, and it belongs to the man who sexually assaulted me. In the book, he's X. There's more than one reason for that, and all of them are true at the same time.
Naming him would have given him a place in my story
A name gives a person somewhere to live in a story. Once a reader knows what to call someone, that person becomes a character. The reader carries them from chapter to chapter and starts building a picture of who they are.
I didn't want to hand him that. The book is 280 pages. If I'd used his name, it would have shown up again and again across those pages, and every reader would have had to say it in their head each time. I would have had to type it every time I wrote about him, through every draft.
I thought about that and decided no. A book is about as permanent as anything I'll ever make. It sits on library shelves and in people's houses long after the year it comes out. I wasn't willing to give him a room in it. He doesn't get permanent residence in my story.
A made-up name wouldn't have solved it, either. A fake name is still a name. It still turns him into a character with a face and a presence on the page, just a slightly disguised one. I didn't want him disguised. I wanted him reduced.
X is a strike-through
The letter is figurative and literal at the same time.
Literally, it's a placeholder. It's the thing you write when the real answer doesn't need to be there. Figuratively, X is the mark you draw through something to remove it. It's what you do to a line on a list when you're finished with it, or to a word you've decided doesn't belong on the page.
That's what I've done with him. I've struck him through.
A strike-through doesn't pretend the word was never there. You can still see what was crossed out. I'm not writing him out of what happened, because he's the reason any of it happened, and the book doesn't pretend otherwise. He's in the story because what he did is in the story. But he's crossed out. He happened, and he doesn't get to take up any more space than that.
Susan had her own name for him
It's common for survivors to have a hard time saying the name of the person who raped them. Susan, my therapist, talks about this in the book, and I was no different.
In our sessions, Susan called him SOB. It gave us a way to talk about him, and about what he did, without me having to say his name every time he came up.
When it came time to write the book, I chose X. It did the same thing on the page that SOB did in that room. It let me write about what happened honestly and in detail without putting his name in my mouth, or in my readers' mouths, over and over again.
If you're a survivor and you've never been able to say the name of the person who hurt you, you're not doing anything wrong. You're allowed to call them whatever you need to. A letter works. So does a word your therapist came up with. You don't owe anyone that name.
I'm not keeping any of this quiet
Using a letter instead of his name might look like I'm protecting him, or keeping part of this hidden. I'm not.
Sexual assault already comes with so much silence, and most of it doesn't start with survivors. It comes from everyone around them. The crime gets minimized, or treated like something that should stay private, and a lot of survivors end up carrying it quietly because that's what the world around them expects. Every survivor gets to decide how much of their story to share, and there's no wrong answer.
For me, the right answer was to say all of it. He still has his name, and he's living his life under it. What happened is part of the public record.
I wrote a whole book so that what happened to me and my family wouldn't stay in the dark. The only thing I left out was his name.
I didn't want the story to be about him
The book is called The Story We Share. It's told alongside my husband, my family, and my friends, the people who lived through this with me, along with voices from medicine, the courts, and law enforcement.
I wanted to give my family and friends a place to say how they navigated what X did. They were carrying it too, each in their own way, and I wanted them to be able to tell that part themselves.
I also wanted the book to help the people who are in their position now. The husbands and parents and friends who are supporting someone they love through something like this, and trying to take care of themselves at the same time.
So when people ask me why he's X, that's my answer. The book is full of names that belong to the people who helped carry this. His isn't one of them.
Jessi Bixler is an entrepreneur, marketing strategist, and the author of The Story We Share (Next Thing Press, 2025), a memoir about the ripple effects of sexual assault through a family and the systems that respond to harm. She speaks to leadership audiences and advocacy organizations on what people carry and how it shapes how we lead.
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