I was lucky enough to have been raised by open minded women. Never once did the idea that girls are only supposed to be a certain way come up. Early on I learned that girls and boys are equals. I was treated as such up until middle school when all of a sudden it seemed like people had to define their gender. Sexist jokes all of a sudden became funny and I was supposed to laugh at a joke that degraded me. I was required to like make up and dress like the girls in hip-hop videos. I was no longer a person, but rather A Girl and I had to follow a whole new set of rules. Suddenly, I was defined by my gender and I had to wonder when I stopped being a person. It made no sense to me because I didn’t feel different: I still enjoyed stereotypical “boy things” like wrestling, cars, and nurf guns but that was no longer acceptable.
It seemed that because I wasn’t into the same things as other girls, I was considered a freak. Sure enough, I started to get heavily mocked for not fitting into the “girl” mold. Then my sexuality was called into question because I had decided that at the age of 12 I still wasn’t ready to kiss a boy let alone hook up. Nothing I did was right. I acted too like neither a boy nor a girl, so people assumed there must have been something wrong with more or I was a lesbian. I was more upset that they assumed I was ashamed to be a lesbian rather than the fact that they where deciding my sexually for me. (FYI: I am in fact straight but I am an ally to the LGBT community). I was supposed to pick a side of the proverbial gender line and I didn’t and to this day don’t understand why I can’t just be me, regardless of my gender. I endured the bullying and its after effects because I would rather stay true to myself then change for a role I wasn’t born to play.
I am well aware that I am in fact a girl, but I am more than my gender. I was raised to believe that you are more than the parts you are born with. I should be treated as an equal, not as something fragile that can easily break. Feminism is about gender equality, but I think we should stop making it about gender and started making it about people forgetting wither they are man or woman. I want to be able to live in a world where I am no longer required to follow a special set of rules because of the parts I was born with. At the end of the day are we not all the same thing: human.
