Datura

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Barbie dolls, dresses and skirts, bicycles, coloring books of princesses and ballerinas, flowers and butterflies. Things I was taught would make me ordinary and plain, things that would make me dumb, spoiled, and shallow. I begged my mom to change my rose colored bedding, afraid that the pigment would seep into my skin and I would forever blush with the embarrassment of my gender

In the desperate attempt to be more than my chromosomes, more than long hair and glitter and nails and pink, I rejected it all. I avoided it like the plague, I thought hating pink was my vaccine for cooties. It didn’t work. I was inescapably intertwined with the shrewd idea of femininity. I was stripped of my skin to reveal salmon colored flesh, my blood watered down to reveal I was just pink.

I learned that we were pink pigs covered in drugstore lipstick, cotton candy stomped into puddles and bubble gum chewed through, leaving nothing but rubber and spit. The old barbies that were covered in scribbles and bite marks. The sun burns that peeled and cracked, and the naked mole rats that hid under the cracks of society's expectations.

Despite learning all this, it didn't stop me from trying. If I wore enough blue, maybe I could play tag with the little boys. They wouldn't care that I was a girl, just that I could run. We would laugh and kick soccer balls, throw pebbles at each other and scream and jump and the only colors that would matter is the green grass stains on our clothes, the brown dirt on our faces and the bright yellow sun that we all played under.

But blue wasn’t enough. It was never enough for me or any other girl who felt as isolated and ashamed and disgraced as I did.

We were born wrong, born spoiled and stupid, naive and shallow.