I have something I’d like to share with everyone all around the world.
I’m a female. I say female, because it’s my biological gender, meaning that I have been born with female genitalia. Also I have always been called ‘a girl/a woman’ and I have no problem with that. I’m completely content with my sex/gender. I’m in my early-mid twenties, and study to be an engineer and am working as one at a desing and consulting company during this summer, before my last academic year. I’ve received many thanks for my good work during this summer and also gotten a promise of a thesis and hints at a permanent job there after I graduate. I’ve impressed them in just a couple of months. In a field that is generally thought to be masculine.
I think a look to my years growing up to an adult would be useful now. I have two elder siblings, a sister and a brother, a female and a male, in the same sense I introduced myself as. My parent’s incomes were somewhat mediocre, so when I grew up, I got used to wear the clothes my elder siblings had already grown out of. Both my sisters and my brothers. Even today I wear my brother’s old jeans and have even bought a pair of new jeans from men’s section of a store, because they’re just mad comfortable! My favorite outfit today are a pair of jeans, t-shirt, a flannel shirt and my one cherished pair of Converses. I don’t really see a need to show my feminine figure in slim dresses and high heels.
In my childhood I also played with Lego’s (the smaller and more challenging one’s, not the baby versions, Duplo’s). Well yes, I also had some Barbies, when I was little, but I think I always got more kicks out of building Lego’s and especially playing with Bionicles with my brother. My parents never pushed any so called ’girl toys’ for me. The rare chance I got a new toy, they always let me choose.
At my early teens I found my favorite hobby ever. Kickboxing. My parents didn’t see any reason to tell me ’No, martial arts are boy’s hobbies’. The same way my parents didn’t push me any gender specific toys, or hobbies, they didn’t push me any gender specific careers. Once I thought that I wanted to be a dressmaker and I even got an education in it. But then I changed my mind and thought that I want to be an engineer. Even here, my parents didn’t see any reason to tell me that it’s not okay, because I’m biologically a girl/a woman/a female.
Where I’m heading here, is that I personally don’t see, why being a female should in any way define, what I am like as a person. It makes me kind of sad, when I see people struggling to hold up a certain kind of an image based on their sex (still in a biological sense). Of course I’ve also seen females who love to be feminine and males who love to be masculine. What I mean is, being a female or a male, isn’t the same thing as being feminine or masculine. So I don’t personally understand the whole ’let’s call everyone just a person so they’re not put into boxes by genders’ thing. Yeah, it’s alright, and I don’t really have anything against it, if it makes people feel better. I just don’t understand how people are so limited by words such as ’girl’ or ’boy’. That’s because I’ve beed raised to believe, that even thought I’m ’a girl’, that one word doesn’t need to define me as a person. They’re just words. I hope that other people could see that too.
My mother once told me, I can do anything I want. So now I want to tell it to everyone else. You can do anything you want and be anything you want!
TL;DR: A word such as ’girl’ or ’boy’ doesn’t need to define you as a person. You can be and do whatever you want.
