While I was reading that last post, I had a lot of thoughts. I didn’t want to clutter that post with them, as they are off-topic from the OP’s very important message so here:<\/p>\n
Maybe it’s where I grew up. Maybe it’s when I grew up. Maybe it’s who I grew up with or maybe it’s what my parents taught me. Maybe it’s all of that and maybe it’s none of that. My memories of things before the accident when I was 12 are fragmented and hard to recall without something to trigger them.\u00a0<\/p>\n
One thing I clearly remember was another kid asking me if I’d had a sex change because I didn’t “act like a girl”. I was “too boyish”. I wasn’t the only tomboy around, but I was the one that most of the boys identified with, I guess. (At least until I discovered Sailor Moon. And then after I showed them pictures of naked transforming Serena, they were all on board with me again. …you know, that really should have told me something when I was a kid.)<\/p>\n
I also remember a lot of detention. Why?\u00a0<\/p>\n
Because when a boy would “be a boy”, I wouldn’t take it. He harassed me? He embarrassed or humiliated me? I responded the same way any boy would.<\/p>\n
I beat the shit out of him. I encouraged other girls to beat the shit out of their harassers. Because if boys can be boys then girls can be boys too. “Boy” isn’t a gender. it’s a fucking title<\/em>.<\/p>\n It’s a title that says “I can do whatever I want because I am confident that I won’t get punished. And if I am? Well I’ll do it again and again and again until they get tired of punishing me.”<\/p>\n Did they ever get tired of punishing me? Eh. Kinda. When I started beating the shit out of my little brother’s harassers I actually got praised for standing up and protecting him. I still got in trouble and served detentions and the like but I got praised<\/em> while doing it.\u00a0<\/p>\n Even now, at 28 years old, my first reaction to something is violence. It’s been trained into me. I trained it into me<\/em>. I don’t react quite so physically anymore (done too much damage to my joints over the years; I actually take the time to size up a person first now), but man oh man. I don’t even fucking notice I’m doing it until someone points it out to me.<\/p>\n I’m fairly certain it’s the same with a lot of men— they don’t realize that’s what they’re doing. Unfortunately they don’t have the same experiences that I do because they don’t have the added experiences of being a woman on top. They don’t want to listen to the experiences of women, because they can’t understand that the experiences of women are different<\/em> from those of men.\u00a0<\/p>\n Because “girl” is a title as well.<\/p>\n It’s a title that means “reserved and quiet”. It means “needs to be protected”. It means “unable to do what I [men] can”. It means “use words instead of fists”.\u00a0<\/p>\n It means everything that a man doesn’t want to be, and so he ignores it. Not out of spite, but out of disinterest.<\/p>\n [ the men referred to in this post are of the cishet variety. I cannot begin to understand the experiences of the trans* community and therefore do not feel comfortable trying to shoehorn them into this and (very likely) get something offensively wrong. ]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" While I was reading that last post, I had a lot of thoughts. I didn’t want to clutter that post with them, as they are off-topic from the OP’s very important message so here: Maybe it’s where I grew up. Maybe it’s when I grew up. Maybe it’s who I grew up with or maybe … Continue reading <\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[1132,1133,1134,1131,1135],"class_list":["post-6819","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-boys-vs-girls","tag-personal-experiences","tag-personal-opinion","tag-sexism-thoughts","tag-very-likely-wrong-in-lots-of-spots-but-thats-how-opinions-work"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/renne.finalknight.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6819","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/renne.finalknight.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/renne.finalknight.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/renne.finalknight.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/renne.finalknight.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6819"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/renne.finalknight.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6819\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/renne.finalknight.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6819"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/renne.finalknight.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6819"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/renne.finalknight.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6819"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}