I remember the first time I noticed being different. In a kindergarten class, when the teacher asked for the big, strong boys to help her move chairs to the gym. I didn’t think much of it, but I knew I was strong, so in turn, I picked up as many chairs as I could and moved them to the gym with the boys. I didn’t realize that was one of the first offhanded comments of many that would allude to men being superior.

Something as little as a color can create a gap, a subconscious divide between us.

Growing up, all the toys I remember being given were Barbie dolls and My Little Ponies. None of the boys ever had those toys or wanted to play dolls with me. Most of their toys were blue the same color as the entire boys’ bathroom in our elementary school. The girls’ was a nauseating pink, a color that seemed to quietly scream at us that we weren’t good enough, but we weren’t quite old enough yet to understand why.

When I won races in P.E. and then track and field against the boys, I had this underlying sense that it was not enough. I was happy I[won when I passed the line, but I knew when I got older things wouldn’t be the same. It wasn’t just being built different; it was being raised different.

My little brother is one of my favorite people in the world, and maybe I took too much care of him, like my parents did. When he was 13 years old and still asking me to make something as simple as Ramen noodles for him because he didn’t know how, I thought about myself being 13: cleaning the house and occasionally cooking meals for all of my siblings. Even when I was younger, I was told not to wear too-revealing clothes, yet he walked around the house without a shirt on. It’s not that I also wanted to walk around my house shirtless or that I wanted him to be uncomfortable. I just wished more people were aware of the subtle contrast due to gender.

My whole childhood I was repeatedly taught a set of rules, similar to the ones my older sister already knew and the ones my younger sister had yet to learn. Things like hold your key in between your pointer and middle finger if you need to defend yourself; don’t go on a walk after dark; how pepper spray works; don’t fill up your gas at night; text your friends where you’re going always; and if you think someone is following you, call someone, and if no one answers, fake a phone call.

For all the same reasons I was taught the rules, I was put in taekwondo starting in fifth grade and continuing until I received a black belt. But it didn’t matter to me because physically the majority of the guys in my grade were stronger than me by then, and I couldn’t do anything about it anyway—something I realized whenever practice ended one day, and the adults went to heat up their cars leaving me completely alone with a boy. I quit soon after.

The first time I got an unsolicited picture on my phone I was 14. I remember calling my best friends, confused and disgusted, when they told me it was old news and they’d all already received messages just like that.

The first time I got catcalled I was 16; I don’t remember what outfit I was wearing, which shouldn’t matter anyway, yet I wonder if it was somehow my fault. “Take it as a compliment”—something every girl has heard from a man whose opinion about their body was unwanted. So, I did, and in doing so, I pushed away the inappropriate, unwarranted parts and tried only remember “pretty girl.” Unfortunately, that doesn’t work well when you have nightmares later about it, or when a group of guys is walking towards you and the experience rings in your memory like a microwave beeping at 1 a.m. while you’re trying not to wake up the whole house. Later on that week, when my sister was crying, I learned how real the “1 in 3” statistic is.

When I had to take health class in high school, during the life unit, the teacher would occasionally walk around commenting on which girls wouldn’t be able to give birth to a child because their hips were too small. The boys snickered and I think in some sick way those girls felt a sense of relief because if they were seen as small, they wouldn’t have to worry about being fat—at least for a couple hours before someone else commented on their bodies or the societal expectation to be thin settled in again right around lunchtime, where they spent the hour in the bathrooms instead.

Not wearing makeup for the longest time and not talking about “girl topics” because they were viewed as gross or emotional. Being a tomboy and arm wrestling with the older guys because I felt I had more worth being seen as one of them. Back then I was 17, about to turn 18, and those same guy friends talked about my age, talked about how excited they were for me to be legal. It’s a dehumanizing feeling when you realize people aren’t friends with you because they want to be your friend but because they think they’ll get something out of being a decent person.

In June 2022, I had my breath taken away from me, as did every other girl, even if they didn’t realize it. What Jane Roe fought so hard for me to have, a right that should’ve already belonged to me, was ripped away, as if I don’t own my own body. As if I am just a product of society, an object, like I was called throughout high school: I don’t have the right to decide what lives and dies within myself. And if it dies then I die too, because after all I’m only worth what I can produce.

Being stuck inside a patriarchal society that is no stranger to the constant degradation, dehumanization and violence it instills upon its bearers of life—the subconscious gender divide that women recognize at ages so young they cannot even comprehend what it means for them—because to be a man is something for everyone to relate to as a human experience, but to be a “female” is to not be the entire experience and only a subplot, a sub-genre—not a human and just a woman