It took being diagnosed with a brain tumor to realize that I was a feminist. Don’t get me wrong I believed in women’s equality and I had spent a considerable amount of time battling the stigma of being female in male dominated sports growing up, but for some reason I hadn’t yet started considering myself a feminist. It wasn’t that I grew up not believing in feminism. Quite the contrary. I just didn’t view myself as someone who instituted change, but more importantly I didn’t know what feminism meant to me yet. Looking back, I can’t tell why I didn’t categorize myself as such sooner.
Growing up my mother filled our homes bookshelves with such reads as Our Bodies, Ourselves and The Secret Life of Bees. I learned how to be unapologetically loud and how to laugh without restraint. My mom taught me how to mountain bike and whitewater canoe. She taught me how to work hard and how to be stern. I saw my father cry and I learned that not all women can cook (case and point: my mother). I rejoiced to the words of Virginia Woolf and Susan B. Anthony. I followed the presidential campaign, appalled with the way that women’s rights were being addressed. I was proud to consider myself a “nasty woman”, but not yet a feminist. I identified as female.
The summer after my freshman year of college I started my first full time job. I was hired in a warehouse as a shipment receiver. I was the only female identifying staff member in the department at the time and most days I stepped through the door feeling out of place. My small frame wasn’t hard to notice as an outlier among the much taller men and I dropped many, many boxes unflatteringly on myself.
On one occasion a coworker asked me “what it was like as the only woman working in the department?” I replied saying, “I sometimes worry that I’m looked at as incapable or as though I need help”. The reality of my words was besides the point. What mattered on a base level was that I didn’t view myself as equally capable. This is why I should have seen myself as a feminist sooner. I was given all of the tools to view myself as capable, but for some reason I still didn’t.
Soon after beginning work I was diagnosed with a benign pituitary adenoma. As far as brain tumors go mine is fairly common and it doesn’t affect my day to day life really at all. Around 10% of all people have a brain abnormality similar to mine. Think of it like a mole on your arm. Mine just happens to be in a small structure of my brain called the pituitary. The pituitary is an endocrine gland and my specific tumor inhibits the production of estrogen and progesterone, two crucial hormones for menstruation. Therefore, my previously normal menstrual cycle had been halted to a stop like a car run out of gas. Unlike other women I don’t have a period and I don’t have the same outlook on becoming a mother.
In the days following my diagnosis I felt the loss of my reproductive license. I fundamentally felt that I was losing a crucial connection to what makes me inherently female. Despite this I learned an important lesson; I am much more than my biology, just as all women are. We are linked together beyond our ability to have kids and menstruate, although it is what biologically and socially define us. It took this realization to see who I have become, beyond my biological ability. I now race mountain bikes, just as my mother did alongside my male counterparts, and I participate in a predominantly male workplace entirely as an equal. I am a feminist because of what I know all women are capable of beyond their ability to bear children.
I was lucky to grow up inspired by women who only saw their biological boundaries as hurdles to overcome and reproductive rights. I have conquered my fear of being the only female in a workplace. I am just me, capable, and female. I’m ecstatic about women’s equality and it’s not because it’s my time of the month. I know this because I don’t have one and this doesn’t affect my ability to be female or a feminist, just as it shouldn’t affect anyone’s ability to be a feminist.