What helped me in practicing all the things on this list was to start accepting the reality of my body and female structures, and the general traits that came with it. Although my personality is not hyper feminine, I was still markedly feminine, I was still female, and somehow, I still received the message that I couldn’t find a place in society or be at peace with myself being an androgynous female. I also received the extremely toxic message that if I wasn’t adhering to gender norms or stereotypes enough, I was not a woman, or should be a man.

Along with that, the post-modernist concept that I could in fact be, anything I wanted to be, that biological sex didn’t matter, that all gender norms, stereotypes, and any traditional femininity or masculinity were not only wrong and stupid, but that I could choose to opt out of them entirely by being non-binary, not having any gender or sex, or being “just human”(what seems profound, but can also be a lazy way to pretend sexed realities and functions don’t exist because they are too difficult to manage) conditioned me to reject traditional wisdoms that I have now integrated into my life as both an individual, but also existential being. Lumping all traditional sex and gender roles into an outdated box of “patriarchal oppression” did me no favors, and neither did popular culture telling me — and countless other young women and men — that if dealing with biological sex and gender roles are difficult, we can just opt out or play pretend, and that everyone needs to go along with it.

[The rest of us should stop cooperating with it. If adults want to indulge themselves in transgenderism, they can — but the rest of us are under no obligation to participate in their fantasy, recall their pronoun choices, or give them access to facilities designed for biological differences between men and women. — Ed]