Breathe.

Feminism that’s based in a link between gender and genitals doesn’t just exclude people who’s bodies don’t fit – it’s a fundamentally flawed analysis that perpetuates an essentialist idea that feminism partially exists to combat. Feminism that centers a trans feminist take on gender, that recognizes that woman ≠ vagina, offers a more accurate gender analysis in general that benefits everyone.

The crush was a private thing that happened in my room, but it was also a shared activity between friends. It didn’t matter much that Emily’s crush was a haggard guy in his mid-50s, or that Mary’s was dying as the Titanic sank, or that my romantic rival was Gwen Stefani. Our crushes weren’t about anything as simple as attainability, or kissing. You couldn’t take Paul McCartney to the homecoming dance; the very idea was absurd, because the homecoming dance was an absurd nothing, especially when compared with the immensity and violence of our feelings.

My mom should’ve understood. At the Beatles’ 1966 concert in Chicago, she’d had to slap my Aunt Martha hard to get her to stop from screaming herself into a faint. From the teenyboppers to the Beliebers, teenage girls have been mocked for their crushes, but that scorn is just a shoddy mask for the anxiety these crushes inspire. Because a teenage girl with a crush is frightening. The Beatles were always on the run from shoving, hysterical girl-crowds, who wanted—what? To crush into them, to crush themselves, to crush against other girl-bodies that were all feeling the same feeling together, a chaos of feeling, a feeling that took your breath away. “A Beatle who ventures out unguarded into the streets runs the very real peril of being dismembered or crushed to death by his fans,” Life reported in January 1964. A girl with a crush is also capable of crushing.

So, because some men have managed to sexualize stretchy yoga pants, that means stretchy yoga pants are now inappropriate/slutty/cause for “alarm.” Because the standards for what it’s okay for women to wear should be dictated by men’s libidos. Nearly every woman I have talked to about this — in the office, on Facebook, on Twitter — has echoed the sentiments of the women commenting on the GMP piece: we wear yoga pants because they are comfortable. Period. The suggestion that we A) wear them because we want sexual attention from men and B) that therefore they shouldn’t be worn in scenarios in which that attention would be “inappropriate” takes all the responsibility for controlling male lust off men and places it on women. And that is some bullshit.

How could so many men be oblivious to such a basic aspect of life for the women and girls around them? One of the most plausible explanations is that violence against women has historically been seen as a “women’s issue.” We focus on the against women part of the phrase and not on the fact that men are the ones doing it. But the long-running American tragedy of men’s violence against women is really more about men and our problems than it is about women. We’re the ones committing the vast majority of the violence! We’re the ones whom women have been conditioned to fear. In the twenty-first century, it is long past time that more men—of all races, religions, ethnicities, and nationalities—faced up to this sad situation, educated ourselves and others about the hows and whys, and then went out and did something about it.

I’m like that. Either I forget right away or I never forget.

Femininity is depicted as weakness, the sapping of strength, yet masculinity is so fragile that apparently even the slightest brush with the feminine destroys it.

Does rape happen in nature? Yes, but how little do you think of men, human men, that you’re saying ‘you’re animals, you can’t control yourself, so you’re just gonna rape’, like it’s literally thinking the worst of men.
It’s not like you do not have the power to not rape, you just don’t value women and so you rape them. It’s not like nature, like there’s this force that you can’t control that’s making you rape women.
You don’t value women, you don’t have boundaries and so you violate them. It has nothing to do with the great force of nature.

If you want to kill yourself, kill what you don’t like. I had an old self that I killed. You can kill yourself too, but that doesn’t mean you got to stop living.

Each time I’m asked to tell about myself, I find myself starting the same way: “My name is Kelsey and I’m nineteen..”
but what I’d really like to say is:
“My name means island of the ships but once
I found a translation that said I’m a burning shipwreck-
not a burning ship but a ship that has caught fire
after the wreckage and well, I’d say that’s more fitting.”

I’ve learned that people don’t have time for about me’s.
They need two things: a name and an indication you’re someone special.

The doctors, they want facts not details.
“I broke my leg when I was three, it’s a funny story actually-“
The right or the left?
Conversation over.

The teachers, they want interests, hobbies.
You’re sad, yes, but what do you like to do?

The adults are a spew of questions.
What school do you go to? What classes are you taking?
What do you plan on becoming? Got a boyfriend?
No, stop.

People my own age are the worst.
“I’m planning on an English degree with a concentration in creative writing.”
Yeah, aren’t we all. So how many times have you, you know,
done it?

I’m pulled apart, my interests travelling highway 2
my goals at a stop light at traffic hour,
my medical history on a billboard for the world to see.
But what about me?

Where’s the chance to say,
“I hang on to fistfuls of poetry like loose change in my pockets,
and I keep waiting for the day that the world turns upside down
so I can swim with the stars.
I’m not afraid of darkness, it’s a loneliness I can empathize with it.
It’s the blackholes like cigarette burns inside of me that get troublesome.
I walk through graveyards and read the dashes between years,
each a story I’ll never know. Sometimes I create my own.”

No wonder none of us know who we are anymore.