Are Girls Just as Good as Boys? Yet? Still? Soon? Hello?

i've been thinking a lot about how the skin you're poured into at birth will instantly and forever shape how you are perceived and treated and what options you will have in life. 

it's true for what genitalia you've got slung on you, too. 

i have drafted many posts on my absolute terror at raising a girl. at having to help anna figure out that life won't be quite as open and easy, safe or fair as it will be for her brother. i haven't put them out, because they're hard for me. my thoughts are muddy stuck in worry and disappointment and maybe some sexism, and definitely some helplessness. and i don't want to give her that mess. i don't even want to put it onto the internets and wade through it all. i want to give hope to her, and you. i want to be a voice of earnest belief that things. are. getting. better. 

but i just keep concluding that girls are just not as good as boys. there's so much evidence that that simply MUST be true. 

my words are too many and too tangled and lost and inconclusive and....so, poem. 

girls are just as good as boys

*but that can't possibly be true

why not?

*if it were, then we wouldn't be so mistreated 

*our bodies wouldn't be our most important part and deserve such constant critique

*we would accelerate at the same rate as boys and there would be no limit

*we would be encouraged and applauded for being successful and large at life

*we wouldn't be shamed for our biological differences like blood, milk, and babies

*our massive differences in the fact that babies come out of us and not men wouldn't automatically make us burdens or weapons or moral and political cunundrums 

*a vagina wouldn't be a euphamism for something weak and bad

*our voices wouldn't be silenced in the name of keeping order or honoring a god

*our position and safety and future wouldn't be dependent on men

*we wouldn't all be so "crazy" and "insane" and "hormonal" and "unpredictable" ''

(untrustworthy, unworthy, unreliable, weak again) 

so then, girls aren't as good as boys?

*obviously not. look around. the world makes it clear. 

what if we ARE just as good, but the world is wrong?

*yeah, good luck with that, then. 

then what am i supposed to do, mom?

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