Letters to the Editor
Published: Wednesday, March 17, 2010
Updated: Sunday, March 21, 2010 03:03
This week, Wellesley has been the most vocal I've ever seen it. We shout and we whisper, across the internet or across the lunch table. Wellesley, we are speaking and, I'm afraid that this is something that we don't do enough of. We need the practice. After two form letters sealed with "love" from the founders of HerCampus I was surprised and disappointed because, well: they said nothing. Our speech means something here because we are saying the things that no one else wants to say. Our speech means something here because we have come to it in a way that lets us speak through the frail internal structure of social constructs, hierarchies, and binaries. And, for the people who don't go to this school, that's terrifying. We cling to what we know because it's easier than putting up a fight.
I think that it is our duty to make people question. Does gender matter? Should we be tackling the gender hierarchy and the patriarchy? When I pull on my men's clothing in the morning, when I bind my breasts down so tight I can barely breathe, the last thing I'm thinking of is undermining the lives of people like Stephanie, Windsor, and Annie of HerCampus.com. But, somehow me, my brothers, my siblings create the sort of backlash in people that stops questions and lets the hatred and ignorance flood through unimpeded.
I don't mean to make anyone question who they themselves are because of who I am. I don't want to make a few girls open up a silly website to my hyper-liberal ideas. I just want to be able to communicate with the world in a way that makes sure I still have a voice and a language that are my own. As women we must always fight, and as a transgender person that fight is something just as deep and equally troubling. We have the opportunity at this school to undergo an upheaval of our former selves, to embrace the ideas that no one else will even touch. We can be us and that us is often the thing that no one else wants us to be. This school has given me the time and strength to forget the people telling me what I cannot do and who I cannot be simply because I am a woman or I am female. That's what Wellesley does: it gives us tremendous power and clarity from our single-sex, not single-gender, education.
We have the ability to back up and pick out the injustices and the things we think are wrong because we fought to get this far ahead and we're not going to stop now. What we do with that power is up to us, but I think it is our responsibility to the community, and in this case the community who has access to HerCampus, to let our beliefs pull through and to accurately represent our strength and our progressive thought.
Yes, we are feminists. And, we cannot fear that word because then they have won. Yes, we are genderqueer, transgender, non-conforming and allies and we cannot fear those identities because again they will have won. We have a choice to reclaim these words and in doing so reclaim ourselves and our identities. We have a chance to believe in something when everyone else is spitting things they think are insults ("feminist lesbians" for one) in our faces. Leaving HerCampus is the first step, but it is not enough. Recognition, vocalization, and a fight: that's what we're in for, Wellesley, but I think we've got it in us.
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