By Elliott Eden.
I’m a 16 year old AFAB (assigned female at birth) and this is how I’m feeling this International Women’s Day: bitter.
Most days I feel too scared to leave the house, mostly not from any fear of physical danger but just from the usual level of harassment: whether a man finds me sexually appealing or not he will feel the need to tell me about it.
I realized this for the first time at 14, when I was leaving the CAMHS (child and adolescents mental health services) building. In some baggy knee length shorts, and a T-shirt 2 sizes too big, when I heard a 40 something year old man behind me yelling to 3 of his mates “god, she’s got a flat ass.” That was also the day I got given a food chart. For those who don’t know what a food chart is, it’s to record what you eat each day, and is typically given to kids in CAMHS that are suspected to have an eating disorder.
I was super insecure about my body, and the only thing that was keeping me from isolating myself from the world completely, was thinking that no one could notice those features but me. So as I looked back I hoped it was a mistake, and he was talking about someone else. My fear was confirmed as he apologized to me. I remember vividly the way he said “sorry” was so odd, he kind of looked surprised as he said it.
I had optimistically thought in the moment that he only realized I was a child when I looked back, and he was surprised to see my baby face. But if I think about it more critically, he saw me coming out of the CAMHS building, and he saw that I was 5 ft 1. He was just shocked that I turned around because he expected me to be used to it. He expected me to accept it. But I naively thought it must’ve been a mistake, and I was looking back for reassurance. Instead I was only left with more fear and shame.
I had to walk for another 3 minutes to the Tesco car park, where my dad was picking me up. That doesn’t sound like a long time, but it felt like it. I was nervously pulling my T-shirt down lower, trying to hide my shameful body every 5 seconds, and holding back tears as my face turned red.
It wasn’t like I hadn’t experienced things like this before, but it was the shamelessness of an adult man saying this about me. A stranger, in public, as I was walking out the mental health facility for children. I had never experienced that level of audacity from a man who had never even uttered a word to me before that moment.
Most days I stay inside. Because I stay inside, I’m on the internet a lot. I’ve always been quite an internet and gamer kid, and because of that I’ve always struggled with predatory men online. It first started on Xbox Live Chats, and Omegle, same as most kids growing up in the 2010s. The persistent relentless harassment from men, especially on the internet, really never stops, no matter what sites, apps or video games I’m on. Men who cannot see my face or hear my voice still tell me they want to rape me.
When I was a kid I really just thought it was the spaces and the specific men I was interacting with, but as I’ve grown older it seems to be almost every man, and as that increasingly looked to be the case I, like many others, seemed to lose the ability to care any more. I’d sometimes even purposefully get myself into dangerous situations to feel wanted.
I was so isolated, and as an AFAB we grow up being told our worth to others is how pleasing we are: first your cuteness and politeness, and then it seems to become your hotness and even then your naughtiness… and when you don’t have many close people who value you for other aspects of yourself, like your sense of humour or your kindness, you start trying to fit the societal ideals of women.
And if you’re a woman or AFAB, you know that’s impossible. The box is small, sure, but no one talks about how it’s not even a box, sometimes it’s an icosahedron. My need to be perfect in order to be loved persisted, but eventually I got tired of the abuse and stopped getting into as many dangerous situations. I started believing that it was my fault, that I shouldn’t have succumbed to the societal pressure set by oppressive men. Granted some will say I got myself into those situations, but even if I did, I was a child. And most of it came down to social pressure and fear.
My bad experiences with men go back to before my age was even double digits, as is true for most AFABs or women. But that really isn’t talked about much. I think most non-predatory men assume we start experiencing the dualities of their own gender or sex in teen years. Primarily because that’s how it’s portrayed in the media, I believe partly because if predators make it seem as if young girls and AFABs are only getting abused, harassed, and even just treated unfairly in their teenage years, it’s more acceptable in their eyes. After all: the kids are closer to adulthood, probably dressing more “provocatively”, and have hormones flying all over the place, so society can rationalize it into “they deserved it” in a way they can’t with smaller children.
But that was not the case for me, and lots of others. I struggled a lot with how I was treated due to my sex well before teen years. I’d say I started perceiving inequalities around 5. Only little things to start with, like my AMAB (assigned male at birth) sibling was never asked to socialize with the guests, even though we were the same age. or that my friends who were boys always seemed to get what they wanted, in a way that I didn’t.
I remember specifically one time I was playing in the sand box with a boy, and I took a toy that I didn’t know he wanted. Instead of asking for it back, he punched me really hard in the stomach. His mother then ran over and comforted him. She told me, while I was on the floor, that I should apologize for taking his toy.
At the time I felt so guilty that I had hurt him like that, even though I was the one winded and bruised. The boys and men in my life never had to compromise, or apologize, for something they didn’t do. In fact they’d hardly even apologize for things they did do. As I grew up I only found more and more injustices.
As I thought about what to do for this article I considered that it might be hard for people to believe this is a very average (in fact even mild) experience for an AFAB or girl my age, so I put up a post on Instagram asking teenage AFABS and girls for their experiences and stories for this article. Everyone involved has consented for this to be published, however their names will not be included for safety. Some only wanted to give a small statement, and some I had a conversation with. Here’s what I got sent:
“When I was 9 I was walking in a field alone, and was cat called by adult men. I remember that I was very scared.”
“When I was 11 a family friend assaulted me, he was in his 30s.”
“From 13 to 14 I was repeatedly assaulted by 2 boys in my class. I remember the teachers watching, but I even made sure to tell the teachers directly. And they did nothing but tell me ‘boys will be boys’.”
I asked if International Women’s Day was celebrated at her school, and if she thought it was important to celebrate. She told me: “no, Women’s Day isn’t acknowledged at my school. And I think Women’s Day is incredibly important. Women get treated horribly, and I think women deserve to be celebrated for not just one day, but everyday.”
“I’m 16 and a couple of months ago, I was coming back from a concert with my friend. I was dressed pretty masc, and this group of guys shouted at me across the train station, something like ‘I’m gonna eat your mum’s pussy’ I don’t remember what else they said, because I was trying to ignore them. I just remember being sad. I felt like no matter what, I’m always gonna receive comments just for being a woman. It made me feel so disappointed, and frustrated.”
I asked them if they felt safer with their friend, and they replied “yes, definitely. if they weren’t there I would’ve totally run away, instead of just ignoring them.”
I asked them if they thought gender and sex equality will ever truly exist. They responded: “Of course I can only hope that full gender equality will exist one day, but I think there’s always a slight inequality that gets overbalanced. To me, that’s just how people work, some people just hate people who are different from them. And even with society changing, I don’t think enough people will change for there to be full gender equality.”
I asked these questions because this IWD is focused around ‘accelerated action’, encouraging people to take action even in everyday life, to help make an equal and fair future. The official article from internationalwomensday.com for IWD 2025 states that “At the current rate of progress, it will take until 2158, which is roughly five generations from now, to reach full gender parity, according to data from the World Economic Forum.” but to be honest, even though that’s obviously very far in the future, it feels to me like wishful thinking.
It’s hard to believe that this unfair system has been in place for thousands of years, but we’re all somehow going to stop discriminating based on sex and gender, in 5 generations? It felt unrealistic to me. As I was reading that article I found that it was using what looked to be AI generated images, of extremely posed women holding up their arms in the ‘we can do it’ pose. It looked like they were wax models, their faces glistening to a strange extent. It felt so disheartening, that even the official IWD website seemed to not care enough to show real people in real situations. And I feel that it would make it a lot harder for the average person who wasn’t looking into the data, to trust their article. Even if they aren’t AI they seem to be heavily edited, which in my opinion seems like something you don’t want from a source you’re trying to get reliable factual information from.
This International Women’s Day, I can’t help but think about all the women in America getting their abortion rights taken away, In Afghanistan their education taken away, In Iran their right to show their skin… I mean, in Mexico a woman is killed every 2 hours, and at least 10 specific femicides a day. As we keep our solidarity here in England we mustn’t forget we are not immune, especially when America is involved.
America has a very big cultural impact, especially upon Western and English speaking countries. It is so important that we do not follow in America’s footprints right now. We cannot stand by impressionable young boys be saying stuff like “your body, my choice” – something I have been hearing a lot lately, even from very little boys, clearly repeating something they heard. If we let America have this kind of social impact that could very easily lead to a catastrophic political impact, and we cannot let that happen. America is crumbling right now under their new leader.
The infant mortality rates in the US are already skyrocketing. And their numbers have a direct correlation to the abortion bans. Not only are parents denied abortions for completely non-viable pregnancies, due to congenital malformations and then forced to carry those foetuses to term despite the doctors knowing that the pregnancies cannot possibly result in a live born baby. But also those pregnancies could even cause the parent to die as well as the child. In America the doctors know this, this is a proven fact, but they are forced to carry out these disturbing malpractices by law. These laws are literally killing women, in the completely unevidenced vain hope that she will birth a baby.
“Infant mortality was 6 percent higher than expected in states that implemented abortion bans,” said Alison Gemmill, talking to the New York Times. Gemmill is a researcher who particularly specializes in women’s sexual and reproductive health.
These statistics don’t even include children dying after leaving the hospital, due to the parents not being able to give the appropriate and adequate care to the children.
What does accelerated change look like?
I’m not going to sit here and say we women and AFABs all around the world should stand up for ourselves more, and that the only reason we haven’t reached equality yet is because we haven’t put enough work in. Even if this isn’t explicitly said, that is the rhetoric pushed by the patriarchy designed to make us give up, designed to make us believe we are too small to make any real change, designed to crush our hope… but it simply is not true. It is not our fault. It was never our fault.
We do, unfortunately, have to fight and work harder, but we shouldn’t have to. And we all need to remember in this dark time that we have worked harder than most powerful men, and they are often only powerful because they were blessed with inherited riches that we may never possess, and because of that we unfortunately need men to help us rebel.
A man is the only person who can seriously change a misogynistic man’s perception because by definition they don’t respect a woman and or AFABs opinion. We need to make sure that decent men feel ashamed not to stand up. Your male friend should believe he is cowardly if he stands on the side lines, awkwardly looking down at his feet. That is the change in behaviour we need to make in order to achieve real systemic and social change.
The oppressed have tried and tried to change these bigoted men’s minds ourselves, but no matter how we dress, how we speak, how we present, they hold in a laugh when we approach the table. Most cis men have been socially trained to believe that we are inferior, and the only way to change that now is to find the men whose bigotry is not ingrained in their core, and reason with them. Show them what it’s like to be a woman or AFAB every single day, document our experiences.
One small project I have been doing for a while is called “a day in the life of a girl on the internet.” Every time a man inappropriately messages me, I screenshot it, post it on my story, and caption it “a day in the life of a girl on the internet”. And men have told me that it has changed their perception on how they thought women were treated. Men have told me they didn’t realize how constant and relentless the harassment really is until they saw my account.
Granted, it’s hardly ever men who did not already consider themselves to be feminists prior, but it is still something. Now that men have seen me have to block 10s of accounts making unsolicited sexual remarks a day, delete and switch my account multiple times after being overrun with hate, report men to the police, have to download screen recorders that don’t alert the other person on the app for my own safety… maybe that’s made one of them less likely to blame a woman/AFAB for something they didn’t do. If we can wake men up even a little bit more, that’s an achievement. And we are not ‘less than’ for not being able to do more.
All of your favourite women in history had to fight this same battle: Sylvia Plath, Audre Lorde, Gloria Steinem, Francis Beal, the list could go on forever! No one is alone in this. We have generations standing behind us every time we simply say “no.” I am proud to be associated with such brave and strong people. Even if most of us had to be strong out of necessity, and should’ve been safe enough to be allowed to be weak, I am proud of us. I hope this International Women’s Day we’re all a little prouder.
- Main image by Brett Sayles.
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