Yesterday, during a car drive with my family late at night, the topic of feminism came up, as it has been coming up lately with the sit-in in the faculty. 

My father asked me why if our instincts as women tell us to be mothers, feminist women think that is society that is making us being mothers even if we don't want to?

I was perplexed for a minute because people in general disesteem how powerful the susception of patriarchal-neoliberal society is - in our case and society and culture, in general, in the way we act, think and feel about everything in our lives. We have a false sense of individualism and autonomy of ourselves that we - as a society think that stereotypes, bias and discrimination can't apply to us if we don't let them. As an anthropologist, it had been made clear over and over again for me that our birth in this society means that we operate with the prejudices and categories that this society has.  

The only thing that we can do to change our society is being aware of our upbringing and modify our acting and our perception that society has imposed us as the correct ones, as we called it in feminism: the deconstruction of ourselves and our beliefs. But then, my father asks, feminism just wants that all those categories disappear, in others words that all diversity disappear? To that, I say a powerful and loud NO. We don't want that all those categories to disappear, on the contrary, we want more categories to be accepted as viable options and not as the way it is now, like the "the unnatural option". 

We want society to consider normal to want to have children, to have that parenting instinct, as well as not having children and not having that instinct. Even more, to have that instinct and then decide that is not for you, or to think you don't want it and late in life, suddenly wanting to be a parent. We want it to be our decision. That is all. We want to be our decision with what categories we resonate with, and that this won't be assigned based on our genitals, what characteristics and stereotypes we would have to live with. I feel proud to resonate with being female (for the most part, but that is a topic for another post), pansexual, and not a biological mother, but maybe in the future an adoptive mother. We just want that these categories, these ways of being, can be as valid and as respected and as "natural" as any other options. That has been my TED Talk. Thank you for reading me.