This Girl Can! Can She?

Do not get me wrong! I am all for empowering girls and women, in whatever they do. This may originate from the simple fact that I am a woman or maybe I just want everyone to get the chance to succeed in what they love.

I am a student, and my University just practised a full week of THIS GIRL CAN events, workshops and talks. As a woman, how do I feel after this week that should be all about empowering me? I tell you how I feel: Annoyed and angry! Why? Well, let me tell you why...

I was a really fortunate kid. I was raised in a family that believed in equality for everyone and that taught me that I could be and achieve whatever I wanted. Astronaut? Sure honey. Soldier? No problem. Princess? Difficult, but sure if you put your mind to it. Nothing was declared impossible, my grandma only had one condition: I could be whatever I want, but I had to learn how to knit my own jumpers and darn my socks. So here I am, studying what I always wanted, coming from a job I loved, just finishing a new jumper, thanks, grandma!

When I left home to explore the big world, I took this mindset with me and decided to become a paramedic in one of the biggest cities in the world. On my first day, the instructor told me, that I was the only girl in the force. He informed me about the rough tone the guys had with each other, and how physically and mentally challenging the work would be. After his speech, he asked me if I wanted to reconsider my decision. I did not for a second, I just had one request: I want to be judged like everyone else, I want to train as hard, run as far, carry as much as they do. I want to be one of them. He looked at me, then he took a paper from my file which included all the things I did not have to do because I am a woman and threw it in the bin. He looked at me and said: It will be hell.

He was not joking! It was hard, but it was satisfying. It made me part of something big. It brought me the respect I wanted and it taught me skills I will have for life. It also came with some really lovely abs. The guys I trained, I worked with became my family, and they accepted me as one of them. No one cared that I was a woman, it was all about getting the job done. When I put my uniform on, I have no gender, only a job to do!

Years later, it was me greeting the new recruits, me giving the same speech I received on my first day. A female recruit asked me if it is hard to be a woman in this line of work.

It is not being a woman that is hard, being a paramedic is hard! For everyone. If you decide to do this job, you give everything you got, and then you give more, because people depend on you, lives depend on your actions.

I could see in her eyes that this was not what she wanted to hear. She wanted a pep talk from a female superior. I learned later that she wanted her tasks to be adapted to her being a woman. Leave the heavy lifting to the guys, I will do the medicine. That is not how it works, and she did not like that. This day, for the first time, I was judged by my own gender, for not supporting another woman!

This brings me back to THIS GIRL CAN week 2017, and an innocent question: Who is your role model? My role model is a brilliant, talented, top in his field American forensic anthropologist. He is also a man! His name is Dr.William Bass. My answer to this oh so innocent question resulted in the same look I received years ago from my female recruit at the academy. This woman looked at me exactly like that and said: Couldn't you find a female role model? No, because I was not looking for one!I did not know, that a role model had to be of the same gender. They did not ask me to name a great female person, of which there are a lot. They asked for my personal role model, and my simple answer turned a group of women against me in the blink of an eye. I was a traitor to my own gender.

I love the idea of people being encouraged to try new things and go where they have never been before. I think that this is the main idea behind something like THIS GIRL CAN or other empowerment campaigns.

Brilliant women and men fought for decades, so we can vote, work, educate ourselves and do whatever we want. I live in a part of the world, where we achieved this goal, but we are not done. Humans are still not equal everywhere and in everything, and this lack of equality often has nothing to do with gender.

I am not for empowering women. I am for empowering everyone! For me, equality is one of the most important things in the world. Equality for every gender, every ethnic origin, every sexuality, everyone. Equality for humans! THIS HUMAN CAN. If this makes me a traitor to all the misguided feminist out there who think feminism is about getting back at men, that is fine. If it makes me a traitor to all the women out there that think they deserve different treatment than men in the same line of work, that is fine with me too. I learned that THIS GIRL CAN week makes exactly this women crawl out of their hideaways for a week to spread a completely wrong messages to young girls, and I do not want to be a part of this group of women.

I sometimes do not like my body, I sometimes feel insecure walking into a room. Sometimes I do not know what to say. Now and then I need a stronger person to open a jar for me. In some cases, this person is a man. I admire men and women around me for their achievements, they confidence, their looks or their humour. Sometimes I am the one that is admired.

All these things happen to me, not because I am a woman or a feminist, or not a feminist or I am looked down at by a man. They happen because I am human. That is all I want to be. An equal human being and that is what I will fight for! THIS HUMAN CAN!