There is an old military saying that goes something like "you need to stay alive if you want to fight another day."

I think we are all fighting against the stereotypical roles demanded of us by society at large. I think we are all doing our best to fight against that. However, in doing so, one needs to stay alive! It is one thing to protest violently against society as it now stands and to die in the process and quite another to quietly go about pressing for change. To paraphrase something which General Patton said, near the end of World War II, "The object is not to die for your country, it is to get the enemy to die for his!"

We have enough martyrs already. We don’t need any more. What we do needed to do is to educate the people around us in the hope that they will pass on that knowledge to others. That is a slow process, but if we wish to continue to educate others around us we need to be part of this world. We need to let others know that we are not sick, we are not deranged, we are not a threat, that we are a part of nature just like them, and that we just want to live our lives without fear and persecution. We have not achieved that, and I don’t expect that we will within the next day or two. So we do what is necessary to stay alive, to be able to "fight another day". If being able to "pass" enables us to do that, then that we must do, whether we like it or not.

There are those of us who wish to be the "women" society expects today. There are those of us who do not. Diversity is Nature’s way. Criticising those who want to be different than us, who don’t think exactly the way you, or I, do places us in exactly the same box as those at large who think we need to be done away with. Let’s not fall into that trap.

Be the woman you want to be. Be the teenage girl you want to be. Be the PERSON you want to be. But… let’s all stay alive in the process. There is still a lot of work to be done.