I am profoundly grateful that human beings have the ability and will to revise inherited assumptions and prejudices. This is a superpower we have that, unfortunately, many see as a weakness.

It’s no secret at this point that cultures around the world have subjected girls and women to the mental, emotional, and of course physical violence of practices like foot binding, clitoridectomy, surveillance, forced dependency, forced motherhood, and lifelong infantilization.

These practices produce traumatized people whose full range of human possibility has been narrowed to a single octave amidst a panoply of sounds. It produces rage that cannot find lucid expression. It produces deep sorrow at the things that were lost that cannot even be named.

In its worst manifestations, it produces a Stockholm syndrome-like valorization of the abuse, and a determination to subject others to it.

But this is no one’s destiny. Everyone already embodies the conditions of their own freedom. But it is not guaranteed—it must be won.