I’m only going to talk about one instance, but know that I have a list just like everyone else does. This one particularly hurts, because it involves my grandmother. I love her, but she has a deeply ingrained notion of “men coming before women.” When I was really young, about 5 or 6, I would regularly go with her to our local church — Baptist. This particular day, the church was having an event in which the entire thing was run by the kids. In preparation, I told my grandmother that I wanted to be the pastor, which she told me wasn’t possible but humored me nonetheless as I looked through the Bible and found passages I wanted to share. When we got to church, and I proudly exclaimed that I would be the pastor… I was laughed at, by everyone in the room. It was an absolute nightmare; I know now that they thought it was cute that I wanted to do this, but at the time I was horrified. They told me women couldn’t be pastors. I remember spending the rest of the night locked in the bathroom, sobbing, while my grandmother tried to coax me out. When I look back, I think this was a really big turning point for me in a lot of ways. It didn’t only show me that being a girl wasn’t going to be easy, but it also distanced me from religion as a whole. I’m agnostic, now, because I learned to fear god; he wasn’t on my side. I wonder if this outcome would be any different if they had just let me pretend to be the pastor.
