Feminist Coming Out Day

On March 8, 2011, the 100th anniversary of International Women’s Day, campuses across the nation celebrated with us by joining together for Feminist Coming Out Day and the online Feminist Portrait Project. On the eve of the new year, co-founders Abby Sun and Lena Chen are proud to announce that the campaign will be relaunched in collaboration with the Feminist Majority Foundation. Renamed Feminist Pride Day, the event will be incorporated into campus programming by college partners throughout the United States.

Interested in participating in 2012? Get in touch with Laura Kacere, FMF National Campus Organizer, at lkacere@feminist.org, and stay tuned for more updates!

Colleen, 20, Ohio

I can say without hesitation that just about everyone thinks there’s something wrong with the world. There must be the rare exception out there, but just about every human being—my college classmates, every world leader, workers making 30 cents an hour, the Westboro Baptist Church, my grandparents, and Lady Gaga—can come up with at least one way in which the world is flawed. We can all agree on one thing, and we agree that the world should be better.

Of course, we have different solutions to that. Some people focus on economics, or religion, or race, or class, or environmental issues. And some people focus on gender.

I think that this can be difficult to explain to people about being a feminist. It’s treated like such a radical thing, to say that you see gender issues at the root of the World’s Big Problems, when it’s not seen as so radical to say that the Big Problems are because of, say, colonialism or materialism or racism. Of course, to be a feminist isn’t to ignore the political/economic/religious/racial, etc. They’re all knotted up in a big ball of Problems together, but I became more and more a feminist as I realized that gender-based oppression lay quietly beneath so much of the messed-up stuff in this world. And I realized that you can find such oppression enforced and endured by people of all classes, races, national origins, and religions.

I am a feminist because this pisses me off.

I am a feminist because I believe that for every girl tortured by femininity, there is a boy imprisoned by masculinity.

I am a feminist because after I graduate from college, I will, statistically, earn as much as a man with a high school diploma.

I am a feminist because I believe that women have a right to be angry because for all of human history we have, in most cultures, been subject to domination, and still are.

I am a feminist because I want ALL people to have awesome lives.

Hi! I’m Tanya -mother and feminist. I blog about what it means to me to be both. I’m a lactivist and an intactivist. I believe with confidence and the right support all women can and should breastfeed their babies, in the genital integrity of all children, in attachment parenting, in sex education, birth control, and in a womans right to govern not only her own reproduction but also her birthing experience. Childbirth is not the medical emergency it is portrayed to be. A home birth is safer for mother and baby. Feminism is rooted in social work, if we can all learn to embrace our biology by empowering -with knowledge- the maternal feminist in us all, womanhood would be refined as our missions become one.

This is what a Canadian, vegetarian, philosophizing, weird, compassionate, passionate, wiccan, informed, and kick-ass FEMINIST looks like!

I don’t know that women and men are equal because they are not the same and both fulfill needed roles. I would say that ALL genders are human and on that basis, none ore more or less deserving of human rights. Until women are no longer killed, damaged, stopped, and punished solely on the basis of their gender, I see the need for the increasing of planetary awareness. I object to the history of the term “feminism” and the lies that people associate with it. But the need for human rights equality is CLEAR.

This is what a twenty-something, queer, British, feminist looks like