Hi everyone. I’m just trying to share my experience and maybe talk through something that has been sitting heavy on me in recent years… and honestly my whole life but I’ve only just had the words to express it lately.
I am a sapphic (married to a woman) white passing cis woman — I say white passing because my dad is Mexican and I have a Spanish last name but I am otherwise extremely light skinned and was not raised with any of that culture because my dad was ashamed of it / that side of the family was likely trying to assimilate very fast and marry into white American families.
I was bullied pretty badly as a young girl and especially so by other women, but my whole life I have always loved women and craved friendships with them. I found that the mean girl energy was especially strong with other women who looked like me— which confused me a lot when younger because I looked like them, but they treated me as if I were an opponent or their enemy. I remember specifically other girls pretending I was invisible when I was a child when I would try to play with them— which would make me cry, which I think would only ignite it more. I remember one girl writing a story about how my entire family killed themselves and then I did and gave it to me to read for a school assignment. These are just a few examples but I basically am giving them to demonstrate the type of energy I mean when I say “mean girl” energy.
The white side of my family is also, among other things, racist and uneducated, and I do not keep in touch with any of my
biological family for many reasons — but one of them being that. The other is that my mother is a narcissist — as well as her sister — and they’ve always treated me like competition or like a problematic woman for not wanting to embrace patriarchy and white supremacy. It has basically left me on my own.
I also can’t fit in well with the Chicana subculture of Mexican Americans because I did not grow up with that culture or experience.
I have always really admired the sisterhood that Black American women seem to emulate and value in their culture. Of course, I am not Black, so this is only what I observe— but I really, really wish I could experience that and sometimes I also wish I could be friends with them, too. Maybe this comes across as fetishizing their culture or identity, I don’t mean it that way, and I know that Black women go through things I will never understand or have to endure, but I will say that, being someone like me has left me feeling really in between and without support at times, wishing I could fit into a community like with Black women. I don’t know how else to explain it, but I guess the only thing I can say is that being a white or white passing woman who rejects white supremacy is very lonely, because it’s really difficult to find sisterhood in that experience.
I really hope others share their thoughts with me and I would love to hear what other women think and feel especially.