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Gina Williams
9/7/2023
ETHN 101
Professor Rivera

Intersectionality of the Misunderstood Woman

Despite the color of my skin, or because of my appearance, or upbringing some people

may say I have “it made”. Whenever someone expresses that because of what I look like or

sound like, or making it seem like I haven’t struggled it frustrates me to the core. People will

always judge a book by its cover. Except they won’t know what’s lying underneath until they get

to know you and the obstacles you’ve had to overcome all your life due to your different

intersectionality’s. Intersectionality is defined as “the interconnected nature of social

categorizations such as race, class, and gender, regarded as creating overlapping and

interdependent systems of discrimination or disadvantage.” (Oxford 2023)

I am an American twenty-one-year-old, mixed, bisexual, woman I have a high school

diploma and I have some college education. Currently, I am a student with a low-income job, and

I live with my grandparents in a nice house in Santa Ana (bordering Tustin). Identifying as

bisexual throughout my life has been a struggle, when it comes to friends, dating, or even having

a mainly conservative family that might not understand or be the most accepting. Being bisexual

in a family that is mainly conservative is extremely difficult to try to not express your true

feelings about your sexual orientation for fear of being disowned or looked down upon or having

stereotypes brought upon you. For example, sometimes when my family talks about marriage to

me it’s always about the man I’m going to marry and never giving me an option for it to be a

woman where they like to assume I’m just straight. Especially, when sexuality integrates with

religion, my family has a belief that a man should marry a woman and everything else beyond
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that “Isn’t right” or is considered taboo. My father will tease my other gay cousins and often is

disgusted at the fact that they are lesbian and that “there must be something wrong with them” he

always likes to say another infamous homophobic saying of his “It’s not Adam and Steve it’s

Adam and Eve.”

Within discussing my religious beliefs, I don’t believe in any religion although because I

am mixed my family is mainly Mexican and raised me to be Catholic. I agree with Freud that

religion was created as a comfort for humankind. Although I don’t believe in any specific

religion, I think there is a God out there or some form of entity influencing our human lives as

we know it. I was mostly raised as a catholic by my family, although I did not care for most of

the Catholic church’s beliefs. Such as their beliefs on homosexuals, divorcees, or religious

beliefs in general.

Talking about my Mexican family’s religious beliefs you may not believe me like most

people that I am Mexican, or some people might say I am “whitewashed.” The meaning of

whitewashed means “To portray in a way that increases the prominence, relevance, or impact of

white people and minimizes or misrepresents that of non-white people.” (Webster 2023) Since I

am mixed, you could consider me to be one giant melting pot of different cultures and

ethnicities. Although, because of my skin color it’s hard for people to believe but that’s not what

my ancestry says. I have always had a very hard time fitting in with other Hispanic kids my age,

they’re always in disbelief, denial, or shock when I tell them I’m Mexican and Italian, and there

tends to be no in-between with the reactions I would often get.

Many of my family members are Mexican but they have lighter skin tones than most

Hispanics would, some would say. Even though my family never properly taught me Spanish I

still understand some of the language and I am still learning to this very day. In high school, I
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wasn’t doing too well with my grades, and I never really cared about them because I thought

high school didn’t matter. (Boy was I wrong.) So, I ended up having to go to continuation school,

which was a place for troubled teens or students who were struggling with grades. Most of the

students at the school were Hispanic and mostly spoke Spanish. By default, I was different, and

the kids found me to be an easy target to pick on and bullied me at school. One time this girl in

my art class was calling me names in Spanish and talking about me to another girl and I picked

up on it and asked her why she didn’t like me and just gave me a dirty look. The students at the

school didn’t like me because I didn’t like to mess around there, I knew I messed up in life and I

needed to graduate from a traditional high school, and I needed to get my shit together.

Eventually, I was able to graduate from continuation school and I was able to return and graduate

from my traditional high school.

School has always been difficult for me, in the past and in the present day, having a

learning disability such as ADHD has always been difficult in school and with life in general.

Having ADHD, (it used to be hard for me and sometimes) still is hard for me to focus, complete

assignments on time, be organized, and have good time management skills. Even though now it

may seem like I don’t struggle with those things as much it was a very long journey I went

through to get where I am today. I experienced a lot of hardships, discrimination, and bullying

about my disability from both students and teachers. Due to me having ADHD, as a kid I was

hyper, a non-stop chatterbox, and was always getting into trouble in school. My mom had taken

me from the age of five from psychiatrist to psychiatrist trying out different medications that

would make my mood, or my weight fluctuate constantly. (Except, when I developed into my

adulthood, I stopped taking my medication.) My teachers would constantly be disciplining me

for one reason or another or always making me sit far away from other students due to my
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incessant talking and hyper behavior. One time in the 5th grade I had a teacher who was so fed up

with me as a student, she wrote an email to my mom saying that my mom needed to “up the

dosage of whatever medication I was taking” and my mother was furious.

Overall, throughout my entire life, my intersectionality’s tend to cross over one another, I

don’t think we ever realize this until we develop into adulthood. However, as we get older, we

tend to realize that our intersectionality’s tend to intersect with one another, and they impact our

lives greatly. I think society as a whole needs to be more understanding of other people’s

differences and intersectionality’s it will bring us closer as a society and hopefully influence each

other to be kind to one another whether we think someone is different. No matter if we have been

discriminated against because of it, bullied, or maybe made more obstacles than most people

may have in our lives. We must learn to accept it and that is what shapes us into the person we

are today, and we must hold our head up high and own it.
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Works Cited

1. “intersectionality, n., sense 2”. Oxford English Dictionary, Oxford University

Press, July 2023,

2. Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary. (2023, September 2). Whitewash (Verb) . Merriam

Webster .