I have always been a feminine person. I paint my nails, I wear pink, I prefer dresses and skirts to pants. Oh, and don’t even get me started on makeup. I own more lipstick than I am years old. I never questioned this. But all around me, there was a very typical feminine discourse going on that I was not a part of: birth control.

I was 19 years and 8 months old when I found out that I tested positive for a gene variant that essentially means that my blood is more prone to clotting, but for our purposes, it means that I cannot take any form of hormonal birth control without increasing my risk of a blood clot. So yeah, not a good idea. My mom asked me a simple question after I received the results: “Are you OK with this?” I answered yes because, well, I was. At that moment in time I hadn’t deemed it a major setback. Not that I do now, but in that moment, I had yet to realize the societal implications of these results.

I know people who take birth control, namely the pill, for myriad reasons other than to prevent pregnancy. Everything from reducing acne, regulating periods and reducing menstrual cramps. In this day and age, being on the pill is commonplace. It has almost become a rite of passage for young women. I hear friends, family, fellow students — everyone, really — just mention the pill in passing. “Oh, gotta go, I have to take my birth control pill,” is a phrase that I hear often on my college campus.

While the onset of menses used to be the mark of the beginning of womanhood, nowadays it is whenever you go on the pill. So where does this leave me? I don’t know, exactly. I mean, I feel like a woman, and for all intents and purposes, I am. But ever since receiving these results, I have started feeling like less and less of a woman. Every time I pull up Facebook, my feed is swarmed with ads for different birth control delivery services. The pill is ubiquitous today, you don’t even need to leave your bed to get a prescription for it. Do they know? I think to myself every time I see these ads. It feels like these companies are purposely targeting me for something I can’t have.

Like I said before, I never thought about the fact that I couldn’t take hormonal birth control as a big deal. Other than a couple spots on my face around that time of the month and a bad bout of cramps every once in a while, I’m not bothered by the lack of it in my life. However, the more pervasive the pill becomes, the more I feel less “normal,” less like a true woman. This issue brings up the debate of sex vs. gender. Yes, I am biologically a woman and I identify as a woman, but are companies pushing hormonal birth control to try to control the gender debate, or is it merely just a money grab? What happens to people who do not identify as women but still require hormonal birth control? I ask these questions because I wonder if I feel like less of a woman, what is society doing to everyone else?

While societal norms are always changing, currently women are placed on a higher pedestal the more feminine they are, which is probably why I’ve always presented myself in a very stereotypically feminine way. These ideas of what is feminine and what is masculine have been ingrained in our minds since we were infants, wrapped in a blanket, with a color associated with our gender. I’m a sociology major, I study society, but pressuring people to fit into a gender box depending on certain actions and characteristics is something I never understood. Aren’t we all just people? Why does whether I can medically control my hormones affect my feeling of belonging as one of these people? I don’t have the answers, nobody does, but I do hope that we can all rethink our ideas of gender in order to create a more inclusive and accepting world.

Leah Timpson (letauthor@gmail.com) is a student.