The man who raised me to be the woman I am today told me a ‘woman shouldn’t be president’

You raised me to be independent. To be strong, and not to take shit from anyone. You taught me right from wrong, and to always treat others how I wished to be treated in return. You were there to mend my broken hearts, and to show me that a real man wouldn’t treat me the way countless boys did. You taught me to not be a part of a man’s world, but rather, to be their entire world. To respect my body, but to know that I was more than just my body. To be an intelligent, strong woman, capable of anything I decided to set my mind to.

I built up an image of you in my head: the strongest, most loving man in the world, willing to take on three kids not your own, because you loved them and their mother. I never thought of you as my ‘step-father’ – you have always been a second father to me. However, we have never aligned on political issues. It’s because I’m young, you say, and that I haven’t had enough experience out in the world to truly understand how the world works. I’ve always brushed it off, never letting it get to me too much.

We have always disagreed, but that’s how parent-child relationships work. No teenager or young adult is ever going to agree entirely with their parent. It’s a simple rule of nature. A science, perhaps. But we loved each other unconditionally despite our disagreements, and that’s what was important.

Then one lazy Saturday night, we were sitting in the living room, you watching the news, and me killing time on my phone. Hillary was on screen, discussing her promise to this country if she won the 2016 presidency. And then you said something to shatter my image of you, like throwing a wrench straight through a window.

A woman just shouldn’t be president.

That’s it. Those six simple words were powerful enough to send shards of disbelieve through my entire being. Nothing you have ever said before had hit me quite so hard. This was beyond a slap in the face. This was a full on freight train coming at me head on, contradicting everything you had ever raised me to believe.

You see, telling me, the 18 year old woman you consider to be your daughter, that a woman shouldn’t be president was like saying I couldn’t be president. Like saying I wasn’t strong enough. Like I wasn’t enough.

You raised me not to let a man tell me what I was worth, yet there you were, doing exactly that.

That single sentence instantly made me question everything you had ever told me. How much of what I had grown up believing because of you was the truth? How much of it had you said just because it was what you believed I needed to hear? After all, you were the one to raise me to know I was worth more than just my body, but how could I believe that now? Saying women shouldn’t be in such a prestigious leadership position because of their gender automatically reduces all women to being nothing more than a gender, nothing more than sexual objects. Therefore, this reduces me to being no more than a mere sexual object.

Gender shouldn’t matter. Whether you choose to vote for Hillary or not is irrelevant. Whether she could succeed as president or not is most certainly not predetermined by what is – or is not – between her legs. I don’t condone voting for Hillary just to get a woman into office, but I am most certainly not not voting for her because she is a woman.

It’s 2016. America has come way too far to allow such an insignificant attribute as gender be a deciding factor for its people.

Gender shouldn’t – and doesn’t – matter.