So here's what people who haven't gone through pregnancy, giving birth and breastfeeding do not understand about the experience and feel dismissed by Serena Williams' statement may have a hard time comprehending.
I'm pretty certain she did not mean that giving birth makes you real and anyone who doesn't is fake. Y'all being wild sensitive right now.
Here's a woman who spent a lot of time not doing things that made her feel womanly. Not to mention she was always dragged for looking manly. She stayed dressed down and sweaty, and was reduced to only being valuable from the waist down, and for her athleticism. Even in pregnancy with the changes it brings to your body- she's being clowned. vintage lace trumpet wedding dress
This is a woman who values and looks up to her mother. A woman that is a real woman by her definition, because this is the woman who raised her.
When you become pregnant, carry a child, give birth and or breastfeed that child, you evolve into another facet of womanhood- not a higher or better- but different. You watch your body do things that it was made to do. You watch yourself become a protector and a giver of a different level. And it's a real experience.
Feeling this way doesn't devalue women who haven't given birth, or preclude that childlessness equates non- realness. Nor does it make one assume that there aren't other ways to experience becoming a mother. Becoming a woman to her is becoming a mother.
I'm a mother- but I didn't become a woman when I had children. That wasn't my experience. But I understand. Every woman has their own unique quest and experience to womanhood and it happens to each of us at different ages. And it's our right to define what becoming a woman is, looks like and feels like for ourselves.
Let her have that. Damn.
Y'all got a problem with everything.