This exercise is already challenging.
I am grateful that I was born male. Please, read closely so you do not misunderstand me. There is no doubt whatsoever that if one gender is superior, then women are superior to men. Women live longer; have more quality-of-life years; have higher survival rates during famine and most diseases; women can endure childbirth; women must deal with menstruation; women tend to have more empathy than men; and women tend to have stronger social and networking skills than men.
If you doubt women’s strength, there are many videos of men attempting to endure a short episode of labor pains.
Men tend to have a few natural advantages, though. Men, as a group, tend to have stronger spatial skills, which partially explains why there are more male pilots. Men tend to have larger lungs, more upper body strength, and are capable of higher ratios of muscle to fat stores. Those features are useful in many tasks that require short-term strength but are a major liability during things such as famine.
Given the archetypical natural differences between men and women, if I had the choice, I might choose to be female. After seeing my mother and my sister suffer from horrible cramps and watching my two children born, though, I would not want to endure that pain.
The reason I am grateful that I am male, however, has nothing to do with nature: nearly all societies oppress women simply because they are women. Gender equality has vastly improved in the last 100 years, but I do not know of any society in which women do not face oppression, bias, or discrimination on a daily basis. There is absolutely no excuse for this situation, and I refuse to accept that the universality of the oppression is evidence of some natural (or divine) truth.
The main reason I am grateful that I am male is that I do not have to suffer the degradation that 51% of all humans regularly experience. I want to live in a world that is not sexist so that in the future, no person says, “I am grateful I was born with my gender because I am not oppressed.”
Similarly, I am grateful I was born in the United States. I lived in Beijing, China for five months, I lived in Cairo, Egypt for eight months, and I traveled through many places, such as India, Israel, Palestine (The West Bank), and Europe. In nearly every country, I was given special treatment for no other reason than my parents happened to have lived in the United States when I was born. (My family has been in the United States for many generations, but my point is that I did not do anything to earn my status as a United States citizen: my citizenship is based on childbirth and geography.)
Even for people who do not travel outside of the US, people in the US tend to enjoy advantages that billions of people will never experience. The US does not have the best healthcare or the best education or the cleanest environment or the safest communities: in fact, there are few categories in which all 300 million US citizens have access to the “best” of anything. Nevertheless, the US tends to perform well in every category, so on average, it is a great place to live. Furthermore, the overwhelming majority of people in Latin America, Africa, and Asia have a much more difficult life than even the poorest citizens of the US.
My life right now is wretched, but because I was born in the US, I have education, and I have the opportunity to build a new, full, happy, and healthy life. There are at least two billion people in the world who will never have the opportunities that I have. And the only distinction is that I was born in a modern hospital in Florida and not in a mud-brick hut.
I am grateful that an ex-girlfriend gave me my backpack. For my first trip overseas, I was not prepared. I was fortunate, however, that my then-girlfriend had traveled before, so she helped me to prepare. She had purchased a great backpack for traveling, but she bought it six months before her trip and forgot about it–so she never used it. She gave it to me in 2006, and I have used it to travel all over the world. Starting in May 2013, I lived out of one suitcase and my backpack. Starting in October 2013, I had to abandon the suitcase and all of its contents. This backpack is one of the best gifts I have ever received. My life is much easier because of it.
