I have this cousin, that when we were little, he used to torture me by tickling me without mercy. I remember it was humiliating, and I was promising myself that when I’ll grow up, I’ll take revenge. Then we grow up and we stopped talking to each other as teenagers, having the minimum typical interaction in family gatherings. We started talking again when I was in high school and he had already finished the university. It was one of these family vacations that children suppose to be with the children and the adults with the parents. To fight our boredom, as proper teenagers that are forced to spend time with the family, we walked a lot to take some time off this family situation. It was then when we started having longer discussions and he started talking to me about something called anthropology of kinship, that I was struggling to understand but felt exciting and important. I remember he was explaining to me that

My first feminist epiphany moments

women are often connected with nature that is wild and men with the culture trying to control the wildness and that all these are bullshit.

I loved talking to him, actually listening to him and try to grasp what he was saying. The summer after my first year of university, we were hanging out at my empty parents’ house and we were already pretty close. It was then when we came out to each other and suddenly I met a completely different cousin. He was suddenly so expressive and sentimental and sexy talking about his love life, so different from the distant cousin I used to know. We spent the next days having long discussions and he talked to me about Judith Buttler and how

the gender is something constructed.

My brain was about to explode trying to process all this new information, but I felt empowered and free. I remember talking to my best friend about all these, or at least how I understood what my cousin said. We agreed that it made sense to us, as we were already suspicious about scientific truths in general. After this we were more confident to say that

we don’t believe in gender roles, scientific truths and even biology and argued a lot with people pointing to scientific authority.

Of course after some time, we had to face real situations that help from scientific people like doctors or experts was necessary, so we had to admit that all these opinions we had were a bit extravagant, but we never stopped being suspicious about general truths.