Why diversity matters.

One of my first memories is of me crying to my mom because my Barbies were all white (this was before diversity hit the kid's stores) and my skin was very brown, just like my Syrian ancestor's skin had been way before my grandmother came to Argentina.
My white-skinned mom then decided to buy a black doll to show me that I was pretty too, sat me in front of a mirror and made me look at my reflection next to the toy that looked like me until I didn't flinch. I'd stared at it, my mouth opened and showing off the blank space where my first tooth had fallen from a week ago. And then I bawled my eyes out, threw the doll at her and shouted that wasn't a real Barbie. I thought that because the doll was black it was somehow less than my blond, blue-eyed dolls.
I grew up, I forgot about Barbies. I found books. I remember how I begged my mom to read me every night before bed. I remember my favorite book and how I'd know all the words by heart, I'd read it so many times. I remember the thought tickling my brain like a bug that wouldn't stop buzz-buzz-buzzing. Why are all these girls so white?
By the time middle school came around, I'd found that some TV shows and books did have girls like me. They were very few, and I had to hunt them down, but I was a skilled seeker and I'd found a few great ones that I could put on repeat, repeat, repeat.}
Until my two siblings came out of the closet.
I didn't understand exactly what it meant to be gay, and I didn't like how people would snicker when I slipped and said my brother had a new boyfriend, or that the girl my sister was hugging wasn't just her best friend. I decided to stop talking about two of the people I love most in the world because I just couldn't deal with so many people asking me if I was a lesbian too (hey, queerness MUST be infectious, right?) I didn't even know how sex worked yet, hell I didn't even know if I liked sex at all, and I was already so afraid of being gay.
When I started high school, gayness was something most people understood and I'd learned to shut my mouth just in case any homophobic assholes wanted to make a joke out of my family. But, hey, life's a bitch. I found out I had a sex development disorder. I was a freak of nature. And to make matters worse, my syndrome was taught during every Biology class I had to take during school.  When they made jokes about the funny looking "thing" (because that definitely wasn't a girl!) in the photo the textbook showed to explain... me, I learned to keep the words in. Lucky me, I'd learned to hide so well nobody knew.
Fast-forward a few years and I'm finally learning to love myself, and the brown skin that's wrapped around me, and the syndrome that I kept hidden during my younger years. Now, even though I consider myself hetero, I never flinch when someone asks me if I like girls.
I think I'd have been less afraid to speak up when I was younger if there had been more characters like me (and like my relatives and friends) in the books I read. I'd have been less afraid to raise my hand and say "hey, I have that syndrome too!" if a TV show like Faking It had been popular around my peers.
I wish I'd known back then that gay and black and different aren't insults.