From around the age of 5, I remember being asked to circle my gender, my ethnicity and tick a set of boxes on standardised tests. That’s the thing about people though – very few are ‘standard’. I grew up in Latin America, in a country where very few people look like me. When asked: What’s your ethnicity? In my mind, I couldn’t tick ‘Asian’ – I had never even visited a country in that continent. But I couldn’t possibly tick ‘Caucasian’ or even ‘Latin’ as my eyes didn’t match my peers’. For others, these instances of data gathering were just tick box exercises. To me, they were a constant source of internal conflict.

Read: In 2025, I thought a lot about my identity as I grow older

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