As a teenager, Deena Walker dreams of being a scientist, but her controlling boyfriend, and her own attitude toward her gender, get in the way.

Deena Walker is a postdoctoral fellow at Mt. Sinai School of Medicine where she studies the molecular mechanisms of addiction and depression. She recently moved to New York after finishing her PhD at The University of Texas at Austin in December 2012. When she's not in lab she enjoys practicing yoga and playing fetch with her dog in Central Park.

This story originally aired June 30, 2017.

Story Transcript

As a child, I knew two things about growing up.  One, I would be a scientist, and two, I would never be a woman.  I know.  You all are looking at me right now and you're thinking to yourself, well, you've obviously failed at one of those, but I can assure you I am indeed a scientist. 

You see, women, in my perception, were weak and they were a nag and they were something that men had to take care of.  And because of those characteristics, I assumed that that’s why women were excluded from so many male-dominated events that I wanted to be a part of.  So to remedy this for myself, I decided I would emphasize everything masculine about me and suppress anything feminine. 

Most of my friends were boys and I engaged in rough and tumble play well into adolescence.  In fact, I remember this one game that we would play where one boy would sit on the ground and another would walk in a circle around him.  The one on the ground would punch the person walking in the thigh screaming, “Walk!”  The longer you walked, the tougher you were. 

So when it came time for me to walk in that circle, with every cycle and with every punch I just kept saying to myself, “Come on, Deena!  You can do this just one more time.”  Because, after all, what could be more masculine than being able to take a punch? 

Despite my reluctance to accept anything womanly about myself, I do remember the first time I felt powerful as a woman.  I was fourteen and I was with my sister at a nearby lake and her friend pulled up on a boat and asked us if we wanted to go for a ride.   And of course we wanted to go for a ride. 

So when we got on the boat, I was taking off my clothes to reveal my brand new two-piece bathing suit and I happened to catch her friend’s eye.  And the look he gave me was intoxicating.  I remember thinking, Holy shit.  I think men might do things for me because I look good in a bikini.  That feeling was then sustained by the fact that he started to pursue me, and I loved the attention.  I was also a little bit scared because he was substantially older than me.  But I calmed those fears by telling myself that I must be really, really special if he was willing to risk so much to be with me.  And I really loved feeling special… unlike most fourteen-year-old girls. 

As the flirting turned into a relationship, that feeling just continued because he was always telling me things like, “You're fantastic.”  And I was such a great girlfriend because I was really more like a guy, a compliment I've heard many times in my life, by the way.  We would watch sports together, we went hunting together.  And because I was so much younger, we had to keep the relationship secret.  So most of the time that we spent together was after I had snuck out, we would hang out with his friends late at night drinking and smoking pot.  And in those groups I would find out secrets about those guys, like who was having an affair or who was still smoking pot even though their wives thought that they had quit.  I was anything but excluded and I loved it. 

However, as time went on and I started expressing some of my own needs, like wanting to go to college or wanting to be a scientist, it didn’t take very long before he started to treat me like a woman.  I was seventeen.  It was about three years into our relationship and we were fighting again about me going to college and whether he was going to come with me.  I got out of the car to walk home to try to stop the fight, like I had many times before.

But this time, he got out of the car and came walking after me screaming at me about what a baby I was and how I should just calm down.  And he pushed me into a pile of rocks.  I was stunned.  I stood up, blood dripping down the right side of my body, and I turned around and walked back into his house.  I locked myself in the bathroom and started to cry. 

His mom came in to check on me, and as she was helping me clean the blood off my arms and legs, she said, “Ugh, I hate it when he does this to you girls.”  And I thought, Girls?  Plural?  There were rumors that he had been abusive to his ex-girlfriends and his friends had tried to warn me that he had a temper on him, but I really didn’t think it would happen to me.  I thought I was special. 

After that first violent incident, I decided that I would deal with it the way I thought a man would and I would fight back.  So when he hit me, I hit him.  When he called me names, I came back with something just as mean.  I justified all of this by telling myself that this was just how people fought.  In the end, we decided that he would come to college with me. 

So we moved a thousand miles away from our hometown together.  All the while, I was thinking like, Why can’t he just ask me to marry him so we can break up?  The distance didn’t really... being that far away from our families didn’t really help our fighting, by the way.  I remember one time, we were arguing because he had made me hang out with his ex-girlfriend the night before, something he never would have put up from me, by the way.  And he just kept saying like, “Stop being a baby.  Calm down.  You're overreacting,” which just made me so angry that I finally just hauled off and punched him in the face.  I looked at him and realized that made him angry. 

So I scrambled into the backseat to avoid his reach.  So he's driving with his left hand and he's reaching behind into the backseat trying to grab me with his right.  All of a sudden, he just lets out this horrible scream and swings his arm around back into the front seat.  As he does that, his hand catches my nose and blood just pours out all over my clothes.  He had dislocated his shoulder. 

So we paused our fight so that I could take him to the hospital.  And as they were setting his arm the doctor came to me and pulled me aside, pointed to the blood on my shirt and said, “You know, once things are bad more often than they're good, it might be time to leave.” 

I politely explained to her that things were fine and this was just an accident, all the while thinking, “Whatever, lady.  I’m sure your relationship isn’t perfect either.”  But what I was feeling was an insane amount of shame and embarrassment that she had figured out what I was letting him do to me. 

So meanwhile, I’m in college and I’m working towards that second goal of becoming a scientist.  You all had forgotten about that, haven't you?  So I had done some undergraduate research and through that I had developed a passion for molecular biology and I had also perfected the art of suppressing anything feminine about me.  I never wore makeup, I always wore jeans and T-shirts, I rarely did my hair, and I tried my best to exclude other women from the academic environment. 

I did this the same way a lot of men do.  I talked to men more, I collaborated with men more, and I judged those women who wore dresses or pink or high heels as incapable or childish. 

But that passion for molecular biology had also solidified my ambition to want to be a scientist and the fact that academic science seemed like a pretty masculine endeavor, made me feel pretty comfortable with my chosen career path.  So when my boyfriend came to me and told me that he wanted to move to another state and transfer schools, a school that didn’t offer a molecular biology program, I refused to go with him.  The thing that had initiated the physical abuse was now serving as a way out for me. 

So we didn’t break up right then.  In fact, we stayed together for another year.  But because it was long distance, I had a little bit of space to sort of take a step back and see what was really going on.  And in that year I had so many voicemails saying things like I was a slut because he couldn’t reach me on the phone, I was an idiot because I didn’t know that his flight was delayed, I was selfish because I wouldn’t change my major.  I was so fucking book smart and why didn’t I have any common sense. 

And even when he was apologizing, when the violence injured me, he still found a way to make it my fault.  He was sorry that I was so small.  My body was too small to withstand the punishment.  Those comments, which had seemed totally normal when we were living together, now, with just a little bit of distance, seemed completely insane.  So after a year of harassing voicemails and a lot of support from my labmates, I ended the relationship. 

But if that relationship did one thing for me, it reinforced the idea that women are weak and that the best way to be successful was to be as masculine as possible.  And in the years since, I've had to work really hard to overcome that way of thinking.  I've done individual therapy, I've done women’s group therapy, and I volunteered at a domestic violence shelter and a rape crisis center.  All of that has helped me redefine masculine, feminine, strength, and weakness because survivors of domestic violence and sexual assault are some of the strongest people I have ever met regardless of their gender. 

But even after all that time, I still struggle.  I’m still more comfortable suppressing my feminine attributes when I’m at work.  And there are times when I am really uncomfortable being seen as a woman in the lab.  For example, I gave birth about five months ago.  [Applause.] Yes, you guys should cheer that.  Biology.  But if there is one state that screams feminine, it is carrying a living being in your uterus for nine months.  Pregnancy was dizzying for me because there was no escape.  I woke up every morning with this huge reminder that I was a woman. 

And now I’m a mom, and I’m raising a little boy.  And after learning how to be a woman and how to accept both the masculine and feminine in me, I have to teach him to do the same thing.  Because what I really want is to raise my son to be the boy and man I wish I knew growing up. 

Thank you.