Her kind invented weapons, sharpened sticks to points and rocks into bludgeoning tools to bash skulls open. To counter strength was ingenuity and invention, using fire and words to cut down foes, painting their faces red and yellow with blood and bile. But the idea escaped from her ancestors, taken without permission, and laid to rest on a grave of lilies.
Her kind invented war. With tactics and battle cries, raised swords and beaten shields, running into battle with fangs open wide to rip open throats like wolves, hungry for death and carnage. With feathers in her hair and battle drums in her heart, she destroyed all who opposed her and ate land like thick bread, sopping up the spoils along with it. But that was taken from her too, stillborn, and ripped from her fingers.
She didn't understand the gravity of what it meant back then. For her, it was just life, and it was the general way of the world to lose more than you gained. It was only in retrospect, as an older woman, did she realize what she had been robbed of. What they had been robbed of. Maybe she had never considered it a loss because she was unsure of what she actually was back then. And that was precisely the reason why it had to be thrown into her face.
Gasoline and bullet holes were supposed to be hers, along with the poison gas and battering rams, longbows and IBMS, and the millions of handwritten letters, soaked with tears and blood, that were crumbling apart across the globe. She was supposed to be the queen of destruction and rotting flesh, of wounds and starvation, of torn, scorched lands and splintered trees, where nothing grew but hollow, cracked bones, sucked dry of all their marrow. Her inheritance was taken from her by her brothers, and instead she was only left with a crown of twigs and daisies instead of one made of roses and barbed wire.
No, they were both supposed to be hers, with a ring of bark and a ring of bone, both the perfume of life and the stench of death. Her kind was supposed to be the mother of it all, birthing all that breathed onto the planet, and the reaper of it all, cutting down bodies like a sickle cuts through wheat, curved and sharp. She should've been loved and feared, her dress lined with lace and bullets.
All the statues of men atop horses. They should've been women, who had always had to carry the burden of blood.
She didn't know what to think when she read the newspaper. She felt like she had been lied and cheated to. Her birth gender was supposed to match the one that had developed in her young brain. She should've never been tamed, should've always the shrew, and something deep inside of her trembled when she put down her coffee cup, stained with red lipstick.
But all she could do is sigh and stare at the wall, fingers twirling in her thick curls.
Based on a recent anthropological article I read that argues that human females were the first to create weapons, mixed with some feminist elements.