26/09/2026
Years ago, I had a group of students.
We used to sit in a circle, pick a topic, and just talk.
No lesson plan. No right answer.
Just arguments, opinions, stories… wherever the conversation took us.
One day, we were talking about our inner voice.
And one of my female students said:
“My inner voice… he keeps talking to me.”
I immediately stopped.
**He?**
I asked her, “What do you mean by *he*?”
She said:
“My inner voice is a male voice.”
And honestly…
I couldn't accept it.
I couldn't even imagine what that would feel like.
I thought maybe she was just trying to get attention.
She was a teenager, after all.
Years passed.
Last week, I was teaching another class.
The conversation somehow turned into a debate again.
Someone mentioned the words **“inner voice.”**
And suddenly, I remembered that girl.
So I asked my students:
“What gender is your inner voice?”
The answers seemed obvious.
Girls said female.
Boys said male.
Until one student came over to my desk.
He leaned toward me and whispered:
“I hate the fact that I have a female voice.”
I just looked at him.
He continued:
“I'm not a misogynist. I just don't know how that happened.”
And I froze.
Because suddenly…
I remembered that girl from years ago.
And I felt ashamed.
Not because I had deliberately dismissed her.
But because I had made a very human mistake:
I assumed that because I couldn't imagine experiencing something…
it couldn't possibly be someone else's reality.
Maybe that's the strange thing about being human.
We experience our own minds from the inside.
And because our own experience feels so natural…
we assume everyone else's mind works the same way.
But maybe it doesn't.
Maybe there are entire worlds happening inside other people that we simply cannot imagine.
So now I'm curious.
**What is the gender of your inner voice?**
**What is the gender of your inner voice?**
__ Studies:
- Characteristics of inner reading voices — PubMed
- Toward a phenomenology of inner speaking — ScienceDirect
- Inner Speaking as Pristine Inner Experience — Oxford Academic
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