My dietary habits aren’t what I want to talk about today, though. What I want to talk about is how terribly sorry that I am. When you crash into me in the grocery store while walking along with your head down staring at your iPhone, I’m sorry. When you bump into my chair as you squeeze past me in a small restaurant and cause me to spill my glass of water, I’m sorry. When I walk down the aisle of the airplane and I see your eyes fiercely avoid mine, and your lips tremble in the desperate prayer that says, “please God, anywhere but next to me,” I’m sorry. I’m sorry because I’m ashamed of my body. I’m sorry because society taught me that I ought to be.

In reality, none of these things are things that I really need to be sorry for. After all, it was you who lacked the spatial awareness to avoid walking into me in the store. It was you who didn’t consider asking me if I could please scoot in so you could get by me in the narrow dining room of a San Francisco restaurant. And let’s be honest, there isn’t a single stranger you want to have sitting next to you on a crowded airplane. While this body I live in may not scream Magic Mike, I can still easily contain all of me between the armrests.

All of that said, I didn’t really notice my tendency toward unwarranted apology-making until another group of people started apologizing to me in the workplace: women. Apologies took the form of salutations, valedictions and email subject lines. It started happening so often that I wondered if it was something about me that was causing the women I work with to apologize so much. But it wasn’t just me. It was happening all over the office. Young, competent, qualified women were apologizing to men all around the company simply because they were doing their job.

Rachel Simmons, the author of The Curse of the Good Girl, commented on this phenomenon in Time Magazine’s reporting on the Pantene empowerment ad “Not Sorry.”

“Women know they have to be likable to get ahead. Apologizing is one way to make yourself more accessible and less threatening,”

Less threatening. Those two words really stuck with me when I first read the Time article in 2014. While drawing a connection between the workplace and general environmental challenges of an overweight white man and a woman of any sexual orientation, shape or color in our society might involve some right angles, it dawned on me that the notion of being a threat was a common thread. It’s not about being fat or being female; it’s about being other. As in, other than your average white man.

The great irony is that your stereotypical white man of average build didn’t cement his perch at the top of every societal ladder—including and especially in corporate Tech—by being pushovers. To the contrary, some of the most celebrated leaders in this industry are also remembered for the sharpness of their claws; just ask anyone who presented to Steve Jobs or Bill Gates at design reviews in the ’90s or early 2000s. I’d argue most felt threatened. Or at the very least, no one felt like those guys were making any apologies for demanding they get what they felt entitled to.

In the workplace, and out in the world at large, every time we apologize for our mere existence we mark ourselves as submissive. Submissive to the “average,” the “typical,” and the “normal” people who don’t have to apologize for who and what they are. These tyrannical descriptors are boxes, meant to imprison those that don’t conform and form a protective bubble around our culture’s celebrated classes. I know I’m not the first to call for this, but I think it’s high time we all stop apologizing.

Whether you’re an overweight caucasian man, a young black woman with a newly minted MBA, a gender-queer Asian software engineer or any other combination that doesn’t add up to a 5'10", 170 lb. caucasian man, you don’t need to be sorry for it. Our bodies, our genders and sexual orientations are not things we choose and they are not useful predictors of our ability to contribute to the human cause.

In Star Trek: The Original Series, Gene Roddenberry introduced the Vulcan IDIC (Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations), which in physical form resembles a medallion and was originally panned by many critics as a silly prop meant to spur mail order merchandise sales. Later, in the magazine Inside Star Trek, Roddenberry would respond to requests to clarify the IDIC philosophy:

“Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations represents a Vulcan belief that beauty, growth, progress — all result from the union of the unlike…”

Later in the show’s run, this philosophy—that societal growth and progress stems from the “union of the unlike”—would be underscored in a magnificently written exchange between the Vulcan Spock and a human character named Dr. Miranda Jones, a blind telepath:

Miranda: “The glory of creation is in its infinite diversity.”
Spock: “And the way our differences combine to create meaning and beauty.”

It’s time to stop apologizing to the world for being who we are, because if we’re ever going to have a chance at the 23rd century that Roddenberry envisioned with our planet intact, it will require all of us to look past our prejudices and celebrate our differences.

So to the body-shamers, the homophobes, the misogynists and racists, I’ll go first: I’m not sorry.