I HAVE had to make my own journey in rejecting certain practices, ideas and notions, and even rejecting whole communities, to assert myself as a woman.

In dealing with the guilt of knowingly upsetting my close family and friends, I have always found it interesting when the choices I have made are blamed on and attributed to “Western education” — that maybe if I were in the Philippines I would not have made these choices.

Why is feminism commonly attributed to being a white Western thing? Why do women still need to defend their choice for wearing a hijab or burka? In Hanna Yusuf’s video for the The Guardian, explaining how the hijab is feminist, she says: “Liberation lies in the choice.”

Most feminists will agree with the struggles and challenges we have to face collectively, but the individual experiences of actively going against the grain will vary tremendously, and losing sight of this is making us lose sight of our right to freedom of choice.

DJ Ritu of the BBC World Service and Radio 3 spoke of increased “racism and segregation within the LGBT community” at an LGBT History Month event a few weeks ago hosted by a collaboration of GMB self-organised groups GMB Shout! and GMB Race.

It had brought to attention racial prejudice and racism being an additional barrier to LGBT and women’s rights and I started to think more about what feminism might mean for black, Asian or minority ethnic (BAME) women and those who identify as women, and how the tendency to treat gender and race issues as mutually exclusive needs to be addressed.

It is Kimberle Crenshaw who first coined the phrase “intersectional feminism” in her 1989 paper Demarginalising the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics. In this paper she explores how oppressive institutions are all connected and cannot be examined separately.

Some believe that bringing up BAME issues within feminism is divisive and hinders the movement, and history will make you believe that. When we consider the AfricanAmerican suffrage movement and the black feminist movement, they are often picked out as separatist, but they were born out of feminist waves that were not inclusive of all women from different backgrounds in the first place.

Among some BAME peers today, there is still a strong feeling that a white feminist voice will be heard over a BAME feminist voice. Of course not all BAME people feel this way and we can argue whether this statement is true or not, but this perception definitely does exist and we have to work together to understand why and what we can do to change it.

From a young age, I was aware of my ethnicity before I was made aware of my gender. I remember acutely how my mother used to put chicken drumsticks in my packed lunch. I begged mum to pack me some nice triangle ham sandwiches with the crust cut off, but she refused. She could not understand why I didn’t want this food because when she went to school all she had was a little boiled rice. Six-year-old me would peek into my lunchbox to assess the safety of the foil shapes I’d grown to be suspicious of.

Sometimes I wouldn’t even need to see it, the glorious smell of BBQ chicken would gush in a typhoon of aromas in the school dining hall and I would quickly as possible seal my lunch box shut again, crimson with embarrassment. I would take my uneaten lunch back home and hide it under my bed. Of course I got found out.

I was born into the Western world as the daughter of Filipino expats, which meant growing up with cultural values that were different from the “Western norm” and from the “norm” of my parents’ heritage.

There was internal conflict with the sense of belonging and being different all at the same time. All of these things contribute to my identity as a woman, as British, as Filipino, as me. After a long day at work, my mother would come home, put the shopping away, cook tinola and rice, do the laundry and still somehow keep the place tidy, all with my baby brother on her hip. And she did this happily. This was just the way things were, the way she was taught and the way I was taught.

In Filipino culture, as it is in many cultures, the woman will traditionally take a subservient role to the head of the family — a patriarchal structure that spans most religions and households: black, white and Asian, but all to varying degrees.

My ethnic background cannot be removed from my experience in opposing sexist cultural norms I have been exposed to. The difference in values brought about by culture clashes between my Filipino parents and living in London created barriers in our relationship which have been hard to accept but we work it out and I am lucky that we still have each other. I am grateful that I am not cast out of my family. I am grateful that I do not need to fear for my life because I choose to exercise my freedom of choice as a woman.

But there are many women living in London, in Britain, who are far less fortunate than me. Celebrate and encourage diversity in the feminist community and focus and be mindful of intersectional oppression. The experience of a feminist is subjective to their culture and environment. We cannot afford to forget this. Without inclusion, the feminist movement will always be stunted.

As Kimberle Crenshaw said: “Women come from a whole range of backgrounds. If our visions of peace don’t include these differences, then our peace will be partial.”

• Rae De Guzman is GMB branch equality officer and a member of GMB race and GMB young London committee.