Wait. What? After I came to accept that statelessness was an issue and a big world issue, I faced another challenge. Now, I immediately imagined that the main reason people become Stateless was because of political victimization. Of course I had heard about atrocities against masses of people, in the past and in the present, where human beings were stripped of their identity and dehumanized and destroyed. I knew of the Rohingya, the people of Palestine, the Kurds, the Bosnian Serbs. I knew of the depths that humans could descend to, to destroy and dehumanize people. Women not being able to pass on their nationality to their children results in a huge number of children being born into the perpetually helpless situation of being stateless. Now this really was beyond my comprehension. What an unnecessary problem to have in this day and age. Why would governments purposely push people into situations of being utterly powerless for their entire lives? Surely a person who cannot go to school, cannot legally do a job, cannot own land or travel – surely every person like this, who is prevented from being independent and self sufficient, who is forced to be perpetually dependent - is ultimately a huge burden on any State? So what is the rationale behind States continuing with this seemingly unnecessary discrimination against scores and scores of the people living within its borders? This level of tragedy was shocking but I could begin to see how people who were deeply cruel and power hungry could plan and action such awful plans. And so I was prepared to accept that making people stateless could be a step within this kind of terrible trajectory. What I was not prepared to find out was that, in fact, many of the stateless people in the world are stateless not because of some hateful political agenda, but because of laws that discriminate against women. This was what I could not reconcile myself to. 17