The Female Characters Who Taught a Gay Boy How to Be Strong

International Women’s Day usually centers on real history — scientists, activists, artists, leaders. Women who changed laws, built movements, and refused to accept the limits placed on them, but stories shape us too.

Long before we fully understand the world, we meet characters on screen who quietly show us what strength can look like. Sometimes it’s loud and heroic. Sometimes it’s messy, stubborn, or deeply imperfect.

• Some of these women carry bows and arrows.
• Some hold surgical scalpels.
• Some walk into a room like gravity bends around them.
• And some of them are just trying to keep their children alive.

As a gay man who grew up glued to movies and television, I often found myself looking to female characters in ways I didn’t yet have words for. They were survivors, outsiders, rule-breakers, protectors — roles that felt strangely familiar. They weren’t real, but the strength they carried felt real enough to stay with me.

Here are six women from film and television who, in one way or another, changed how I understand resilience:

1. Katniss Everdeen — the hero who never asked for the role

Katniss Everdeen (The Hunger Games)

Credit: Lionsgate Films

When we first meet Katniss Everdeen in The Hunger Games, she isn’t trying to become a symbol of rebellion. She’s hunting illegally in the woods so her family doesn’t starve.

Everything about Katniss begins with survival. When she volunteers for the Games in place of her sister, the moment doesn’t feel theatrical or triumphant. It feels instinctive — the kind of decision you make before your brain has time to catch up with your heart. That’s part of what makes her so compelling.

Katniss never becomes the polished, confident hero that stories usually reward us with. She’s guarded. Sometimes cold. She struggles with trust, with trauma, with the impossible expectations people project onto her.

The Capitol wants a symbol, but Katniss is just a person trying to protect the people she loves, and somehow that makes her bravery feel even bigger.

2. Samantha Jones — freedom as a form of power

Samantha Jones (Sex and the City)

Credit: HBO / Warner Bros. Discovery

When Sex and the City first aired, Samantha Jones was a shock to the system. Not because she was cruel or destructive — but because she refused to apologize for existing exactly as she was.

Samantha was successful, confident, sexually open, and unapologetically ambitious. She said things women on television weren’t supposed to say at the time, and she did it with a grin that made it impossible to look away.

But what really made her unforgettable wasn’t the glamour or the one-liners. It was the loyalty.

Samantha loved her friends fiercely. When things got messy — heartbreak, insecurity, illness — she showed up. Sometimes with blunt honesty, sometimes with humor, but always with the kind of support that felt deeply genuine.

Her cancer storyline remains one of the most quietly powerful arcs in the series. The woman who seemed invincible suddenly had to confront vulnerability. And she did it the same way she faced everything else in life: head-on, without apology.

3. Meredith Grey — surviving the storm

Meredith Grey (Grey's Anatomy)

Credit: ABC Signature / Disney Television Studios

Few television characters have endured as much chaos as Meredith Grey in Grey’s Anatomy.

From the beginning, Meredith carries a complicated emotional inheritance. Her mother is a legendary surgeon but a distant one. Her father disappears from her life early. She arrives at the hospital already carrying years of unresolved weight and then the disasters start.

Plane crashes. Hospital shootings. Personal losses that would flatten most people.

What makes Meredith interesting isn’t that she survives these things. Plenty of TV characters survive terrible circumstances. It’s that she doesn’t pretend they didn’t break her a little along the way.

She doubts herself. She retreats emotionally. She makes mistakes — sometimes big ones. But she keeps moving.

Over time we watch her evolve from an insecure intern into a respected surgeon and mentor. Her journey isn’t about becoming flawless.

It’s about learning how to keep standing after the ground keeps shifting under your feet.

4. Natasha Romanoff — rewriting your own story

Natasha Romanoff (Black Widow / Marvel Cinematic Universe)

Credit: Marvel Studios / Disney

In the Marvel universe, most heroes have something extraordinary defining them: Super strength. Technology. Magic.

Natasha Romanoff has none of those things.

What she has instead is history.

Raised in the Red Room, she was trained from childhood to become a weapon — manipulated, controlled, and shaped by a system designed to erase personal choice.

Her story becomes powerful not because of what happened to her, but because of what she chooses afterward.

Natasha spends years trying to make peace with the damage left behind. Slowly, almost reluctantly, she builds trust with the Avengers. What begins as a team eventually starts to resemble something closer to family.

Her strength isn’t flashy. It’s quiet redemption — the decision to keep choosing a better path, even when the past refuses to stay buried.

5. Beth Dutton — chaos with a purpose

Beth Dutton (Yellowstone)

Credit: Paramount Network / Paramount Global

Beth Dutton doesn’t enter a room. She detonates into it.

On Yellowstone, Beth is brilliant, ruthless in business, emotionally volatile, and capable of delivering dialogue that feels like a perfectly aimed knife.

People underestimate her constantly. It rarely ends well for them.

But beneath all the fury is a character shaped by deep, unresolved pain. Much of Beth’s aggression comes from a desperate need to protect the things that matter most to her — her father, her family, and the ranch that defines their world. She isn’t easy to love.

But she’s impossible to ignore. And television doesn’t give us enough women who are allowed to be this messy, dangerous, and fully alive.

6. Bahar Çeşmeli — strength in ordinary survival

Bahar Çeşmeli (Kadın)

Credit: Medyapım / MF Yapım / Fox (NOW)

Among all these characters, Bahar Çeşmeli from the Turkish drama Kadın might feel the most grounded in everyday reality.

Bahar is not a superhero or a revolutionary figure.

She is a single mother struggling with poverty, illness, and the overwhelming responsibility of raising her children alone.

Her life is full of obstacles that feel painfully real: financial hardship, complicated family relationships, and moments where hope seems almost impossible to maintain. Yet Bahar continues. She wakes up every day and keeps fighting for her children’s future.

There is something incredibly powerful about that quiet determination. Not all heroes fight on battlefields. Some simply refuse to stop loving the people who depend on them.

Sometimes, when the world feels particularly heavy, it’s strangely comforting to remember that many of the strongest people I’ve ever known first lived on a screen. Stories give us mirrors — showing us who we are, who we could become, and the strength that already exists all around us.

Today, beyond the fictional heroes and unforgettable characters, this day belongs to the real women in our lives — the ones who carry quiet courage through ordinary days, who fight battles we may never fully see, and who continue to shape the world with intelligence, compassion, and resilience.

To the women who inspire us, challenge us, protect us, and stand beside us:

Happy International Women’s Day.

May your strength always be seen, your voice always be heard, and your stories always be told.