older trans woman: I was closeted when I was younger so I feel like a young girl now going through all these simple girly milestones I couldn’t before
me: I grew up with severe social anxiety and self-hatred and no money and I’m experiencing certain girly teen things for the first time in my 20s so I completely relate and empathize
a radfem on her bullshit: YIKES wtf look at that pedo autogynophile LMAO women don’t think like that!!! nobody relates!! stay out of my bathroom freak!! I hate you! this is why I hate MALES and wish they would all DIE!!!
Being a woman isn’t about wanting to do girly things and it’s fucking creepy for adult men to fetishize female childhood, especially when girlhood is so traumatic.
I lost my teen years to a chronic illness that confined me to my house, and yet, somehow, I don’t feel compelled to pretend to be a porn-version of a fourteen year old.
And pray, do tell, what are these “girly milestones”. Weirdly enough, some 40 year old dude’s fetishistic fantasies are not the universal teen experience.
Uh doing your hair the way you like? buying clothes that make you look and feel good? experimenting with makeup? having a girls night with your friends? having female friends in general? perfecting your skincare routine? flirting and being flirted with? going on a date? going to prom? going to a party? decorating your room?
bruh basic stuff?
“doing your hair the way you like” “experimenting with makeup”
I remember spending hours locked in my room watching tutorials, washing, drying, and frying my hair over and over again with blow driers, straighteners, and curlers, trying to learn how to do pretty things to my hair. (I still can’t do a French braid.) I lost whole weekends to this, weekends I could have spent hanging out with friends or family, reading, writing, studying, playing games, or being outside. I remember spending absurd amounts of money on hair dye, to the point where my own mother forgot that I’m not naturally blonde. I remember the freedom I always felt when I cut my hair short, and how much freer still I felt when I finally cut it all off into a super-short pixie, and I didn’t have to deal with that shit at all.
I remember those same weekends, deciding instead to experiment with makeup. Putting it on and washing it off, scrubbing my face red and raw, over and over again. I remember the makeup causing acne, and wearing more makeup to cover that acne, which caused more acne.
I remember being 14, waking up at 5am to do my hair and makeup before school. I remember coming home after school, when the makeup had worn off and I’d finally gotten annoyed and put my hair in a ponytail, and thinking I looked hideous.
“having a girls night with your friends? having female friends in general?”
I feel like all the lesbians who were never invited to sleepovers will tell you that they’re still female. regardless, having age-appropriate same-sex friends is hardly a “girly thing.” and it’s still weird for grown men to identify with pubescent girls.
“perfecting your skincare routine?”
ah yes, the crippling anxiety caused by not looking like a photoshopped magazine model. followed, in adulthood, by the crippling fear of aging, because a woman who is not fuckable is invisible. I have memories here, too.
I didn’t even have bad acne, and yet, I still remember covering my face in things that gave me actual chemical burns. (I’m allergic to benzoyl peroxide, which was fun to discover, and I have eczema that makes it difficult to use acne treatments.) I have broken capillaries on my nose from using “pore strips,” to try to get rid of my “blackheads” (btw, those dots on your nose are called sebaceous filaments, they’re a normal part of your anatomy, and you really can’t get rid of them.) I remember a whole drawer full of face wash and lotions and creams and spot treatments. I remember friends who were put on accutane, a medicine that can cause severe organ damage, and dries your skin out to the point of pain.
But hey, I don’t need memories. I really enjoy my skincare routine as an adult. But it’s rooted in those anxieties. Stay young, stay pretty, have perfectly flawless skin. I spend an unreasonable amount of money on it. I’m breaking the law for it – I’m illegally using somebody else’s prescription for Retin-A.
“flirting and being flirted with? going on a date?”
Plenty of people don’t become sexually/romantically active until later in life. Lots of lesbian women don’t come to terms with their sexuality until later. They’re still women.
“going to prom?
going to a party?”
While admittedly fun for many people, that is neither female-specific, nor a required experience of adolescence. Prom is pretty much exclusively a US thing. It’s also expensive as hell, which keeps it out of the reach of many people who grow up in poverty. And lots of introverted people never go to a party in their life. They’re fine.
“decorating your room?”
This is also neither female-specific, nor adolescence-specific.
I understand that you feel like you missed out on these things, due to poverty and social anxiety, but a lot of these things don’t exist for many people. It sounds like your idea of the adolescence you missed out on is heavily influenced by media. Life for many young girls is not like a teen movie, where they have a cute ~aesthetic~ Pottery Barn-esque bedroom covered in posters and polaroids and christmas lights, and they have sleepovers with their girlfriends where they do each others’ makeup and gossip about boys, and have cute dates where they chastely share a milkshake with the cute guy from geometry, and dance all night at prom. For a lot of young women, adolescence is a time of violent self-hatred, psychological torture, sexual assault and abuse, and anxiety about everything. I notice you don’t include things like “being bullied,” “having the cute guy from geometry spread your nudes to the whole school,” “developing an eating disorder,” “getting three hours of sleep a night to balance school, a social life, extracurriculars, a part-time job, and get up early enough to do your hair and makeup before school,” “crying over college rejection letters,” or “pregnancy scares” in your list of Just Girly Things. But that’s the reality of adolescence for many young women.
i remember experiencing “girly milestones” like:
– ironing my naturally curly hair into oblivion (with a literal clothes iron) bc i was made fun of for it for years and burning my scalp and hands in the process. cutting off chunks of it to try and thin it out. crying when this didn’t work
– ~experimenting with makeup~ and getting an eye infection because eyeliner got into my eyes and i didn’t know how to take it off properly
– not thinking about my skin or giving a shit about wasting my time ~perfecting my skincare routine~ until someone told me i had “gross skin” and an adult woman told me i needed to develop a skincare routine while i’m young “or it will be too late!”. began obsessing over every “flaw” in my skin.
– being bullied by my female friends when i was 11 – 13 for being “too quiet” and “having stupid hair” (see above).
– developing DD breasts by the age of 14, hating buying clothes because nothing fit. feeling hideous and/or comical in everything i ever wore. sobbing in changing rooms while telling my mother i wanted to cut my breasts off. being ogled my creepy adult men.
– going to literally one single party in my entire teenage life because of anxiety. never going on a date of any kind because of the same. thinking i was inherently disgusting so why would anyone like me anyway?
– going to our yr 12 formal (i guess our version of prom?) and being miserable because my high heels were hurting my feet, my strapless bra was digging into my ribs and i had pins poking into my head from my hairstyle but when i complained i just got told “but you look nice”. nearly fainting from hunger bc were were told not to eat too much on the night in case our dresses didn’t fit.
– having a boy in my class send me sexually explicit emails detailing what he wanted to “do to me in the toilets” and feeling too embarrassed to tell a teacher. he and his friends continued sending me and two other girls these emails for the next few months. being told “maybe it’s just his way of flirting” when I finally told someone.
– hating the fact that i was expected to be feminine and small and refusing to do typical “girly” things. being told by a family member that i was “confused” and that she would “brainwash me into being feminine”
“Doing your hair the way you like”
I never did my hair as a child, and if my hair was done, my mom did it. I didn’t give a fuck about my hair as a kid, I had other things to worry about.
“Buying clothes that make you look and feel good”
I didn’t fucking do that until I was an adult and making my own money. My girlhood consisted of clothing bought by my relatives.
“Experimenting with makeup”
I have always fucking hated makeup. The literal only reason I started wearing it was during my weeb days when I cosplayed. Out of costume I did not wear it, and as I am no longer a weeb, I never wear it.
“Having a girls night with your friends”
I’ve never had a fucking “girls night”. Post middle school and beyond all my friends were female because boys treated me like invisible garbage due to my height, weight, and appearance. We did not have “girls night”, we had “normal hang out with friends” night. We had fun and did things we liked, and whatever your sick pedophilic mind concocted about “girls night”, I guarantee it’s wrong. I do have a friend who does have “girls nights” and they go to clubs and hit on men. That what you want to do?
“Having female friends in general”
Hey maybe you don’t have any female friends because you’re a fetishistic creep? Just a theory.
“Perfecting your skin care routine”
Don’t make me fucking laugh. Skin care products don’t work. There’s nothing to “perfect”. And the only reason women and girls are so invested in them is because YOU MEN have made MILLIONS telling us our natural skin is hideous and must be hidden. Zits are hell of a lot more natural then your disgusting femininity fetish.
“Flirting and being flirted with”
I’ve never once in my life been flirted with, and neither have I flirted with anyone. You have this image of becoming some beautiful female sex object envied by everyone but that’s not women’s reality, that’s a male fetish. I am an unattractive, overweight, tall woman. I am either ignored or treated like garbage by members of the male sex because of that. You have no fucking idea what it’s like to be an average woman and you watch too many goddamn male made movies.
“Going on a date”
That’s not female exclusive. Men go on dates too, what the actual fuck? But you know what, I didn’t get to go on a proper date until I was 20 and with my first girlfriend. At age 15 I was asked out by a guy in my math class who stood me up and ignored me for the rest of high school, do you want that experience? At age 16 on a bus ride home from school one of the neighbor boys was making a list of every girl on the bus he would marry and when someone said “what about Spencer!?” He gave me the most disgusted look I’ve ever seen. You want that experience too, you fucking misogynist?
“Going to prom”
I HATED prom. Nobody talked to me and I felt like a worthless piece of trash because nobody asked me to it. I ended up driving home early.
“Going to a party”
I never got invited to parties. I ask again, do you want that experience?
“Decorating your room”
Again, did not do that until I was an adult and moved out. My mom decorated my room beforehand. I literally did not give a shit.
Transwomen are so fucking offensive it makes me sick. Your fetishistic, male view of girlhood is so fucking vile and pedophilic and you need to be locked up.
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Big Mean Sweaty Dyke 