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”
Uh doing your hair the way you like? – How is this inherently female?
buying clothes that make you look and feel good? How is this inherently female?
experimenting with makeup? How is this inherently female? Women are not born with makeup and plenty of women do not use it. Ever. Not to mention the fact that many women don’t have a choice to ‘experiment’ with makeup – but are forced to wear it to obtain employment.
having a girls night with your friends? – How is hanging with friends inherently female? A ‘girls’ night contains what, specifically, that isn’t stereotype.
having female friends in general? Men can and do have female friends. This is not inherently female.
perfecting your skincare routine? Not an inherently female thing – suggesting it is perpetuates the oppressive gendered concept that women must have perfect skin and buy hundreds of dollars worth of products to attain the look of prepubescence for eternity.
flirting and being flirted with? Men flirt.
going on a date? Men go on dates.
going to prom? Men go to prom
going to a party? Seriously – you’re listing things that anyone can do now. Do you honestly believe these things are inherently ‘female’ experiences?
decorating your room? Just stop. All you’re doing is perpetuating stereotypes and talking nonsense.
There is nothing listed that are inherently female experiences – and when you have listed something linked to women – you’re framing them as if they’re ‘fun’ when they’re in fact oppressive and women experience these things very differently to men who want to appropriate womanhood without any of the oppressive cultural context behind it.
damn i guess people out there really think being teenage girl is like this
cause it’s a fetish
This is where the transtrend intersects with incels and MRAs. These socially ostracized, awkward men really believe all girls/women do nothing but giggle and flirt and go to parties and paint their toenails with their friends in their decorated rooms covered in posters and photos, are always happy and cheerful and gossip with each other over coffee while being stay at home moms in their immaculate houses that are just magically always spotless and organized with no effort and have no real cares or worries in the whole world, because that’s what TV, movies and anime have shown them.
when i was in elementary school, i was obsessed with monster high. i thought that as soon as i got to high school, everything would get better- because that was all i knew about high school. i thought it would be a big, old building where everyone was nice and it was cool to be yourself. i thought that when i started high school, i would be like frankie. i thought i would suddenly have a group of friends who were nice to me and boys who liked me. i thought high school would be fun and i would enjoy it, because that was how it was in monster high.
now i’m in high school, going into my sophomore year. it’s not like that, obviously. i thought i would make friends, but the other girls looked at me and said “why are you dressed like a boy?” i thought most of the students would be nice, but they brushed their shoulders off and glared at me when i accidentally bumped into them in the hall. i thought it would be cool to be yourself and have “freaky flaws”, but my teachers and family told me i had no right to be upset with the way i was being treated, since i refused to wear makeup or shave. i thought i could find people with similar interests, but the kids in my theater class told me to cut my legs off, yelled “tranny” at me, said i had a dick.
that’s what being a teenage girl is like for me. strangers mistaking me for a boy. my family saying that if i want them to stop, i need to “act like a girl”. walking into my favorite class and then leaving to cry in the bathroom, because the first thing my so-called friend said to me was “when will you die?” and everyone laughing when he said that. a girl i thought was my friend showing a guy my phone number so he could block me. a boy i had never met before looking at me and sneering, “that’s a man”. being told not to wear skirts, because “most chicks shave their legs”, and the underlying “you are supposed to shave your legs”. looking at cute swimsuits and having my mom take them away with a “you can’t wear these unless you trim your bush”.
last year, i shaved my legs once. i stood in the shower and cried while i clumsily tried to use the razor, thinking that if i could just “fix” my legs, people would like me. when i was done, i hated the way it looked. i felt naked and uncomfortable, but the next day i wore a knee-length skirt to school. no one said anything, but people still walked away when i approached them, they still glared at me and laughed at me and mocked me. and i thought, “but i got rid of the problem. what am i doing wrong?”
that thought, “what am i doing wrong”, is always with us as girls, because we are never good enough. society tells us in a million different ways that we are doing something wrong, always. girls who try to perform femininity go through adolescence hearing “slut”, “shallow”, “basic bitch”, “weak”, “stupid”, “ugly”, “fat”. girls who don’t will hear “tranny”, “freak”, “dyke”, “faggot”, “gorilla”, “dog girl”, and the constant “ugly”. we are always ugly and we are always stupid. nothing a girl does is good enough. and society just laughs at our problems. they mock girls who kill themselves, cut themselves, starve themselves. when girls starve themselves to death, they are laughed at. they are called silly and vain.
is that what trans women want? no. they want the movie version of girlhood, just like i wanted the monster high version of high school.
-mod violet
Being a girl in a patriarchal society is absolutely traumatic. I remember one time I found this dress I really liked and I decided not to wear leggings underneath (like I usually did) with some black combat boots. I was so excited, and when I got to school I started feeling…less excited. My legs were super white and I was chunky so my legs were fatty. I got called up to the office for something, and while I was waiting, this couple and their daughter noticably looked at my legs, my face, then the mom whispered something to her husband about me. We were about three feet away from each other and she wasn’t a very good listener. I remember going to the bathroom, sobbing, and calling my mom (who worked across town) and begging her to just drop off some leggings for me or take me home. I will forever be grateful for my mom for this, but she actually came home from work, got leggings, and dropped them off for me. When I put them on I immediatly felt better, but I haven’t worn a dress without leggings since.
Girlhood is nothing but shame, break downs, abuse, assault and some form of self harm. I’ve literally tried to rip my hair out before because I couldn’t get my thick tangled mess into perfectly straight strands. I’ve scrubbed my face raw, cried over acne (I still feel like I have horrible skin despite not having acne anymore), I’ve had issues with make up and hair dye and clothes that literally ruined my self image. Girls were only praised for 100% committing to what your idea of girlhood is and actually doing it well. It’s not reality. It’s not achievable. That much pain and suffering can only be thought as something good and positive by males who never experienced what girlhood actually was.
Big Mean Sweaty Dyke 