46 year old very hip lesbian mother of three girls who worked with and for the trans community for years has a mind melt-down…
A Twinge of Cringe
I was increasingly disturbed about the numbers of girls that I heard about wanting to transition to being men. As a lesbian, I am keenly aware that there are less and less “butch” women to date anymore due to a similar issue. I started to feel uncomfortable with the vast number of people who are identifying as Non-Binary, but I couldn’t place my finger on why it bothered me. Friends with younger kids reached out to me occasionally to say they were putting their daughters on hormone blockers to give them time to “figure themselves out”. The grand finale was watching Dylan Mulvaney- my stomach flopped and finally pulled me out the haze.
I have always identified as a “strong woman.”
When I was a girl, I wanted to be a strong girl. I always wanted to climb higher in the tree, ride my bike faster, and run the mile faster at school. I played with Hotwheels, coveted my pocketknife, built things in the back yard with my pile of old wood and a hammer and nails, spent hours smashing rocks into dust for no reason, and a whole myriad of other activities that were extremely “rough and tough.” All of these things were girl things because I was a girl.
I was born in 1976 and, thus, was a child of the ’80’s. The sexual revolution had happened (that’s part of how I got here). Women’s rights were bubbling up as a political issue. Madonna and Cindy Lauper were forging the way for the Riot Grrrl movement. Gender nonconformity was handled daily by the likes of Boy George and Billy Idol. Our minds were open and our spirits were free and we were going to be as different as we could for the sake of expression and coolness.
Love Yourself
The self-help movement hadn’t taken hold during my school age years, but women lifting up other women had. Cagney and Lacey and Laverne and Shirley were showing us that we weren’t just delicate flowers, we were all on the same team. We *could* be delicate flowers and we could also be strong women. We could laugh at ourselves and we could also take down criminals.
Above all else- I think almost all of us from this era got the clear message that we should be proud of ourselves and love the bodies and minds we were given. We were told to be confident and know that we were loved and would find love one day no matter what. And if we didn’t find love, we could live our lives with our best friends and have a blast anyway.
I mean we were really taught this, y’all. I remember this being messaged loud and clear from tv, friends, and adults in my life. We were right on the verge of throwing out the idea there were girls toys and boy toys and that girls could do and be whatever we wanted. Of course, we were aware that men had the market cornered on high-paying jobs of prestige, that we were scarcely found in the science world, and that we were in the trenches of a battle. We all seemed to decide universally that we were changing things and things would assuredly change.
Being a girl is, in itself, important
Girl Power was super strong in culture by the time we hit the late 90’s. My kids were raised with Power Puff Girls and post riot grrrl music. Strong women were all around them as people to look up to. Girls of their era (first one born in 1998) were told through all kinds of messaging that they should love themselves and go for whatever they wanted.
Every female generation before this current one had a type of resilience, strength and autonomy that has or is disappearing. We (age 105-40) know that just being a woman is important. We can bear children, hold down a corporate job, or start our own business in 10 minutes flat. We can travel the world, spend our lives out in our garden, or invent the next computer program to change lives. The world is, quite literally, what we make of it.
We make it on our own merit and confidence. We make it because we aren’t controlled by our gender, we are lifted up by it. This comes after generational shifts in how we taught girls what they could and couldn’t do. By the time I had kids, I think 99% of parents of girls raised them with the radical idea that their bodies, no matter how they turned out, were perfection and they could and should do whatever they wanted to make them happy.
Change yourself to love yourself
This is, quite literally, one of the most psychologically fucked up things I have ever heard. If someone said this to a child 20 years ago they would have been punched and told to hit the road.
We did all this intensive work in society to tell everyone, but girls especially, that their bodies are perfect in every shape, that their minds are beautiful and work in such a cool capacity because of their biology, that they are powerful if they feel powerful, and that gender norms should never make them feel limited. And yes, we told children of both genders this. We understood that levelling the playing field didn’t mean that boys had to feel like pieces of shit, it just meant we raised them to respect their sisters and mothers and know they were equal.
Today, we are not only introducing confusion into the lives of children with all this “CHOOSE a gender” at school bs, but we are instilling into children that they may not be, and probably aren’t, perfect. Introducing to a young mind, especially a girl who sees the most unrealistic images of women daily, that they have to choose what they are is damaging to the psyche.
Never before in human history have we not told our children they are beautiful as they are. We were just making such gains with girls and women and confidence and self-assuredness. Y’all are throwing that all in the garbage and creating either holes of emptiness in girls or self-obsessed narcissists out of them.
Why can’t they just be girls who play with trucks?! Why can’t they be girls who love science? Why can’t they be girls who ride bikes and build ramps? Why can’t they be girls who like girls?!
Now they surely aren’t girls! They must change! They MUST be a boy after all! They must be “non-binary”. Fuck your non-binary (not as in fuck you, but fuck that mental hole you were lead into like it’s radical, I simply can’t believe that in this climate it’s radical), be super proud of who you actually are and maybe some of your other discordant feelings inside you will go away. My nonbinary people are going to feel hurt by this. But please know that I am imploring you to look deeply at what I’m saying.
It’s radical to be yourself and teach your kids self-confidence. We spent years and years changing how society viewed what women can do. Now we are telling girls to doubt their power as women and head down a road of transition or choosing to not be a women by being nonbinary. Both choices can be seen as a choice of shame of being a women.
Even firmly identifying as nonbinary just because you dress in a masculine manner, fix your own car, or only sometimes wear make-up, is some kind of avoidance of the spectrum of womanhood, and I have to ask why? We worked so hard to make sure that we could be women who did whatever we wanted, and now we are going to cowtow to their gender stereotypes by de-gendering ourselves?
I have been fully supportive of this movement and thought we were headed toward some kind of enlightenment in the past 20 years, but then I noticed I had to start setting aside concerns to be ok with it. I am, in zero ways, anti-trans. I am also not and never will be in support of blocking medical care for transgender adults.
But I want all children to be confident and proud of who they are, especially girls. We are going backwards right now and it’s high time we all started talking about it and what it means and have open disagreements.
The next episode:
A young psyche is developing relative to the outside world and is actually not overly concerned with the self until about puberty. To force children to so heavily consider and weigh their “identity” is damaging to their self-esteem as they reach adulthood.
Scarlet Pearl 