The Girlhood We Lost
By Jenny Holland
A few months ago a video shared on X caught my attention. It was the typical set-up: An angry young white woman, recording a rant in a car. But what she said accidentally revealed one of the major social drivers of the trans phenomenon: a self-imposed loathing of womanhood.
“Womanhood does not exist without trans women,” she says. “Without trans women, womanhood is not a choice. Gender becomes a fucking prison, a cage constructed by oppressive binaries.”
Trans women, she explains, “busted down the doors of those fucking cages and released us to a world of opportunity and choice.”
While this woman’s reasoning is contrived and twisted, she is actually articulating something profound about reality as many young women view it. Being “just” a woman is not enough. In fact, it’s terrible. It’s only through men “choosing” to be female, can a woman validate her otherwise pathetic existence. Somehow, for a large cohort of young women today, a disordered, delusional man who wants to wear women’s clothing is the only thing that makes being a woman cool.
It did not used to be like this. At all. And there are still girls who are being raised with healthy boundaries and an intact sense of self. But for a very large and vocal group of girls growing up in progressive, middle and upper middle class circles, girlhood, femininity, and all its attendant joys and responsibilities are now toxic. A cross to bear, an intolerable imposition. And not at all surprisingly, the mental health of this particular demographic of girls and young women is particularly bad. Examples of this are strewn across social media and popular culture. Girls identifying as boys, as bugs, as cats. These girls are fleeing womanhood.
How has this come about? You could point to a multitude of causes — porn being one that has rightly attracted a lot of attention. But I will point to another that rarely gets mentioned but has had an insidious influence: the inability of adults to just let children be. At some point between my childhood in the 1980’s and today, childhood became an arena upon which adults conducted political theatre. Grown ups suddenly got the ridiculous idea that education involved feeding children an endless stream of traumatising information about how awful the world is, how violent our history is, and how our female bodies are — quite literally — the source of our oppression. Children of the professional managerial class became vectors of an ideology that taught them to hate themselves — an ideology that is taught in schools, then reinforced at home by status-obsessed, virtue signalling parents, and then beamed directly into their brains by an unceasing stream of social media posts.
For girls, this has taken all the joy and excitement away from growing up. When I was a kid in the 1980’s, there was not a single influence in my life telling me that my body was a “fucking prison.” It was quite the opposite. So many of my childhood memories involve me sitting in an adult female relative’s bedroom, watching her get ready. Noting every detail — the application of lipstick, the selection of earrings, the spraying of hair and perfume. I still remember my mother’s dresser, and the little boxes and trinkets that lay upon it, full of sparkly little treasures that filled me with excitement about growing into a woman. Not a single thing about it seemed oppressive. Mysterious? Yes. Scary? Sometimes, especially when you reach an age when unwanted attention from men begins. But there was no high profile movement telling me that I could somehow ‘choose’ to reject everything that was difficult about being female. And we were willing to brave the downsides, for the reward of becoming a full grown woman. That was understood to be an honour I and my peers were keen to accept. Women seemed powerful to us. We longed to join their ranks.
We used to be left to our own devices. I remember countless hours spent conspiring with my friends, full of ideas and notions about the kinds of women we would be. There were pushy parents, of course, and spoiled kids. But that was not the norm. The society of adults around us carried on with their lives, and left us to our dreams and worries — without crushing or amplifying them.
I suspect many women my age feel that when they were girls, they were left too much to their own devices, cast out among the wolves too early, or given outdated advice that was not applicable to our generation. These women want to keep up with the times. So they discount the wisdom of their own grandmothers, and are far too close to, and uncritical of, youthful fads. They might think they are arming their girls against the harsh realities of being a young woman, so as to better protect them. Instead, they are engineering their kids, instead of just letting them grow.
How terribly we have failed the girls and young women of today. Instead of creating a space bounded by intergenerational family members, old rites of passage, and simply just the freedom to while away the time, observing adults doing adult things and daydreaming about doing those things one day — we framed the world for them as a violent, toxic, inflamed place that hates us simply for being female. Untold numbers of girls took that message and turned it in on themselves and their female bodies.
The message is clear: to just *be* is not enough.
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