Why gender identity speaks to girls

The cult of gender identity tells girls If you don’t feel comfortable with yourself, maybe you’re not a woman or a girl at all.

There’s a reason the language of gender identity is so compelling to many girls and young women. Gender identity names and interprets common experiences that the current wave of mainstream feminism utterly fails to take seriously.

According to mainstream feminism—we could also call it ‘choice’ feminism, or intersectional feminism, or third-wave feminism or (god forbid) ‘Everyday Feminism’—anything a woman does is empowering if she says it is. And, of course, anyone can be a woman—you just have to feel like one, whatever that means.

So, this form of ‘feminism’ has no problem with women selling sex or the men who buy it. When men sexually coerce lesbians—as long as those men say the magic words first (‘I’m a lesbian, too’)—mainstream feminism sides against the lesbians. And mainstream feminism has nothing of substance to say about the pressures girls and young women face in 2021. When it comes to the expectations imported from hard-core pornography that blight our sex lives, professional feminists are conspicuously silent. When trans-identifying men redefine women and girls as walking gender stereotypes and sex objects, mainstream feminists dutifully update their dictionaries.

Somewhere along the way, intersectional feminism stopped intersecting with the realities of being female.

In fact, intersectional feminism cheers when women are reduced to a mash-up of body parts and functions (uterus-havers, menstruators, gestators), ‘reclaimed’ slurs like ‘slut’ and ‘queer,’ and regressive stereotypes. This feminism glorifies the very stereotypes and forms of exploitation that feminism once fought. And when older women object, mainstream feminism sneers.

But what if you can’t translate degradation into empowerment like the pros at Teen Vogue? What if being called a ‘menstruator’ makes your skin crawl? What if you object to the image of womanhood mainstream feminism exalts? What if you’re just ambivalent about it?

If you’ve got doubts and reservations, mainstream feminism will label you a Karen or a white feminist (regardless of your skin tone), and castigate you to check your “cis” privilege, unlearn your biases, and conquer your hang-ups.

And if you’re combing the past for alternative role models, you’ll find they’ve been ruthlessly problematized, denounced, or transed. The works of many feminist thinkers—who still have so much to say to girls and young women today—have fallen out of favour and out of print.

If mainstream feminism hadn’t sold out women and girls, gender identity wouldn’t have taken over the market. Because what mainstream feminism evades, gender identity expresses.

Gender identity says: If you don’t feel comfortable with those stereotypes, maybe you’re not a woman or a girl at all. And if you want out, we know the way.

Girls and young women have never before been presented with the problem of Growing Up Female as though it’s a choice. Now, gender identity offers a way out: take these puberty blockers, cut off your breasts, you don’t have to grow up female after all! Between gender identity and mainstream feminism, we put girls in a position where continuing to identify as a girl—rather than changing your pronouns or upgrading your identity to ‘nonbinary’ or trans—is taken as consent to be demeaned and dismissed as ‘cis’ and female at the same time. Girls today are expected to atone for their ‘cisgender’ privilege while still facing the same old sexism and misogyny. But what self-respecting girl identifies with such regressive ideas of what girls are? Wouldn’t you want out, too?

When we talk about girls and young women, transgender identification, and social contagion it can sound like we’re saying: if it’s socially transmitted, it’s not serious—or—if it’s socially transmitted, there’s no real suffering there. But there is real suffering. The problems that feminism evolved to address persist, but the words language and analysis women and girls need to address these problems are disappearing. That nameless suffering is the soil in which all kinds of new ideas and self-understandings take root.

When you’ve been made to feel wrong, when you can’t accommodate yourself to the expectations society has written all over your female body, when mainstream feminism has thrown away the language and analysis girls like you need to make sense of your lives and lodge a protest, then you’ve been looking for an explanation—and a way out. Gender identity provides both.

Here’s what’s wrong with you.

We can fix you.

Is it any wonder gender identity speaks to girls?

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A version of this was originally posted on Eliza Mondegreen’s Writing Behavior.