Reading Rebecca Solnit/Meditations in an Emergency this morning over breakfast, I was struck by the one phrase she used, girl-children.
Reading it had me feeling a couple ways.
I have thought about how I was, of course, a girl-child, but was denied all that went with it, a particular abuse reserved for the trans girl-child.
But I am also struck with the thought: perhaps in some ways am I lucky to have escaped some the hardships that accrue to girl-children? I was never of the belief that I was bad at math or science. I was sexualized by our culture (owing to being trans), but I could hide that better than growing breasts or even just femininity. Of course hiding that came at great personal cost. I think in the end such a course of thought will be unsatisfying, since I can never quantify which pain is greater or if these pains are even different? Are they not both downstream of the patriarchy, determinism, and binaryism? Do the exact terms of sexualization matter to the victim? Does it change the harm?
I must believe that we are more the same than different, and some of the cultural damage certainly accrues, you internalize the messages that girls do all the same no matter how they treat you or the words used for you in particular.
I guess my feelings can only be chalked up to a certain sadness. Specifying the exact target and causes of this abuse brings it into sharp relief in my mind. Less for myself and more for the girl-children in this world, past and present (that sounds like yourself…), and how they are decidedly not protected. And how I expect they carry those scars on.