Unbound: The Magic of Letting Girls Be Themselves
A guest post
A quick note and then a beautiful guest post!
My book Sexism & Sensibility comes out next week! It is a litany of the shitty messages and behaviors girls absorb and endure, and how these experiences affect their sense of self and potential. It's backed by research and illustrated through stories of the girls I see in my private practice. AND what we can do about it! I am BOWLED OVER by the early reviews and can use all the help I can get reaching those who also wants to change the world for girls! I’ve been apologizing—worried I’m "asking too much" (yes, even women who write books about sexism are still stuck with some of that shitty conditioning). But now that my pub date is so close (one week!), the passion I felt while writing it is fired up again, so SHAME BE DAMNED! I’d love if you’d do one or all of these things:
Join the launch team (which really just gives you things you can post on social media plus perks, including a digital copy of the book)!
Post or share my posts about it (follow me on Instagram and TikTok)!
Write an article about it or interview me!
Implore everyone you know to buy it because it will heal them and liberate their daughters, and also b/c the cover is gorgeous!
And don’t forget if you order S&S in the next two weeks, you also get a FREE one year paid subscription to this newsletter (and other goodies). THANK YOU to everyone who already has ❤️❤️❤️.
Xox Jo-Ann
Today’s post is penned by the eloquent writer
. Tara reached out to me after reading “What If Our Most Fundamental Way of Perceiving Others Is an Illusion?” It brought to mind a scene she’d witnessed in a park: a group of tweens or young teens who seemed to embody the meaning of friendship: easily accepting differences, engaging emotionally, and giving each other a leg up, sometimes literally. She writes in the essay below, “I scribbled swiftly in my notebook. I wanted to record every word in hopes of catching the more ineffable thing, their glorious spark: part camaraderie, part courage, part animal joy.” And she does, gorgeously capturing the essence of girlhood before competition and envy, borne of a patriarchal culture that pits women against each other, has taken hold. Yet, her essay left me with hope that this emerging generation will neither succumb to divisiveness nor be confined by the gendered constraints imposed on girls and women. And the parent in this story, who lingers in the background yet casually and savvily models acceptance, surely deserves some of that credit. Please enjoy this treat!Several weeks ago, an article here at The Feminist Parent described my world. “Kids are tired of the gendered cage,” wrote
, “and we can help.”As a parent of teens, adult friend to teens, and professor to twenty-somethings, I see young people tiring of many cages, gender and sexual identities ranking high on the list. For most of the young people I meet, respecting someone else’s gender presentation is just another way to respect each person’s self-determination.
In my western U.S. state of Idaho, many adults are uncomfortable with more than two genders, male and female, and one sexual orientation: heterosexual. I find myself wishing they knew, as Jo-Ann wrote, how “Even though heterosexuality and a binary gender identity are what we’ve decided is ‘normal’ in the larger population, most kids given the space to explore will fall somewhere along these continuums and not at either end.” I wish no adult found this threatening.
I wish the uncomfortable adults could hear what I heard last March, on the first summerlike day of spring, from five girls in the park whose mutual acceptance allowed them all to be truthful and free.
*
“I like girls,” blurted the teen with long dark-brown hair to the mother who had come to tell them it was time to go.
Had there been any doubt of the girl’s meaning, her fierce blush would have made it clear.
Right away, she recanted, “Not really. They told me to say that. I don’t really like girls.”
“I like girls,” said another girl in the group with blonde wavy hair and an easygoing stride in her wide-leg jeans.
“We know,” answered a tall girl with a midriff top and a pleated miniskirt. “You date them for a day.”
The wide-leg girl shrugged – “Yeah, I do” – and everyone laughed.
They were all walking toward the parking lot. The tall girl bumped arms with the mother and reached freely into her shoulder bag for car keys. “My oldest friend liked girls,” said the mother. “Her partner is a woman. People like who they like.” The mother and the wide-leg girl exchanged smiles.
I thought the tall daughter stood taller as she led her pack to a silver minivan glinting softly in the long evening sun. Maybe she was proud to carry the keys. Or maybe she was proud that the wide-legged girl had just pronounced, “Your mom is all right.”
*
But that wasn’t the conversation that drew my attention to the girls in the first place.
Earlier, on the playground, when the sun stood hot and high, I sought relief in the only unoccupied shade I could find, the slim shadow of a metal post. Close by, five girls, age thirteen or so, balanced on a climbing structure of rope and steel. They had flocked from one piece of play equipment to another, a faithful group. In a moment of silence, a loose-jointed blonde girl in wide-leg jeans spoke.
“I have PTSD,” announced the girl. “My dad sexually abused me.”
From across the play structure, a petite girl in a sundress and white tights pivoted on her quavering rope and answered brightly, “Mine too!”
“Yours too?” The first speaker turned her head to look more closely at the second.
“Yeah!”
They might have just discovered a favorite flavor of ice cream in common, or a shared taste for blue nail polish.
The wide-legged girl and the petite girl with white tights moved toward each other on swinging ropes. They tumbled together like drops of water, and their pooled enthusiasm outgrew the play structure.
“Let’s climb the tree!” shouted the small girl in a strong piccolo voice.
“Ok,” answered her new bestie.
They raced toward a densely branched, shaggy conifer standing in a grassy field. The other three girls extricated themselves from the ropes and took off belatedly after the leaders.
Softly, I drew a notebook and pencil from my bag. A couple with a baby got up from a bench near the conifer, and I took the opportunity to abandon my sliver of shade to move closer to the young people who had caught my sympathy.
The girl with white tights was high in the tree by the time I got settled on the shady side of my prize bench. I could not see her, but where her voice emerged, branches rustled. Judging from the foliar activity, she ascended like a sailor going up a mast.
Also high up was a girl with long brown hair, looking out from between branches. “It’s a long way down,” she noted with approval.
Girl three, in a skort and a midriff top, sat on a branch and kicked a pair of thick-soled combat-style boots to the ground.
The wide-legged girl with blonde wavy hair and PTSD waited near the bottom, coaching the last runner. “I’ve never climbed a tree,” admitted Number Five after failing several times to get a foothold. “I don’t know how to do it.” The wide-legged girl hopped down and cupped her hands. “Put your foot here,” she coaxed. When that didn’t work: “Ok, try this. Stand on my back.”
I scribbled swiftly in my notebook. I wanted to record every word in hopes of catching the more ineffable thing, their glorious spark: part camaraderie, part courage, part animal joy.
Soon they were all in the tree. The wide-legged girl was almost as high as the one with long brown hair when she spoke in the same matter-of-fact tone as her earlier pronouncement: “I’m afraid of heights.”
“You are?” the piccolo voice called from above with compassion and a rustle of branches.
“Usually.” There was no fear in her voice now, nor in the position she had chosen on a wide, high branch with plenty of handholds all around. Nor in the conversation topic she launched toward anyone at all, “Who do you think is hot?”
The sun angled through branches, blessing the tree and all it bore.
Someone spoke a name. Someone giggled, “Really??” Several voices spoke at once, and then White Tights asked from above, “Who do you think is hot?” The giggle and chatter started again.
Schoolmates or celebrities – I couldn’t make out all the names and didn’t recognize the ones I heard, some male, some female, some androgynous. In the commentary, most candidates for hotness were referred to individually as “they.”
Girl Number Five interjected from just above the ground, “I’m too young to date. I plan to focus on my studies.” This, too, the group accepted.
When they ran out of intrigue, all at once the climbers came down, checked in with a woman at a picnic table, and took off across the grass, restless and confident.
My patch of shade had retreated to the far end of the bench. It was too hot for exertion, but deliciously warm if I held very still. I stretched out and closed my eyes.
I may have dozed in beatitude.
Without any sense of time passing, I noticed the voices coming back. The mother was with them now, as I saw when I cracked an eye open. The park had emptied out, and one voice carried clearly above distant street sounds, “I like girls.”
The pack was giddy and bouncing, except for the high climber with long brown hair, whose blush was obvious even from a distance. ““Not really,” she corrected. “They told me to say that!”
The mother took it in stride. Her body language said: I trust you to figure it out. I accept you as my daughter’s friend no matter who you ‘like’. You are safe here.
*
“For girls,” wrote Jo-Ann back in June, gender fluidity offers “a respite from the sexualized, commercialized, heteroeroticized femininity that provides little appreciation for other ways to be a girl.” The girls in my park knew how the world wanted to sexualize them. Two of them knew it far too well. They supported each other as emergent sexual subjects, not objects. They could offer opinions about who was “hot,” or decline to play. They could climb trees in ballet flats or combat boots. They could date boys or girls or both or neither. They could change their own pronouns at will, and trust their friends to boost them into the branches of discovery.
Adults sometimes mistake what kids are asking for. The girls who want to be free of conventional femininity do not all want a label like “queer” or “lesbian.” Some do, yes, but others just want more options than I had as a “tomboy” in the 1970s. They want to see how it feels to try pronouns, clothes, and sexual identifications.
I recently wrote about a graphic novel called The Prince and the Dressmaker – a beautiful story of family solidarity, friendship, and personal integrity. The titular prince, age sixteen, feels most alive in beautiful dresses. Also, a romance seems to blossom between His Highness and the dressmaker he hires in secret to make his gowns. The book does not need labels to tell a story of two young people pursuing what feels true.
Like the characters in the graphic novel and my impression of the girls in the park, the gender progressives of Gen Z are
tired of men being valued more than women, heterosexual folks more than LGBTQ+ people, and those who conform to gender stereotypes more than those who don’t. … One-quarter of Gen Z kids across the world expect to change their gender identity at least once during their lifetime. Their younger brains do not fight fluidity the way ours do. (“What If Our Most Fundamental Way of Perceiving Others Is an Illusion?”)
I felt myself rooting for all five girls, each one unique in the way she saw herself in relation to girlhood, womanhood, sexuality, and gender. I saw how they shook off the cage of winter and twiggy girlhood, and even the slow-release cage of COVID isolation. I saw how they shook off the cage of prescribed femininity, like tossing a wave of sun-kissed hair.
*
Months later, I read the words, “Kids are tired of the gendered cage, and we can help.”
Yes, we can.
In the park stands a shaggy old tree – how many human generations? – judging no one. It stands there to bear the young ones while they climb toward the sun.
is a mother of marvelous teens and a literature professor. Her weekly Substack letter, Quiet Reading with Tara Penry, boosts confidence in our shared humanity with stories about authors and books and sometimes a golden interlude about anything at all. She strives to be a feminist parent!
Love it. It rings true for me. My fifth grader came home yesterday and told me her two friends (one she, one they) told her they “like like” each other. She said they were nervous to tell her. But she said she just told them she felt happy for them. Never would have gone like that when I was her age. The kids are all right!