ArcaMax

I had a frilly pink dress in second grade that I only wore a handful of times. There are some photos of me striking some sharp poses in our backyard, but after I outgrew that dress, I didn't follow up with any similarly typical frilly costumes of girlhood. As I grew, I went with comfort over style for a long time -- and some might say even to this day. My much more stylish daughter would likely say this, marveling when, on rare occasions, I float out of the house in a dress.

When I was a girl, the line was always that I fell into tomboy territory. But I knew I wasn't a boy, nor did I identify with one. However, I felt girlhood slipping into a looming womanhood and had many more examples of the suffocation that role would entail, and how it would infringe on the way I would see myself. For many girls, the script was already written for a movie we didn't want to necessarily star in, with a narrative we couldn't control.

It becomes that groove of language that even I slip into, like when I accidentally snag my daughter's hair while brushing. She grimaced, and I told her, "Beauty is pain." She rolls her eyes, and I grunt in my Marine-bootcamp voice, "And pain is weakness leaving the body." We both caught our faces in the mirror and laughed.

But it's those cheap lines that cut. Girls hear the propaganda that would fix their problems, many of which, if not most, stem from their gender. Too loud? Tone it down. Too ambitious? Don't be bossy. Too assertive? That's not ladylike. The thousand tiny paper cuts, each one barely visible on its own, but over time, it's a gash against your identity. It isn't just about biology; it's about socialization. About an invisible curriculum that teaches girls their worth is conditional, performative, and fragile.

And let's be real: there's a script for boys and men, too.

For those discovering their identities in the tribe of life, many of us become acutely aware of what's being done to them to realign them with the scripts. We rush to pathologize discomfort, labeling it as a phase, a rebellion, or even a misunderstanding of their gender. But what if it's neither rebellion nor confusion? What if it's the most lucid response possible to a system that tells them, early and often, that being a girl is a burden, a liability, a shrinking act? That being a boy is swallowing tears?

From princess movies to school dress codes, girls get the message: Your body is not really yours. Your opinions are not really welcome. Your worth is external, bestowed by others. No wonder some girls internalize the desire to disappear, to un-become themselves. It's not about rejecting their girlhood but rejecting the terms and conditions they've been offered for it.

What if we told girls that being a girl isn't the problem, but being trapped in someone else's script is? That their anger is holy and their discomfort is wisdom. That girlhood and boyhood could be explored in their expansiveness and ferality. We can be unruly until we congeal into the people we truly are.

We could stop asking children to contort themselves into the world's predefined, sometimes impossible shapes, and start asking the world to make room for them as new members of society. We should fight to make sure they never have to inherit the same lies we did and that they challenge the messages that confine them to the script of movies that won't age well.

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Cassie McClure is a writer, millennial, and unapologetic fan of the Oxford comma. She can be contacted at cassie@mcclurepublications.com. To learn more about Cassie McClure and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

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