Girlhood isn’t easy to define. At least, not when you are a queer woman. Instead, girlhood is a club that you can’t quite get into. A club that you are both a part of and actively excluded from. Together, let’s answer the question of what girlhood means and how we can redefine it for future generations of LGBTQIA+ youth.
As a queer woman myself, I didn’t want just one perspective to define girlhood. To do this article justice, I interviewed a series of other college students who identified themselves as a part of the LGBTQIA+ community. For their anonymity, I will not be including names.
My first interviewee defined girlhood as, “…a journey of self-discovery and looking out for other girls, and really finding yourself along the way. I think girlhood is also discovering that not all girls will look out for you, and it’s being touched by a man when you didn’t want to be, and it’s realizing that maybe your mom had a reason for that thing she didn’t let you go do.” When I asked her if she felt that her relationship was different to girlhood because of her queerness, she went on to say, “…it always made me feel really weird to be physically affectionate with my female friends. I’d see straight girls cuddling and holding hands and changing in front of each other, but I couldn’t bring myself to do any of that because it made me feel predatory.”
This is a common experience amongst queer women. There is a disconnect between yourself and girlhood because of this feeling that you are the odd one out. You are wrong. You are gross. You like girls, so you cannot be a part of girlhood in the way that other girls are. Or at least that is what we are socialized to believe.
Another student defined girlhood a little differently, “I feel that girlhood is generally people who identify as women helping other women with no ill intent. I think that if I was straight, I might be more into feminism and connect with that identity more.” To this person, girlhood is something that is beautiful, but they are not as connected to it because of their identity as queer. There is a clear theme showing up: that being queer in a way disconnects someone from their tie to girlhood.
Only one student that I interviewed felt truly connected to girlhood, but she didn’t ignore the complexities that it held. “Girlhood, to me, is a community of young girls who are brought together through friendships. It was because of girlhood that I felt comfortable with finally coming out. My experience was unique. For me, it was the support I had from other girls that allowed me to flourish. For many others, girlhood isolated them by actively excluding them.”
There are many ways to define girlhood. The question is, how do we want to define it? I do not have the answer. None of the students that I interviewed had the answer, but one thing was clear. We need to make room for queer youth in spaces of “girlhood”. We need to teach children to love each other, and to love themselves. We need to make girlhood a safe place for everyone.