Mainstream feminism gave away the language girls need to make sense of their lives. Gender identity picked it up.

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

There’s a reason the language of gender identity is so compelling to so many girls and young women. Gender identity names and seeks to make sense of 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 third-wave feminism or (god forbid) ‘Everyday Feminism’—anything a woman does can be empowering if she claims it is, and anyone can be a woman—you just have to ‘feel’ like one (whatever that means).

So—for example—mainstream feminism has no problem with selling sex (or the men who buy it), and nothing but good things to say about men pressuring lesbians for sex (as long as they say the magic words: ‘I’m a lesbian, too!’). Mainstream feminism has nothing of substance to say about the pressures girls and young women are under when it comes to objectification, sexualization, the expectations imported from hard-core pornography that litter our sex lives.

Mainstream feminism cheers when women’s lives are reduced to a mash-up of body parts and sexual/reproductive services and ‘reclaimed’ slurs and retrograde stereotypes.

And when older women object, mainstream feminism sneers.

Mainstream feminism glorifies the very stereotypes and forms of exploitation that actual feminism once railed against—and then mainstream feminism wants you to agree that that’s what you are, that that’s what makes you a girl or a woman—or not.

But what if you balk? What if you’re not ‘proud to be a menstruator’? What if you can’t translate degradation into empowerment like the pros at Teen Vogue? What if some part of you objects to the image of womanhood mainstream feminism exalts? Or what if you’re just ambivalent?

If you’ve got doubts and reservations, mainstream feminism will label you a Karen or a white feminist (regardless of actual skin tone), and castigate you to check your “cis” privilege, unlearn your biases, and conquer your hang-ups. Never mind that you might have a point.

And if you’re combing the past for alternative role models, you’ll find they’ve been ruthlessly problematized, denounced, or transed—or swept aside and out of print.

If mainstream feminism hadn’t sold out women and girls, gender identity wouldn’t have cornered the market—because what mainstream feminism evades, gender identity expresses.

Gender identity says: If you don’t feel comfortable with all of that, maybe you’re not a woman or a girl at all. 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. Between gender identity and mainstream feminism, we put girls in a position where going through female puberty is taken as consent, or identifying yourself as a "cisgender" girl, using she/her pronouns when you're female (which you're constantly prompted to consider and share with your peers) is taken as saying: yes, I'm OK with this. Yes, I identify with this. Yes, I consent to being demeaned and dismissed as “cis” and female at the same time. What self-respecting girl identifies with this? Wouldn’t you want out, too?

When we talk about 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 suffering is the soil in which all kinds of new ideas and self-understandings take root. If you’ve been made to feel wrong, if you can’t accommodate yourself to the expectations written all over your body, then you’ve been looking for an explanation, haven’t you?

Mainstream feminism gave away the language girls need to make sense of their lives and lodge a protest. Gender identity picked it up.