Taking Girl for Granted

Growing up, painting my nails made me nauseous. Shiny liquid spilling into my cuticles made me feel uncomfortable, ugly, even ashamed. It was a childish, melodramatic reaction to say the least, but my currently-colourless fingernails show the remnants of this discomfort. I can hear what you’re thinking: “it was internalised misogyny!” But I don’t think that’s quite right. 

After all, I never worried about other girls’ coloured fingernails. My bedroom walls were pink, and sticky plastic butterflies decorated their borders. I had Barbies and Polly Pockets and made them get married. I begged for sparkly dresses that made me feel like a princess. I worshipped happily ever afters; I craved praise; I longed to be “good” and “special”, all those things that toy stores and films package as ‘girly’. I had no issue embracing ‘girlhood’ in all its stereotypical Western forms. While all this may be true, none of those things meant that my seven-year-old self craved being ‘a girl.’

Because, what is ‘a girl’? If scholars still struggle to define it, then seven-year-old me had no chance. More importantly, I never needed to. ‘Girl’ was the given. 

I think that was my problem with nail polish: I simply didn’t like it. Painting it on felt like an unnatural act, yet it was taken for granted as a symbol of ‘girlhood’. Friends at sleepovers and women at parties would ask if I wanted my nails painted, raising an eyebrow when I didn’t say yes, and certainly not expecting me to run to the bathroom and sob for reasons I could not understand at the time. I remember exactly how the idea of painting my fingernails made me feel: like I was pretending. Images of Disney Channel girls flashed through my mind and my pasty fingers suddenly felt like a monstrously ‘unfeminine’ fit.

Painting my nails felt like locking the door to a cage that I hadn’t even noticed I was in, semi-permanently imprinting an identity that I couldn’t just take off like I could a toy-tiara. It wasn't until a decade later that I had the vocabulary of Judith Butler’s theories of gender-as-performance to help me understand why it distressed me so much. 

But why were sparkly fingertips such a threat to my childhood self-perception? Without knowing it, I was beginning to negotiate the tensions between social markers of identity and my place in the world. It’s worth noting now, if my phrasing hasn’t already made this obvious, that I am a white, cisgender ‘woman’. Maybe it had been the first time that a visual part of identity misaligned with my inner self-expression. Which is, of course, a tiny taste of a much deeper experience that many people of colour, transgender and non-binary people have been forced to grapple with for centuries. A more appropriate essay title may be: “white girl discovers mild gender dysphoria and freaks out.”

But, for those who have taken ‘girl’ for granted, it is worth putting girlhood under the microscope. Luckily for us, Emma Heaney provides a fascinating analysis of gender that argues "we're used to thinking of cisness as an identity: ‘one is cisgender if one is not transgender’ [or nonconforming [...]] But I'm arguing that cisness is more accurately understood as the ideology that sorts us into these two categories.” What Heaney means is that society has been programmed to see ‘cisgender’ as the default, therefore everyone’s personal attributes are assumed to be linked to their biological structure. That is, unless they deviate enough from those gendered characteristics to be deemed ‘transgender’. Most importantly, Heaney highlights that gender under this lens is not natural, but socially produced, and everyone therefore deviates from the male/female binary in some way. Heaney’s language allows space for nuanced discussion of gender discomfort within cisgender experiences, melting the barbed wire of my cisgender girlhood into liquid metal brimming with potential.

I am cisgender, in the way that Heaney describes it. The socially constructed nature of gender categories may explain my disconnection from the term ‘girl’, but I’m still aware that in my daily life I don’t stray too far from the constructed gender category assigned to me; I can slip into the normative model of cisgender womanhood without too much resistance. I can take gender for granted, as my life goes unscathed whether I paint my fingernails or not. I was mistakenly taught that I liked pink because I was a girl and that my cousin liked trucks because he was a boy, and that those who questioned those assumptions were “confused”. I am really a ‘girl’ because I was raised to believe in ‘girlhood’. I am now faced with the task of untangling the knots those messages left behind.

I take for granted being able to wake up each day and play with the person that steps out the door. It’s a luxury few have. The idea that I saw nail polish as a mark on my otherwise non-permanent body reveals how naive I have been to the passivity of my own white girlhood. The fact that I saw painted fingernails as an obstacle to my identity is a testament to how embedded in cisgendered ideology I’ve been, and how many gendered ideas of identity I still need to shed.

The visual identities that I can afford to play with are the same that oppress trans and nonbinary people, and which are used to strategically de-feminise and dehumanise women of colour. My experience therefore does not claim to be universal and certainly not original, but instead intends to acknowledge the absurdity of this ‘feminine’ reality. Really, then, I ought to shut up about fingernails. I’m writing to challenge the girl who takes girlhood for granted, who thinks that feminism still concerns whether or not she “chooses” to paint her nails or put on makeup. For the girls who still think that ‘girlhood’ is natural, and not an imposed, albeit oftentimes beautiful, construction. I am trying, in my tiny way, to poke holes in my own ingrained cisgendered version of reality. 

But I guess what I take from all this rambling is a sense of how confused I now find myself to be called a woman. How queer it is to see gender reveal parties and finally realise that — in a world where gendered violence results in over 70% of U.K. women having experienced sexual harassment in public* — raising a child as cisgendered is not an unpolitical or ‘neutral’ decision at all. I’m late to this party, but now that I’m here I can’t look at another blue-or-pink cake reveal the same way again.

I’m humbly part of a history of womxn who have negotiated their womxnhood. But, for better or for worse, I am also a person who likes pink and was actively raised as a girl. Writing for Women’s History Month cannot exist without the acknowledgment that this celebration has always included me; my status as ‘woman’ has always been assumed and taken for granted, in both privileging and stifling ways. If we’re talking about women’s history, we cannot do so without recognising those whose womanhood had to be fought for.

For now, I’ll put down my pen and probably still won’t wear coloured nail polish. Yet, this time it will be because I can’t be bothered maintaining it when it chips, and not because it threatens a flimsy, performative sense of identity. Happy Women’s History Month to all those who take ‘girl’ for granted, and to those who put it under a magnifying glass.

*Statistics from UN Women UK and Open Access Government.
**Emma Heaney is an author, theorist and professor at William Paterson University. The ideas paraphrased in this article can be found in an interview with Heaney here.