Women and girls are individual female human beings, not anyone’s performance of femininity.
“Femininity” does not define women or girls. The social expectations, projections, aesthetics, and behavioral codes imposed on female people do not define women or girls. These expectations are subjective, culturally unstable, heavily commercialized, and always shaped by sexism.
A human performance is not a human being. Defining any individual or class of human beings as a performance interpreted by others is profoundly dehumanizing. The conceit that any man, or any class of men, possesses such special insight into the inner reality of female human beings that his imitation or performance can reveal the essence of women is not merely absurd; it is offensive.
To define women by “feminine expression” or role is to reduce female human beings to costume, mannerism, or stereotype, while reinforcing narrow ideas about what is definitively “feminine” and expected of women and girls. That is dehumanizing. It treats women as products of perception rather than as actual people. Women are not characters performed by others. They are not social scripts. They are not roles available for adoption.
Women are not constructed by society. Sexist societies construct stereotypes about women. The more sexist the society, the more aggressively women are reduced to those stereotypes, as if they are innate to her essential humanity, and deservedly punished for noncompliance.
Widespread stereotypes do not become morally meaningful, academically definitive, or universally true just because they are common. Sexism is common. A woman in a patriarchal society is not a different kind of human being from a woman in a freer society. The difference is not her nature, but the degree of oppression imposed: the discrimination, humiliation, coercion, and loss of opportunity inflicted on human beings for being female.
Being female is a human condition. A woman’s humanity is not conditional on her acceptable performance of femininity. The real moral test of a society is whether women and girls are recognized as fully human and equal in dignity to men and boys, while also recognizing their distinct sex as an innate and immutable human condition.
Human beings come before human beliefs about human beings.
Female comes before feminine.
Sex comes before gender.
Women and girls come before society.
There is no femininity, gender, or society that precedes the existence of human females. It is all derivative. Sex is essentially human. Being female is one way of being human.
The human being comes first. Social narratives come later. Male and female are human conditions, not identities conferred by stereotypical associations and fallible perception. “Femininity,” “womanhood,” “girlhood,” and similar abstractions are interpretations, prescriptions, and expectations imposed on people; they are not the people themselves. They are projections about what women and girls are expected to do in male-dominated societies, not descriptions of what women and girls are: human beings equal to men and boys, distinguished by sex.
Women are not a set of instructions predicated on pre-approved socially constructed traits. We are not a sex object, appearance, affect, clothing style, marketing category, LARPing option, or human performance. We are human beings of the female sex. As individuals, we are as varied in personality, interests, conduct, and capacity as men and boys.
A woman is an adult female human being. A girl is a juvenile female human being.
Everything else is stereotype, ideology, marketing, or submission to sexist framing.