Maligning girlie girls is nothing new. Consider the number of children’s books, films and TV shows in which tomboys are protagonists, while feminine boys and girls are problematic characters. Tomboys, from Jo in Louisa May Alcott’s “Little Women” to Jo on Norman Lear’s 1980s sitcom “The Facts of Life,” are heroines. Girlie girls, like the golden-ringleted Nellie Oleson in “Little House on the Prairie,” are often villains.

Of course, femininity is even more reviled in boys. “‘Tomboy’ was generally considered a positive label,” the authors of a study called “Sissies, Mama’s Boys, and Tomboys” wrote, “as opposed to the ‘sissy’ who was described as having negative feminine traits.” Notice the inherent link between feminine and negative.

Such is the case in life, as well as literature. As the psychology professor Ritch C. Savin-Williams noted, “Considerably more leeway is usually given to girls than to boys for expressing cross-sex behaviors and interests, which reflects in part the elevated prestige masculinity is given in our culture.”

And the trans writer Julia Serano has noted the “preference for trans men over trans women,” which “simply reflects the societal-wide inclination to view masculinity as being strong and natural, and femininity as being weak and artificial.”

While some scholars have argued that masculine women are lowest on the social totem pole, with their inherent lack of power in the world and their failure to live up to impossible standards of beauty, masculinity still carries prestige and femininity carries the whiff of subjugation, regardless of the gender it’s applied to.

In our attempt to free ourselves from the history of women's oppression, we may have internalized a sexism that makes us want to shut off whole strains of items and experiences — to steer clear of pink or ballet or lipstick — and to associate the feminine with the bad. Some of that is because we do not want our kids to pick up on the messages usually cleaved to those things, that a girl must be a decorated object, pleasing to the male gaze. The original Barbie, after all, is anorexically thin, white, blond and literally unable to stand on her own two feet . But some of it is unexamined.

So let’s examine. First, we must stop using “girlie” as an insult. Second, we must strip gendered associations from lipstick, dresses and glitter, soccer balls, sweatpants and short hair. There is no reason any of those things should be strictly for boys or girls, or the genders in between.