Show caption ‘What kind of message is this sending to girls: that if they don’t like dolls, or pink, they are literally in the wrong body?’ Photograph: Alamy Opinion An aversion to dolls and dresses is no proof you’re a man Hadley Freeman Pink v blue gender definitions are hardening, and it’s doing everyone a disservice @HadleyFreeman Thu 5 Jul 2018 06.00 BST Share on Facebook

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As an adolescent, I was terrified of becoming a woman. In part this was because I believed the gender stereotypes. Being a woman, I thought, meant wearing makeup and high heels; men expecting things from me that I in no way wanted to give them. Being a woman seemed limiting and terrifying, and definitely not me. So as soon as I started to go through puberty, I starved myself until I looked safely asexual and boyish again. That was my solution, in 1992, to avoiding being a woman.

I thought about that period of my life this week when I read an interview in the Daily Mirror with a transgender teenager who was born female. At the age of six, he told his mother he wanted to climb trees with boys. “Don’t do that, it’s not what girls do,” his mother replied. According to the report, the six-year-old replied, “Well, I’ll have a sex-change then.”

“I never fitted in with the girls at school. I didn’t like makeup, or dresses, and I never wanted to shave my legs or armpits, like everyone else. I really wanted to do all the things boys did, and wear masculine clothes. I think even that young, deep down, I knew I wanted to be a man,” he told the Mirror.

Whether somebody really decided to change sex because of climbing trees and makeup or, as is far more likely, this was oversimplified reporting on the Mirror’s part, nowhere in the article is there any suggestion that an aversion to feminine clothing doesn’t prove you’re a man. This interview was strikingly reminiscent of an interview on BBC Radio 4’s iPM programme, aired in 2016, in which a mother said she realised her three-year-old daughter wasn’t really a girl because she played with Wolverine toys instead of baby dolls. The interviewer did not challenge her. CBBC screened a documentary in the same year, I Am Leo, about a trans boy, in which transgenderism was explained with the help of pink brains for girls and blue brains for boys.

What kind of message is this sending to girls: that if they don’t like dolls, or pink, they are literally in the wrong body? It’s hard to see how it helps anyone – least of all transgender people – for the media to reduce transgenderism to feelings about makeup, and the female experience to femininity.

I once thought that definitions of gender would keep expanding until the idea of gender itself was rendered irrelevant; but, to my astonishment, they have shrunk and hardened, and this has had an effect on how men and women see each other and themselves. In Nanette, her excellent new standup show on Netflix, the comedian Hannah Gadsby talks about her weariness with being told by members of the public that she must be a trans man in denial, because she is a lesbian who wears trousers. Because that’s where some of the current gender debates have led us: to women being told that they’re not really women if they don’t enjoy wearing pretty dresses.

Far from gender being “on a spectrum”, as the current lingo has it, too many well-meaning articles about it are more binary than ever: girls are like this, boys are like that. This is what feminists like me object to because gender is restrictive and femininity in particular was conceived to be limiting. News that 40 British schools have banned skirts in favour of trousers, in a hamfisted attempt at gender neutrality, is merely a different side to the same coin, because the message being sent to children is, “Skirts are too dangerously feminine to be worn by boys.”

For me, not eating was at least in part an expression of anxiety about femininity and sexuality, represented by my changing body. This is extremely common among teenage girls, who then find ways to punish the bodies that are taking them into womanhood, whether they like it or not, and it is getting even more so.

On top of the much-reported rise in eating disorders, a report from the US this week found that as many as 30% of American teenage girls self-harm – twice as many as boys. In Britain, at the Gender Identity Clinic in London, the UK’s main child gender service, 70% of all referred cases are teenage girls. One can support people with gender dysphoria getting the treatment they need while at the same time suggesting that the wildly disproportionate numbers of teen girls at gender clinics points to other problems here.

There is no single cure for unhappy girls, but as adults it is up to us to teach our children that one does not need to change one’s body to reject socially imposed gender stereotypes. Girls can swing from the trees like monkeys and plait their own leg hair; they can play with tea sets and measure their life in lipsticks; or they can do all of the above simultaneously, if they so please, and none of this has anything to do with their bodies, biology or brain colour. Biological sex goes deeper than leg hair.

• Hadley Freeman is a Guardian columnist