Can we talk about how a female character of any age can be described as a “girl” and it’s read as normal, but if a character in their 20s, etc, is described as a “boy”—especially in a queer context, I think—a lot of people seem to read that as creepy?

It’s not difficult to see why this would be, because likening women to children is socially habituated, but there’s also a shadow of predation around things like a man talking about “his boy” in the same way a straight man might say “his girl”

Consider the difference:

“I fell in love with a beautiful girl”
“I fell in love with a beautiful boy”

Most people seem way more inclined to read the second one as suggesting an underage person, as having a pederastic context

One of the few times I’ve seen a vehement reaction against someone saying “I’m attracted to girls,” as if that must mean underage girls, was when a trans woman said this

This kind of thing shows up in how we complexly gender trans people.

Trans women are cast as being more adult, in a sinister way, than we are, as more powerful and lacking in innocence. It’s not strange to see a teenage trans girl called “a man”

While for cis men this attribution usually suggests a heroic, valued authority and maturity (“be a man, not a boy”), for trans women it suggests something infernal and threatening.

You get these narratives like “men with penises want to change with young girls” about a high school trans girl, the exact same fucking age as her peers, who doesn’t want to have to use the boy’s changing room ffs