New film about growing up female arrives just in the nick of time

I just saw the trailer for a movie that made me actually tear up.

The preview of “Are You There God? It’s Me Margaret” propelled me backward in time, over 50 years, to a moment when I was in the sixth grade and sitting in a corner, falling in love with a book of the same title that changed my life.

I think it might have changed the lives of millions of 11-year-olds over the years, which means that Judy Blume, the author, had at least as much impact on the world as J.K. Rowling.

It's the story of a young girl on the cusp of what we used to call “womanhood” back in the dark ages, a euphemism for menstruation.

I remember being told that I would soon enter “womanhood” when the pediatrician started talking about the changes that would be taking place in my body in the next couple of months.

This was when I was 11. It actually took three years before that particular “change” happened, and I thought I was abnormal.

That’s the whole point of the book, a loving exploration of the mind of a young girl who thinks she’s different and maybe broken, because she is the last one of her friends to get her period.

That book was a balm for so many of us in the 1970s who were trying to deal with all of the changes that were happening for women in the world. The radical and swiftly shifting templates for what constituted a “good” life for women left a lot of adolescents and teenagers reeling.

Like the “teenage” filter that many middle-aged people have discovered and are now using on the Tik-Tok app, seeing the film's trailer made me a bit melancholy, too. The trans movement has begun to erase young girls and their biological identities, making the book – and these emotions – irrelevant.

I see a kinship of sorts between Judy Blume, the book's author, and Rowling, the creator of the Harry Potter franchise. Rowling became a flashpoint for so many trans activists who accused her of not respecting their lives and their identities.

The only thing Rowling has ever done, and that was done with great respect and dignity, was to defend the integrity of biological women. She has been at the forefront of telling the emperor that he has no clothes, and that if he thinks he does, at the very least it is not a dress.

Rowling has been terrorized because she is trying to preserve exactly that thing that makes Margaret such a memorable figure: the beauty of the blossoming of a young woman.

This is something that happens biologically and psychologically, but in the trans world they have completely erased the biological component and allowed us to accept that if you “think” you are a woman, you are one.

That is a huge disservice to girls, who have to deal with the onset of menstruation, with the natural shift in hormones, with all of the biological mandates that cannot be changed by simply wishing them away and attacking fabricated pronouns.

We are told to have compassion to those with gender dysphoria, as if speaking the truth is cruel. Compassion comes in many forms, and recognizing there is a component of mental illness in the race to erase is an important step in helping those who are suffering from the dysphoria condition.

But there are other people who deserve compassion.

All of the Margarets out there in the world, the young girls who are nervous and questioning yet fully cognizant of the power and obligations of their biological birthright deserve our concern.

There is great beauty in the natural process of becoming a woman, someone who has been vouchsafed the duty of bringing new life into the world.

And the trans movement, at least in its most radical form, is destroying it.

I’m thrilled that a book that helped me deal with the evolution all biological women go through is being made into a film at this particular moment.

It is a way, I hope, to underline that there is a lot more to being a female than dressing up as Audrey Hepburn and getting a few sponsorship gigs with Bud Light and, most nauseatingly, Tampax.

The fact that a biological man is now hawking sanitary products is a sign that far from cherishing young girls, we have started to mock them.

Margaret would be horrified. So, I think, is God.

Christine Flowers is an attorney and a columnist for the Delaware County Daily Times, and can be reached at cflowers1961@gmail.com.