This morning, after waking up with my girl cats, I made myself a cup of girl coffee then got stuck into some girl work. I took a break to lift some girl weights, then sent some more girl emails. Finally, after my girl dinner, it was time to get some sleep ahead of another long, hard day of being a girl.

I know what you’re thinking: why is this woman so insistent on gendering her unremarkable activities, and infantilising herself when she is clearly an adult? It’s a fair question. Since the pandemic, when “hot girl walks” followed Megan Thee Stallion’s 2019 song Hot Girl Summer to become one of the first big TikTok trends, this framing has become dismayingly ubiquitous, in person and online.

Today you might be a “clean girl” (wearing natural-looking makeup) or a “cool girl” (projecting an unbothered image) or a “tomato girl” (pass). To insist that you are an adult woman, however, marks you as a killjoy. This trend infuriates me, to a humourless and even antisocial degree.

My self-restraint ran out while on holiday in Paris with my poor sister, whose unwitting proposal of a lighter evening meal sparked a minutes-long tirade from me, stemmed only by the arrival of our charcuterie board. It transpired then that I was just hangry, and I apologised for ranting. On the upside: my sister hasn’t referred to “girl dinner” around me since.

I know my response is disproportionate – that it’s only fun, a lighthearted attempt to wring levity from daily mundanity. One could argue that the “girl” trend is an effort to elevate young women, a powerful cultural force that has historically been dismissed (see: pop music). With girls often socialised into taking care of others, some women may be trying to conjure up the playfulness and freedom they felt denied as children.

You might also reasonably say: it’s just not that deep. I’d argue, however, that the “girl” trend is far from harmless. For one, it is frequently a Trojan horse for consumerism, with beauty products and fashions prescribed with each new iteration. More importantly, the trend is self-infantilising and insidious, all the more so for seeming so innocuous. In an equal world, sure, grown women could feel free to joke about being just girls, blissfully free from responsibilities such as voting; but at a time when so many are actively working to disenfranchise us, it feels a bit like cooperating.

With women’s rights “regressing worldwide”, per the UN, we can’t risk giving ammunition to those who want to take them away; we should be standing firm in our political power and taking every opportunity to express it. Today’s girls are counting on us.

Meanwhile, whenever I hear grown women talking about their hot girl walks or clean girl makeup or messy girl desks, I’m reminded of Malibu Stacy, the Barbie-parodying doll from The Simpsons, vacuously trilling “Don’t ask me – I’m just a girl!”. Lisa Simpson, an actual child, didn’t play along, and I shan’t either.

• Elle Hunt is a freelance journalist