I want to tell you the exact moment I understood that my body didn’t belong to me.
It was a Friday night game, sophomore year. We’d just finished a halftime routine — one I’d helped choreograph, one that included a standing back tuck I’d spent three months learning. I hit it clean. My flyer group nailed the basket toss. The crowd was on their feet. I was proud in a way that felt electric, the kind of proud you earn with your body.
Walking to the concession stand afterward, still in uniform, a group of guys from the visiting school lined up against the fence. One of them said something. I won’t repeat it here, but it had nothing to do with cheerleading and everything to do with what my uniform supposedly told them about what I was available for. His friends laughed. One of them held up his phone.
I was sixteen. I’d just done a standing back tuck in front of two thousand people. And in the span of thirty seconds, I went from athlete to object. Not because of anything I did. Because of what I was wearing.
People love to have opinions about cheerleading. They either dismiss it (“it’s not a real sport”) or sexualize it (“well, what do you expect in that outfit?”). Both positions accomplish the same thing: they erase the athleticism and replace it with a narrative that’s more comfortable for the person talking. If cheerleading isn’t a sport, then the girls doing it aren’t athletes, and if they’re not athletes, then the uniform isn’t athletic wear — it’s a costume. And costumes are for other people’s consumption.
Let me tell you what this uniform actually is. It’s a functional garment designed for mobility. I need to tumble in it, fly in it, catch people in it. I need range of motion in my shoulders, my hips, my legs. Every part of it exists for a reason, and none of those reasons involve the commentary of strangers.
But here’s what I’ve learned at sixteen that I wish I didn’t know: it doesn’t matter what my uniform is for. It matters what people decide it means. And what people have decided is that a girl in a short skirt on a sideline is performing for them. Not for herself. Not for her team. For them.
My coach tells us to ignore it. My mom tells me to be careful. My dad wanted to go to the administration. None of these responses are wrong, exactly, but none of them fix the actual problem, which is that I live in a world where a sixteen-year-old girl cannot wear the required uniform for her sport without strangers treating it as consent.
I tried wearing sweatpants over my uniform between routines for a few games. Do you know what happened? My teammates asked if I was okay. The other parents asked if I was cold. A boy from my school said I looked “like a nun.” Covering up drew as much commentary as not covering up. The lesson was clear: there is no version of a female body in public that goes unremarked upon. The only choice is which kind of remark you prefer.
I don’t prefer any of them. I prefer silence. I prefer being watched for what I can do instead of what I look like doing it.
Next week we compete at regionals. I’m working on a new tumbling pass — a round-off back handspring back tuck sequence that I can’t quite land consistently yet. When I hit it, the feeling is indescribable. My body in the air, rotating, trusting the physics and the thousands of reps. For those two seconds, my body is entirely mine. No one is watching it. I’m inside it.
I am not performing for your commentary. I am an athlete in a uniform that I earned. And the fact that I have to explain this — at sixteen, in 2026, in an essay, to strangers — tells you everything about what we still haven’t fixed.