Hell no, come on. I completely disagree with your overall sentiment here.

How in the hell is "little girls" "infantilizing" when it's referring to actual children? And it's not inextricably tied to sexualization anymore than any other term used to refer to girls and women is (and all are to some degree, because under male supremacy we are inherently sexualized in negative ways), how did you get that impression?

I'm sorry if this sounds overly aggressive or hostile, and I'm not trying to attack you personally, but this idea is awful.

Personal disclosure/disclaimer: I'm a feminine adult woman with a childlike personality in many ways, I often tell people I'm a "little girl at heart" as that's a major aspect of how I see and describe myself, and frankly it's hard not to feel almost personally attacked every time I see this crop up. It's also really important to me to define my childhood as being that of a little girl, since I'm a trans woman and society has stripped that from me. I'm very sensitive about it.

That all being said, just ideologically speaking, I'm really fucking tired of this creeping pseudo-feminist trend of wanting to get rid of or downplay almost every term that specifically designates and differentiates girls/women (especially those associated with femininity or cuteness) because it's "infantile" or "sexualized" or whatever. I'm seeing this creep into discourse more and more lately and frankly it scares me and makes me feel like my entire identity with the way I relate to my womanhood (and many other women relate to theirs) is being undermined.

I've seen it with the discussion around the term "panties" and other gendered terms for clothes, with the use of "girl" in (self-)reference to adult women, and now this.

I contend that this type of conscious androgynization is not the answer, and that it's actually really misogynist, masculinist and anti-feminine in itself. We as women shouldn't have to relinquish or modify terms for ourselves in ways that undermine our unique experience and pride in our gender just because they're misused and appropriated in gross ways by patronizing, misogynist men. That's entirely on them to stop sexualizing and overly infantilizing these terms, and symptomatic IMO of the deeper underlying misogyny at play in how we're spoken for and described.

Language is not the end all be all of challenging misogyny and oppression at large, despite what postmodernist transfeminists would have you believe. It's just not. The stronger versions of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis that this implicit, pervasive underlying idea relies on have been largely discredited by modern linguists. Changing the language that we use for ourselves will not change how we're seen and treated--as a member of several marginalized groups who experiences the "intersections" transfeminists are so fond of referring to, I've seen and personally experienced this time and time again. So that's another point. Young female children will always be patronized in disquieting ways so long as the structures of male supremacy and patriarchy remain in place, regardless of whether they're referred to as "little girls" or not.