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TOMBOY
IN GRADE FOUR, OUR CLASS WAS IN A PORTABLE about 100 metres beyond the schoolâs back door. A small wooden porch flanked by two railings and a set of stairs led up to the portable; it also provided a multi-level platform useful for playing WWF WrestleMania. One other girl sometimes played with us, but mostly it was just me and a whole bunch of boys. The goal was to hurl ourselves at each other hard enough to pinâto push and jostle and launch off the porch onto an unsuspecting crowd of wrestlers. The boys werenât my friends, but they let me play with them. (Sports is all about numbers.) I had long hair, but it was unkempt, and this was the era of nineties JaromĂr JĂĄgrâhis glorious, curly mullet unfurling from his hockey helmet in much the same way my dark waves bunched at my shoulders.
That year, I turned nine and was finally allowed to play hockey. The first time I knocked over a fellow girlânot on my teamâI stopped skating and helped her back to her feet as my father hollered from the stands. Afterwards, he and my coaches told me to âuse my size,â the way it was beneficial on the porch behind the portable.
That year, in school, we played a math game called Around the World, based on the times tables, in which the goal was to circle the classroom, defeating your classmates one by one. That year, drunk on wrestling and hockey and mathâa subject I understood to be best suited to real (read: male) nerdsâI requested that my classmates call me Andy. They did not comply.
I grew up in a time and placeâborn in 1984, raised in a small town called Dundas, Ontarioâwhen gender roles were binary. I grew up in a place where my favourite tomboy classmate later ridiculed my unshaven legs. I grew up in a place where, when I was walking to work or the library, people yelled gendered, homophobic slurs out of their cars. I grew up with a mother I thoroughly confused and disappointed, just by virtue of being myself. Itâs hard to say what kind of a person Iâd be today if these conditions had been different. Given these conditions, though, I took refuge in the word âtomboy.â
THE WORD âTOMBOYâ FIRST EMERGED in the mid-sixteenth century to describe rude, forward boys. A couple decades later, it began to apply to womenâmore specifically, bold and immodest, impudent and unchaste women. Soon after that, the term found the home weâre familiar with, referring to girls who behaved like âspirited or boisterousâ boys. (Men got to keep âtomcatââcreepy if youâve ever googled âcat sexâ after hearing alleyway yowling in the middle of the night.)
By the time I hit elementary school, tomboyâs denotation had remained unchanged, but its connotation had shifted: acting like a spirited and boisterous boy wasnât such a bad thing. Second-wave feminism had crested, power suits had come and gone, and we all understood that embodying certain aspects of masculinity provided a shortcutâalbeit tenuousâto power in adulthood, and freedom in childhood. As Jack Halberstam writes in his 1998 book Female Masculinity, tomboyism tended, at that time, to be âassociated with a ânaturalâ desire for the greater freedom and mobility enjoyed by boys.â Of course, there were boundaries: eschewing girlsâ clothing altogether, say, or asking your classmates to opt for a more masculine version of your name.
âTomboy,â as an adult term, is most often applied to straight women who are somewhat masculine or boyish, or maybe âandrogynousââa word most often applied by the mainstream to masculine women with model-like proportions, proportions that are clothing-flexible because they are narrow and boxy. The first sentence of Lizzie Garrett Mettlerâs introduction to Tomboy Style: Beyond the Boundaries of Fashion, goes like so: âWhen I arrived on campus for my first day at Brooks School in North Andover, Massachusetts, I was thirteen and as plumb a tomboy as any.â A couple of paragraphs later, when Mettler describes breaking her collarbone playing field hockey, she writes that her new Brooks best friend, Kingsley Woolworth, âdecorated [her] sling with Lilly Pulitzer fabric sourced from a pair of my motherâs cigarette pants.â Mettlerâs tomboyhood fashion icons, featured in the full-colour book, are universally thin, generally white, and cover the usual gamut from Coco Chanel to Patti Smith, Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy, and Diane Keaton, with more contemporary additions like Tilda Swinton and Janelle MonĂĄe.
My favourite photo is probably the one of Eartha Kitt, in mid-swing, playing baseball. Most of the other photos and iconsânot to take anything away from these great womenâdonât include people like me. I donât and canât see myself in these wealthy celebrities: their small breasts, their bony shoulders, the ease with which a pair of trousers glides over their hips and thighs. Taken together with Mettlerâs narrative, these images frame âtomboyâ as a way of being a woman that fits quite neatly into what we expect of âwomanâ: a conventional BMI, tousled hair, a camera-friendly approach. Bodies with hips cocked, odalisqueâd across the hood of a fifties car. Style from brands and stories that are very parochially New York, or what youâd call continental, European. Style that reaches out to rich women who want to marry rich men, style that lets them know everything will be okay: here is a way forward that will still appeal to the men and women in your social niche.
SEVERAL YEARS AGO, I WAS EATING LUNCH AT A CAFĂ in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. Behind me, a mom and daughter spoke Polish while they waited for their order. They were a matched set: both blonde and blue-eyed, similar facial structure, similar feminine clothing styles, similar body types.
When I was very young and could be forced into puffy-sleeved dresses, could be convinced or strong-armed into wearing curls and tights, my mother foresaw a future where we would be a set. My hair wasnât blonde like hers, my eyes werenât blue, my ears stuck out farther from my head than they were supposed to, but none of these things was immutable.
At eight or nine I began to grow. My body shot up and broadened. My legs lengthened, my belly got round, I became chubby, grew breasts. Next to my peers, who still looked like children, I felt monstrous. My mom urged the hairdresser to âsoftenâ my face with feathered bangs. We fought about clothes. I wanted to dress like the boy from two doors down who wore low-riding shorts and untucked T-shirts; wearing my pants like that, my mom said, would draw attention to my stomach. We bought clothing in aspirational sizes. We put me on a diet. I starved and binged. I forgot to close my legs when I was made to wear a skirt. Instead of being part of a set with my mom, I resented her as much as I resented my inability to give her what she wanted from me.
The word âtomboyâ provided me with my first out. Being a tomboy offered me a way to pursue masculinity from what felt like a failed female body. I gave up mimicking girlhood, accepted a ruptured relationship with my mother, and slowly began to build a relationship with my body and my selfhood that wasnât based in self-negation. The world I grew up inâthe world we live in nowâstill places an inordinate amount of pressure on female bodies to be consumable; opting out of femininity, even privately, freed me to see myself as a whole person, and it also freed me to interrogate the legitimacy of the boundaries I was breaching with my monstrosity. Tomboyhood offered me a kind of self-acceptance I never got to experience as a girl.
But conventional gender-code breakingâallowed, within boundaries, for girlsâends, too often, with adulthood. As Halberstam writes, âIf adolescence for boys represents a rite of passage ⌠for girls, adolescence is a lesson in restraint, punishment, and repression.â In popular culture (Pippi Longstocking, for example), tomboyism is often folded into narratives about resisting adulthood; thereâs a tacit understanding that with time, a tomboy will grow out of her (his, their) affinity for masculine presentation, masculine-coded pastimes, masculine-coded work. And so âtomboyâ gets roped in, like everything else, to safety and conventionâswanning into simple, elegant, usually white, womanhood. A conventionally attractive woman devouring a burger in a menâs magazine profile, an unadorned silk dress.
My masculinity never turned menâs mag icon. I have never been an uncomplicated body in a silky dress; instead, I began to identify with the world of female masculinity best understood and embraced by queer theory. I pursued masculine-coded work, becoming a bike mechanic. I grew up and, though I dated men, came to identify as queer.
For more than a year, I have had a BuzzFeed video bookmarked on my computer: âWhat Is Female Masculinity?â I watch it about once a month. The video starts with identifications: âI donât really identify with anything, but if anything, I guess it would be butchâ; âMOC, which is, like, masculine of centreâ; âgenderqueer butch mahooâ; two âgender-neutralâs; âLHB: long-haired butch.â Everybody has similar but diverging things to say about masculinity, female masculinity, aesthetics, and the benefits and disadvantages of being female and masculine in a world that prizes many aspects of masculinity. Near the end, one of the participants says, âA lot of times, butch women are blessed with the burden of boobs. Thatâs a very funny cross to bear on top of everything else.â
I have large breastsâboobsâand like many people who experience gender dysphoria, I do everything in my power to keep this detail from the general public (I own a binder, surreptitiously wear sports bras under collared shirts, curve my wide shoulders forward in an attempt to hide myself). Often, Iâm proud of myself and I accept my body. But sometimes, I feel alone, quite alone. I canât sum up the power of watching someone express my secret shame as a warmly funny in-joke.
I understand why people balk at labelsâwhy further subdivide the world? But I think of themâtomboy, butch, genderqueer, MOCâas functional and hopeful. If I canât describe who I am in this worldâI am who I am, whether or not I can describe itâthen I canât seek out others like me.
IN 2016, MEREDITH HALE, CREATOR OF THE MOMMY A TO Z BLOG, wrote âDonât Call My Daughter a Tomboyâ for the Huffington Post. Haleâs daughter comes home from school one day and announces that she feels she is like a boyâin fact, a tomboyâbecause she likes sports. Hale writes, in part, that she herself had once âbeen guilty of using the label âtomboyâââbut only before she âknew better.â The previous year, feminist Catherine Connors wrote a piece on Her Bad Mother (later reprinted by Medium and BUST) called âDonât Call Her a Tomboy.â Connorsâs kid, who rides dirt bikes, self-identifies as a tomboy. âI wouldnât call you a tomboy, sweetie. I think that youâre you,â Connors tells her kid. âAnd you like a lot of different things, and theyâre not just âboy thingsâ or âgirl things,â theyâre things that you like.â Similarly, Hale wants her daughter to grow up embracing her femininity and at the same time feeling free to pursue whatever sports and pastimes draw her attention.
Eventually, Connors comes to the conclusion that these ongoing conversations are not really about tomboys, after allâthey are about feminism. That girls and boys can contain multitudes. That gender stereotypes must be challenged. That parents must contest the ways in which societyâwith its pink aisles and camo printsâboxes in boys and girls.
Has our conception of gender changed so much that the in-between space that was so useful for me as a childâthat is useful for me as an adultâis no longer necessary? After mulling over these piecesâand, more broadly, the differences between mainstream feminism and queer feminismâI wish there was room to embrace both âtomboyâ and the fight to move beyond gender stereotyping. I wonder: How would I have felt if I received these messages from my mother? What if, instead, we told kids that girls and boys can do and like and be who they wantâbut if theyâre not a girl, or not a boy, thatâs okay, too?
I have done a lot of work to disentangle myself from misogynyâto embrace what exists of my own femininity, to move past the ways I rejected femininity broadly because it was foisted upon me. I canât help but feel that mainstream feminism has not done the same amount of work to understand genderqueerness, to understand trans identities. Why, otherwise, would you call to kill a term that still holds some usefulness for me, and others like me? If the world has told us for much of our lives that we are not quite women, and, moreover, the labels âgirlâ and âwomanâ never quite fit, is it our responsibility to forcibly expand girlhood and womanhood until it grudgingly accepts us? Can I not just be woman-adjacent in peace?
Identity exists at the crux point of internal and external pressuresâwho we feel we are, and how others see us. Far from being discrete, one feeds into the other. I have no way of knowing how Iâd feel if I hadnât spent my youth feeling shamed into, and failing at, femininity. I wouldnât be a feminine woman; maybe Iâd feel more comfortable stretching âwomanâ until it fit, but also, maybe not. As it stands, Iâm not a woman, and Iâm not a man; Iâm not a tomboy anymore, either, though kernels of tomboyhood remain useful for me. In adolescence, tomboyhood offered me a positive way to describe myself instead of repeating âIâm not, Iâm not, Iâm not.â It emphasized doing rather than being; it offered the option of finding power, and community, and freedom, in monstrosity.
david
DAVID IS THIRTY-FIVE, QUEER, AND MOSTLY CIS. He sometimes feels a little non-gender-y, but not in a very defined way. Usually like, âWhat would aliens think about our construct of gender?â David doesnât really even care enough to pick a label. If he had to, heâd choose agender.
David was born in Ontario, but because his dad was in the army, his family moved to Germany a month or two after he was born. David lived on an English-speaking military base in Germany until he was five. Then his family moved to Saint-Hubert, just outside Montreal. They were there until David was eight. Finally, they moved to Fredericton, New Brunswick, where David lived until he was seventeen. He went to school in English in Germany, in French in Saint-Hubert, and in English in Fredericton.
All of Davidâs earliest memories are of Germany and of travelling around Europe. He doesnât really remember Saint-Hubert, but he thinks it was probably stressful, since he doesnât remember it. He didnât really speak the language.
When his family arrived in Fredericton, David didnât know that was where heâd be until he left home to go to university. The one nice thing about moving there was that his family lived with civilians in a regular neighbourhood for the first time. Living on base, only with other military people, had sometimes felt a bit like living in a cult. They moved to the suburban neighbourhood of New Maryland, about a ten-minute drive from Fredericton, and bought a nice house, on about an acre of land, right next to a forest. The edge of their property ended at the forest line, and David spent a lot of time in the woods.
David doesnât remember when he actually realized that being queer was a thing. At fourteen, he watched Jack on Dawsonâs Creek come out. That was when he realized that coming out was something heâd have to do. He came out to his friend Maggie first, at fifteen. His parents learned soon after. The closest he got to telling them was a moment when he was sitting on the living room floor watching TV with them, but he didnât do it. And then he was really angsty, so his mom read his journal. And thatâs how she found out. Davidâs mom told his dad, and his dad had a very uneventful conversation with him about it. Like, âSo your mother tells me youâre gay.â âMm-hmm.â âAnd that you didnât clean out the litter box.â
David has an older sister. They were close until puberty, but she grew up first and was out exploring, away from David, so they grew apart a little. Theyâre close again now. David wasnât very close to either of his parents as a teenager. Now, his relationship is good with his dad, and not good with his mom. David feels like his dad is more open to growing and changing and acknowledging the impact that heâs had on him. Heâs made some remarks that have felt apologetic to David, whereas his mom has never really been interested in acknowledging any effect that sheâs had on him.
David was at his sisterâs cottage once, and his stepmom asked if she could take a photo. His dad brought David and his sister in close, and David made some comment like, âI thought you taught us to never touch each other.â And his dad was like, âOh yeah, sorry about that.â He acknowledged it, and apologized for not expressing physical affection when David was a kid.
For Davidâs masterâs in social work, he had to write a paper about the intergenerational emotional patterns in his family, which required asking his parents questions. Davidâs dad was very open to sharing information, and he also apologized for going away for a large portion of Davidâs grade twelve year. That year, it was just David and his mom, and they fought all the time.
There were other out kids at Davidâs high school. At least, there were after his mom outed them. In grade eleven, he started hanging out with two gay kids in grade twelve, and he started seeing one of them. They were sort of out to their friends, but not super out. One day, David was supposed to go home, but instead, he hung out with the kids from grade twelve. Davidâs mom found out where the boy lived, went to his house, and told his parents that he was gay. David still doesnât know why, to this day. The boy immediately wanted nothing to do with David.
Davidâs high school principal didnât like him because David handed out a survey about gay attitudes and experiences for his grade twelve sociology class. He handed it out to his friends, some of whom were out in high school and some of whom came out later, but also to other, random students. Someone reported him, and he got called into the principalâs office. His sociology teacher didnât stand up for him. His principal yelled at him and said the survey was inappropriate. The principal stood up and walked around his desk so that he was standing over David, his cheeks quivering he was so angry. After, one of his classmates who was an intern at a TV studio got David on a local show to talk about high school homophobia. David badmouthed his principal on TV. It was funny. David was almost prevented from attending prom. Not because he ha...