Like a Boy but Not a Boy. Andrea Bennett
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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 breaking—allowed, within boundaries, for girls—ends, too often, with adulthood. As Halberstam writes, “If adolescence for boys represents a rite of passage … for girls, adolescence is a lesson in restraint, punishment, and repression.” In popular culture (Pippi Longstocking, for example), tomboyism is often folded into narratives about resisting adulthood; there’s 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 “tomboy” gets roped in, like everything else, to safety and convention—swanning into simple, elegant, usually white, womanhood. A conventionally attractive woman devouring a burger in a men’s magazine profile, an unadorned silk dress.
My masculinity never turned men’s 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: “What Is Female Masculinity?” I watch it about once a month. The video starts with identifications: “I don’t really identify with anything, but if anything, I guess it would be butch”; “MOC, which is, like, masculine of centre”; “genderqueer butch mahoo”; two “gender-neutral”s; “LHB: long-haired butch.” 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, “A lot of times, butch women are blessed with the burden of boobs. That’s a very funny cross to bear on top of everything else.”
I have large breasts—boobs—and 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, I’m proud of myself and I accept my body. But sometimes, I feel alone, quite alone. I can’t sum up the power of watching someone express my secret shame as a warmly funny in-joke.
I understand why people balk at labels—why further subdivide the world? But I think of them—tomboy, butch, genderqueer, MOC—as functional and hopeful. If I can’t describe who I am in this world—I am who I am, whether or not I can describe it—then I can’t seek out others like me.
IN 2016, MEREDITH HALE, CREATOR OF THE MOMMY A TO Z BLOG, wrote “Don’t Call My Daughter a Tomboy” for the Huffington Post. Hale’s daughter comes home from school one day and announces that she feels she is like a boy—in fact, a tomboy—because she likes sports. Hale writes, in part, that she herself had once “been guilty of using the label ‘tomboy’”—but only before she “knew better.” The previous year, feminist Catherine Connors wrote a piece on Her Bad Mother (later reprinted by Medium and BUST) called “Don’t Call Her a Tomboy.” Connors’s kid, who rides dirt bikes, self-identifies as a tomboy. “I wouldn’t call you a tomboy, sweetie. I think that you’re you,” Connors tells her kid. “And you like a lot of different things, and they’re not just ‘boy things’ or ‘girl things,’ they’re things that you like.” 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 all—they are about feminism. That girls and boys can contain multitudes. That gender stereotypes must be challenged. That parents must contest the ways in which society—with its pink aisles and camo prints—boxes 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 child—that is useful for me as an adult—is no longer necessary? After mulling over these pieces—and, more broadly, the differences between mainstream feminism and queer feminism—I wish there was room to embrace both “tomboy” 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 want—but if they’re not a girl, or not a boy, that’s okay, too?
I have done a lot of work to disentangle myself from misogyny—to embrace what exists of my own femininity, to move past the ways I rejected femininity broadly because it was foisted upon me. I can’t 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 “girl” and “woman” 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 pressures—who 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 I’d feel if I hadn’t spent my youth feeling shamed into, and failing at, femininity. I wouldn’t be a feminine woman; maybe I’d feel more comfortable stretching “woman” until it fit, but also, maybe not. As it stands, I’m not a woman, and I’m not a man; I’m 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 “I’m not, I’m not, I’m not.” 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, “What would aliens think about our construct of gender?” David doesn’t really even care enough to pick a label. If he had to, he’d 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 David’s earliest memories are of Germany and of travelling around Europe. He doesn’t really remember Saint-Hubert, but he thinks it was probably stressful, since he doesn’t remember it. He didn’t really speak the language.
When his family arrived in Fredericton, David didn’t know that was where he’d 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 doesn’t remember when he actually realized that being queer was a thing. At fourteen, he watched Jack on Dawson’s Creek come out. That was when he realized that coming out was something he’d 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 didn’t do it. And then he was really angsty, so his mom read his journal. And that’s how she found out. David’s mom told his dad, and his dad had a very uneventful conversation with him about it. Like, “So your mother tells me you’re gay.” “Mm-hmm.” “And that