A Short Autobiography of an Ex-Tomboy

It was a very specific day in the middle of year three that I decided I was a Tomboy.

During a class game of musical statues (public education everyone), I messed up my hair, which until that point had always been in a perfect ponytail every day without fail. I realised I liked having messy hair because it set me apart from all the “girly-girls” in the class, and I loathed to share any similarity with them. For the next four years, I would aggressively pursue the Tomboy identity, and not coincidentally, the next four years were rather unhappy ones.

In the pre-pubescent and early adolescent years, there is a trend of girls dividing into distinct groups, most notably “Tomboys” and “girly-girls”. In other words, some girls choose to reject feminine gender roles and adopt typically masculine traits instead, while others follow their assigned gender expectations. It’s important to note that most Tomboys are cis-women who feel comfortable in their female bodies whilst rejecting femininity; it is this category that I fell into and this category that I will be discussing. As I saw it, the allure of placing myself in the Tomboy section of the playground came threefold:

1.      Respect

Once people realised I was a Tomboy, my opinions were given a lot more airtime by the boys. They would let me suggest ideas when building Lego (serious business in year 4), and even make me “second-in-command” of the building team. Interestingly I was also treated differently by the parents of my classmates, who suddenly viewed me as more mature than the other girls.

2.      Status

Wearing clothes with picture of skateboards, skulls and monochrome logos made me instantly “cooler”, which was a label only associated with boys. Despite hating sports and not being able to skateboard for more than 5 seconds on a flat road, I could somewhat hold the status of an average boy, which was still much higher and more respected than that of an average girl.

3.      Fun

I had never been a fan of playing “Mums and Dads” with the girls, mostly because no one ever let me play the baby (the most popular position). Once I was accepted at least partially by the boys, it opened up the opportunity to have fun because the games I enjoyed like Wall-Ball, Cops and Robbers and various unnamed secret spy games were off limits to girly-girls.

Why is it that being a Tomboy is seemingly so beneficial?

Short answer: Because society values and respects masculinity above femininity.

Long answer: To understand why society endorses Tomboys, we need to look at the way “girly-girls” are treated. It’s quite hypocritical really – we enforce feminine standards on girls from a young age by surrounding them with pink, dolls, toy kitchens, and other items strongly associated with femininity. Yet when they become socialised to accept these standards, we look down on them for their weakness and frivolousness. It’s like Pygmalion, but instead of falling in love with our “perfect woman”, we spit on her. So not exactly like Pygmalion. At all really. Anyway, what we get is a playground full of subtle misogyny, as young boys learn to hate the girls and their silliness; an idea which continues throughout the rest of their lives so that when an employer is looking to hire, he subconsciously doesn’t take the woman with the pink blouse as seriously “because pink is for girly-girls and girly-girls are annoying and stupid”.

Enter the Tomboy. She openly rejects the traits of the hated “girly-girl”, and hence is allowed some of the privileges that come with being associated with masculinity. A Tomboy is regarded higher than girly-girls because people are impressed by a girl displaying the more revered characteristics of boys, and immediately respect her strength, intelligence and maturity more than they otherwise would. And so we receive a world where masculinity is enforced as the desirable trait; girls who adopt it are rewarded and girls who don’t are belittled. Being “one of the boys” is as much of a compliment as being “one of the girls” is a stinging insult.

All this sounds like being a Tomboy is the high-life, but from my experience at least, it’s definitely not. Nowadays I look back and wince at those four years, because my being a Tomboy benefitted literally no one. Loving the dot-point formatting, so let’s use that:

1.      I was 100% reliant on boys for validation. My happiness and comfort became dependant on my status as “one of the boys”, and it was definitely not stable. I constantly needed validation and reassurance from the boys around me that I was Tomboy enough to hang out with them, which was a pretty toxic attitude towards my self-worth. In the bigger picture, it was a cog-in-the-works of the sexism women face anyway, as we are told our entire lives to seek affirmation of our success, beauty, and intelligence from men.

2.      I had to suppress all femininity. As a human being with a complex mix of masculinity and femininity as we all are – despite the harmful message of gender roles – I’ve always had “feminine” interests, like sewing and empire-waisted ballgowns. However to retain the benefits of being a Tomboy, I had to ignore or keep secret a lot of things I genuinely enjoyed doing. A particularly fond memory (not) was locking myself in the bathroom and doing a full face with my mum’s makeup, then wiping it off before anyone saw. The embarrassment of finally admitting these interests to people post-Tomboy phase was very indicative of how society shames femininity, and views someone changing from masculine to feminine traits as a step down the social ladder.

3.      I actively aided the misogyny against the girls in my grade. Since my opinion on girls was respected because I was “real” (masculine) enough to provide authority, my negative attitude towards them encouraged the sexism which the boys had already begun to echo. Having internalised gallons of sexism, I viewed myself as superior to the “girly-girls”, and validated the gendered stereotypes of them by using my not-a-girly-girl identity to appeal to boys. As we push boys to value Tomboys above “girly-girls” we ostracise femininity from the realms of respect and equality.

Being a Tomboy can make girls more comfortable in their interests, and even provide a way to explore gender identity. However many cases of Tomboy-ness is driven by internalised sexism, which further perpetuates gender norms rather than challenging it. It is especially impactful because the age at which Tomboys appear are usually very turbulent and significant in shaping social conditioning and self-identity, and need to be carefully balanced to prevent, well, a generation of bigots.

It is important that we allow safe spaces for girls to challenge the expectation of femininity, but a Tomboy is typically assumed to achieve this by rejecting and shaming femininity whilst celebrating masculinity.

Despite having always been perfectly comfortable in my assigned gender, my childhood would have been a happier and less lonely time if genders didn’t exist.

Basically the gender binary screws over everyone, even rich white cis-het girls.

xx Hannah