Ways to Be a Girl

In typing up a too-long response to a friend's Facebook message, I figured that it was also introspective enough for me to want to keep. These thoughts are part of a relatively new articulation I'm forming of my own gender identity, but it's also been accompanied by reading and thinking that I hope constitutes a broader observation about feminine gender expression and identity.


Friend (abbreviated):
I added your "facebook [extra]" to my RSS feed recently. I just caught up on your posts and I'm now pondering the "aesthetics of masculinity: butch vs. tomboy style" autostraddle article. My clothing is fairly feminine, although comfort is required and I don't wear much that is truly "girly." My levels of girliness have been super inconsistent throughout my life - interestingly, I was most feminine in clothing/friends in middle school. When I dated guys.

Would you consider yourself tomboyish in the way you see yourself on a "soul" level? I don't look it, but my self-perceptions certainly lean more tomboy than feminine.

Also, on a slightly different topic, do you find yourself comparing yourself to or competing with other women? I don't. My main measure has generally been "keeping up" with guys.


Marié:
Thank you for following my blog. I like to know that I'm not submitting things into a complete void.

It definitely seems like a lot of the girly, "pink" gender expression you had as a kid (and have now) was/is very you. What parts of you and your past do you identify as "tomboyish"? Do you find yourself identifying primarily as a tomboy because of the binary "girly-girl"/"tomboy" dichotomy we had as kids, or do you think it suits you most among the myriad of gender identifications for adult (esp. gay) female people (femme, high femme, butch, dyke, tomboy, boi, androgyn, queer, etc. etc. etc.)?

In conversations like this, I often find myself wishing there were an intermediate between "tomboy" and "girly-girl" like "tomboy" is an intermediate between "butch" and "femme." There's no positive label for "not-girly," which is what tends to be used when we don't meet enough of the standards typically required for "tomboy."

The question of whether or not I am a tomboy is an interesting one to me because my gender identity has been fairly clouded by gender expectations and pressures. Many of the feminine things I've done with awareness that they're feminine I know have been because they were forced or very strongly socialized. For example:

From Little House on the Prairie,
which I read voraciously because
of all the dangerous adventuring
into the woods and having to make
 everything, especially food,
from complete scratch.

• I got into sewing/knitting as a 3rd/4th grader because we were studying the pioneers and I figured that the best way for me to be badass was to be capable of hand-stitching 16 stitches an inch. 

• As a fifth grader, I got myself two skirts (which my mother almost refused because she knew I wouldn't wear them), which I wore constantly for two weeks straight  - though only at home - and then promptly discarded again. Other than a couple blip cases like that, after age 7, any dress-wearing occasions (Easter, Christmas, graduations, uniforms, formal dances, choir concerts) were met with reactions ranging from fatalistic reluctance to panicked, horrified emotional distress and attempted refusal.

• I developed an unhealthy, long-enduring weight fixation from 4th grade until about junior year because of passive societal messages and a trigger comment from a boy in 4th grade that culminated in a light on-and-off 2-year-long eating disorder. A lot of the issues & coping mechanisms I had as an adolescent were extremely girl-typical, and to be honest, the fact that it was that way ripped me apart when the wave of estrogen hit my body.

Ironically, that one boy's comment was about how he had a 6 pack and I didn't; I felt like I was fat and put down because I wanted to prove I was stronger than him and lost over that. When I wasn't mimicking Laura Ingalls Wilder, being told what to do, being forced to do something, or reluctantly accepting something I figured I had to, my femininity was enthusiastically expressed in artsiness, creativity, imagination, music, attention to detail, and extreme disinterest in sports and violence. I cannot and will not ever be able to deny that those things are true of me because it would be a negation of the core of my personality. But since I was in 2nd grade, I have always relished the opportunity to prove my worth by trying to assert myself as as minimally feminine as possible whenever I was conscious of my gender expression.

Femininity (though not female-ness) really was synonymous with weakness/pettiness/materialism/cattiness/boy-obsession/hypointellectuality/outright stupidity to me until I hit feminism very recently, and I'm still trying to unlearn those things, as well as the ridiculous cultural messages about size/beauty I didn't think I'd picked up subliminally. I also think that much of my desire to make myself look more masculine has been the expression of my desire for people to see beyond my gender label, which I always felt pressured me to be girly - where "girly" is the idealized expression my gender.

This is where my relationship to female "competitiveness" comes in. As a weight-conscious/slightly chunkier kid, I never saw myself as competitive, though I was occasionally very jealous. I channeled any potential for competition into active, vocal superioristic disdain of skinny, girly, preppy girls and any expression of that kind of femininity. Strangely, my later realization that I was sexually attracted to women helped me to stop objectifying such women in this way, perhaps because it was concurrent with my discovery of feminism.

But there's a deeper, more authentic reason than traditional sexism that I've been so eager to prove my masculinity and reject femininity. As many "feminine" qualities there are that are innegotiably part of my identity, there are also many "masculine" traits that are equally inexorable: leadership, a tendency to steamroll people, daredevilishness, fearlessness, high pain tolerance, a desire to be strong (physically, mentally, and emotionally), a love for playing outside/getting dirty/climbing stuff. These traits all seem to meld into my feminine traits pretty seamlessly, but oppositional attitudes seemed to expect me to grow out of or feminize these latter traits, as though "leadership" in women was a different trait than "leadership" in men.

I want equality where equality is due, so I continue to try to assert my point until the person I'm trying to get through to takes my gender seriously as masculine when it is masculine, and not just a certain caveat or acceptable facet of femininity. That feels like dismissal to me, because it's not a face-value recognition of what I feel it really is. My internal gender, my gender identity, is not simply "woman," especially when "woman" is synonymous with "feminine." My parents have sometimes interpreted this as "defiance" or "hypersensitivity," but it's something much deeper than that. I've been coming to accept that there really is a big difference between wanting to prove something for the sake of proving it and wanting to prove it because the point is an important one.

Not me, but might as well be.

The word "tomboy" resonates with me because it carries associations of youth, and I both have a strong personal philosophy connecting me to childhood and the testaments of many close friends that tell me I often remind them of an eight year-old. It resonates with me because it fits my rough-and-tumble-ness, a big part of my relationship to pain, and my love for getting dirty and discovering cool stuff in the process. It resonates with me because it's the positive counterpart to "not-girly" and allows me to be less feminine than "femme" without feeling like I have to be even remotely dykish to prove my masculinity (even to myself). I feel that I must recognize in this that gender identities don't always need labels and that I'm not trying to cram myself into a new box in order to escape a societally-imposed one. This is a way for me to begin to put words to the fact that not only do the traditional boxes not work, according to the entirety of LGBT studies ever, but they have never worked in my own life.

tl;dr: yes, the word "tomboy" describes me really well on a deep level when I can cut out the pieces that don't fit and tack on a couple extra parts to suit my own needs. I've rarely been fixated on "keeping up" with guys because I spent so much of my childhood and adolescence asserting that my breed of girl was better than boys, but that has changed as I have moved into womanhood. Whatever stereotypes there were about girls and boys, grownup girls are certainly perceived even more differently from grownup boys, whether they're "tomboys" or not.