Having been someone who was really into basketball, and having spent my life looking for good basketball stories and writing basketball stories (none published yet), I really appreciate a well-written basketball story, especially one for girls, which is rare.
Nikki on the Line, by Barbara Carroll Roberts, is one of those rare girls basketball stories that really rings true to me. It’s in all the little details of how the main character feels about playing, the descriptions of how she practices and plays, the way people shoot or pass or move down the court, the tryouts, her teammates and coaches, the parents on the sidelines, the parents at home who don’t always get how important it is, what it feels to be in her body–the burning lungs and sore, tired muscles, the sweat-soaked t-shirts… Thirteen-year-old Nikki’s observations are spot on. The author must’ve been a player herself. I still haven’t finished it, but I’m really enjoying it!
Two good middle grade books for girls who like baseball or softball, both historical–one with a Depression Era Dust Bowl setting (Three Strike Summer, by Skyler Schrempp) and the other (Out of Left Field, by Ellen Klages) set in the 1950s. Both main characters are gender non-conforming but are pretty much accepted for who they are by their families (which is refreshing!), even if they get strange looks from others and aren’t always immediately accepted by the boys they play with or against, or by Little League authorities! They are each the only girl playing on boys’ teams in their respective stories. A lot of good history in Out of Left Field…
And another, a podcast with Krystal Fleming (a “Scottish writer who sits down with people from Entertainment business through to the authors themselves to discuss books, fantasy world and what their lives are really like”), The Book and Life Podcast, https://thebookandlifepodcast.podbean.com/e/julie-swanson-joins-us/
I LOVE this series. It’s like the Native American equivalent of The Little House on the Prairie series I read as a kid. There are five books in the series as of this writing–The Birchbark House, The Game of Silence, The Porcupine Year, Chickadee, and Makoons. The author has added her own black and white drawings scattered throughout. I have to say I liked the first two or three books best (I didn’t enjoy all the Little House books equally either), when Omakayas was younger; she’s the main character of the first couple stories and is in all of the books, although younger characters take center stage as Omakayas becomes an adult and more of a background character in the stories. But I’ve enjoyed all the stories so far.
Having been a gender-variant girl, part of what I love about this series is that it features some gender-variant characters, particularly Old Tallow and Two Strike. Old Tallow is described and portrayed in illustrations as a big, tall, strong, angular woman who’s gruff, a gifted hunter who lives alone with her dogs at the edge of the community and is quite self-sufficient, building canoes, shelters, etc. She makes herself big, warm fur coats patched together from furs tanned after her hunts. Old Tallow isn’t painted in a negative way; she’s a kind and well-respected member of the community who’s like family to Omakayas (an aunt-type figure) and she has a soft spot for Omakayas. Brave and wise, Old Tallow keeps quiet and to herself but steps up big-time when people need help. Two Strike is Omakayas’s cousin, like an adopted sister to her, an energetic and strong-willed girl who wants to be a hunter instead of doing women’s work. Two Strike loves hunting and fighting and is as capable, fierce, and tough as any boy her age, but she must prove her skill as a hunter before she is no longer forced to do women’s work.
Both of these interesting characters, Old Tallow and Two Strike, successfully buck the traditional gender-roles for women in their community. Old Tallow is already well-respected as a maverick when the first story begins, but Two Strike, who comes off as a bit proud and brash as a child, has to earn respect and the right to be left alone to be ‘different.’ Which she does. And then she’s just accepted for who she is and what she wants to be. It was refreshing to see how these characters were portrayed, the love they were shown–like, no big deal, this is how they were, who they were, what they did and liked, no hard time from anyone. Yes, this is fiction, and life back then may not have been as Pollyanna-ish in this regard, but I like to believe some cultures have, and do, accept gender-variance better than ours does.
As much as I enjoyed these two characters and the roles they play in the stories, I would like these books even if Old Tallow and Two Strike weren’t in them. I don’t even know where to begin! I loved Omakayas’s little brother Pinch, her mom and dad, her grandma, Omakayas’s twin sons, Chickadee and Makoons… learning about how her family lived off the land and went with the seasons. I appreciated the ingenuous ways they did things, how they coped each time they would be forced from their lands and waterways and had to travel and make yet another new home… You have to read these books. The Birchbark House deserves to become a classic, if it isn’t considered one already.
These are mostly books featuring characters I consider tomboys, gender-variant, or non-binary kids. The couple that are not–such as The Sweetest Sounds–are about girls who feel they have some secret and keep a lot inside and need to find their voice, and do. Some are about kids wrestling with their gender identity and also about kids who keep a lot inside (most of the books in the first two rows).
I tend to like tomboy characters who aren’t too brash (although Coyote is not shy!), sarcastic, or tough-talking, but I also like spunky ones who are just bluntly honest or don’t have much of a filter (I love how Anne of Green Gables just spews over at the mouth in this way, like she just can’t help herself, like she’s a fountain, a spontaneous stream of consciousness! Not sure she’s a tomboy but she’s a delightful character.) One book I just started, Lupe Wong Won’t Dance, seems to have a main character who is a little tough-talking (I want to give her a chance, though, because she loves sports like I did as a kid), but I’m going to feature another list of books like this soon, and, hopefully, I’ll feature this book then. I have a whole stack of books to read–about gender-identity and/finding your voice–and will post about them once I’m sure I know what they’re like and feel good about recommending them.
One of the books above is considered a young adult novel, Dairy Queen, but I show it here because it’s a really innocent YA and I loved it because I could relate to main character like I have very few girls in middle grade or YA fiction. She doesn’t seem to hate being a girl like I did, but she’s a no-nonsense person of few words and she loves sports and playing with boys. She’s tough and hardy but not in a tough/cocky way where she comes on too strong. The story has a charming humor to it, too. If you like Dairy Queen, there are more books in the series. I like them all.
The older torn-up paperback pictured, Our Only May Amelia, isn’t a recent read, I must admit, but I had to include it because it’s one of my favorite books ever in the ‘tomboy’ category. (I put that word in quotes because I still feel a bit odd using it, but having not been able to come up with one I like better, or that people wouldn’t instantly understand like they do tomboy, I’ve sort of resigned myself to using it.) Again, I could relate to this very girl growing up with brothers in a rural area. And, again, she didn’t seem to hate being a girl the way I did, but she clearly didn’t fit the norms for what a girl was supposed to be and she bucked gender-roles.
Another book I didn’t feature that I wanted to is Melissa, by Alex Gino (because I only have my old copy from back when it was titled George here; I lent my newer Melissa copy to someone who wanted to read it). It doesn’t exactly fit the above categories because it’s about someone identified at birth as a boy and named George, but “she knows she’s not a boy. She knows she’s a girl [Melissa, she’s named herself].” It’s a really good story no matter whether you’re a girl or a boy struggling with gender-identity issues. I’ve written a novel that is in many ways the flip side of Melissa, about someone identified at birth as a girl and who’s uncomfortable with that, really confused and questioning but not as sure as Melissa is about her gender.
The last two books are non-fiction and more for adults who are interested in tomboys like I am.
I hope you find something you really enjoy reading in these!
As a kid who suffered gender dysphoria, I have some advice for adults who know kids who regularly appear to be uncomfortable with the clothes they’re being made to wear, their hair style, and/or the role they’re being asked to play.
So many times growing up, I felt miserable in my clothes and long hair, especially on holidays and special days when I had to dress up. I’d have to wear florals and pink, lace and gathers and ruffles, puffed sleeves, Easter bonnets, thin white gloves, ribbons/barrettes in my hair, long wool dress coats, pointy-toed shoes, “snowball” hats with pom-pom balls that hung down on strings and tied under my chin… As a little one, I’d be given a little purse to carry that matched my patent leather shoes. On those days, while I was dolled up like that (even in anticipation of it, knowing that later that day I’d have to be), it was all I could think of—my discomfort, how un-me those trimmings and trappings were.
Other times it wasn’t how I was dressed but rather the type of activity I had to do as a girl (who thought she was mostly boy) grouped with other girls having to do decidedly girly things–hopscotch, jumprope, the “dress-up” corner in our kindergarten classroom, the movie in 6th grade the nurse came in to show us while the boys were taken away to another room to see their movie… Brownies, Girl Scouts, being an angel in a Christmas pageant, Boys Catch the Girls, Boys Against Girls games; I had no interest in any activity where we were grouped by gender.
Even though I was shy and had given up throwing the tantrums I once had as a toddler and preschooler, I was sure my displeasure must still show. Certainly everyone could see by the dead look on my face and the way I carried myself that I was not happy dressed as I was or doing what I was being made to do. But instead, it was as if I were invisible. Or maybe my face betrayed me and put on its good-girl look or at least a stoic one and my misery didn’t show. Could it possibly be, I wondered? Although I do remember a couple of girls in my class telling me, “Oh, why don’t you go play with the boys!”(when I suggested we play something different at recess) and a general feeling that they and others knew I was a “tomboy,” kids in school didn’t tease me or comment on my tomboy ways, and the adults in my life seemed blind to my resistance to being a girl and everything girlish.
Only once in my life did an adult say anything recognizing my discomfort or dislike of what I was being forced to do or wear (instead they would say the exact opposite of what I wanted to hear: how cute my outfit was, how pretty or beautiful I looked, how gorgeous my hair was… Words that made me cringe.) I remember that one time someone said something with such a soft spot for the person who said it. It endeared him to me.
I was 4 or 5 and it was Easter. My mom had me in my Easter outfit and we were gathered with lots of family members. I was beside myself, in my own little world of torment. My Uncle Bud came over and sat down beside me on a couch or a bench or maybe even a church pew (I don’t remember which it was, but it was a seat for more than one person). We were alone there or separated enough from the others so that it felt like it was just the two of us. He nudged me with his elbow, hitched his head to the side, and made eyes at my Easter bonnet. “Stupid bonnets, huh?” he said, rolling his eyes. That was all he said, but with those three words, I knew he knew how I felt. He’d recognized that he could tell I hated that bonnet. It meant so much to me. I felt seen. His words comforted me. Someone got me, understood me.
Uncle Bud wasn’t even my uncle by blood. He was married to my mom’s sister. I remember thinking this as a kid: How can it be that an uncle who isn’t even a blood relative is the one and only person who can tell how I feel? Why didn’t my mom or dad, my grandma, my aunts and uncles who were blood relatives and the closest people to me on earth? Why did they not see how I felt or say anything if they did? Were they just ignoring it because that wasn’t how I was supposed to feel? Because it scared or worried them?
(Uncle Bud died this year, and at his memorial this summer, this story came up. I shared it with his granddaughter as an example of what a kind and sensitive person he was, and why he was a favorite uncle.)
So if you notice a kid who often seems to be unhappy dressed the way he or she is, or doing what he or she is being made to do, you might quietly and privately say a little something to them about it, letting them know you can tell.
I say “gun” because I have a male friend who wanted an Easy Bake Oven for Christmas very badly as a child, and had asked for one. Instead of getting an Easy Bake Oven that year, he was given a gun, and his little sister got the Easy Bake Oven instead. When he told me that story, and how upset he was to have gotten a gun, I knew exactly how he felt. How many times had I gotten dolls or “girl” toys I didn’t want? And it seemed my family and friends should’ve known I wouldn’t like them.
You might say:
“You’d rather be doing something else, wouldn’t you?”
“Only another hour and you can take that thing off.” Or, “I bet you can’t wait until you can take that off, huh?”
I think questions are good, opening the door for the child to talk if he or she wants to.
A person doesn’t have to say much. In my case, I think less was better. It drew less attention to me and my stupid bonnet that I didn’t want anyone noticing any more than they might have already. I guess it depends how close you are to the child and whether or not you have the privacy to engage in a more in-depth conversation, whether they act receptive to discussing it further. I know I would have welcomed a longer conversation like this with my parents or grandma, if I knew it wasn’t going to result in a lecture/scolding/correction and if I felt they were truly concerned about the unhappiness they could see on my face and were interested in knowing my related thoughts and feelings. If I’d felt safe in opening up to them, if I knew my feelings were going to be accepted or at least treated gently as the precious and fragile things they were, I would’ve loved to tell them how I felt and what I thought. I never felt unsafe in the physical sense, but I didn’t feel like what I’d have to say would be taken seriously (all my tantrums hadn’t been), that it would make any difference, that it would be respected. No one wants to be told “You’re wrong,” “That’s ridiculous,” or “That’s not how it is” when that’s very much how it is, or seems, to you.
Maybe you can be that safe person for an unhappy child, show an openness, an interest, a genuine caring, ask gentle questions, listen without interrupting or shutting the child down or judging what’s said. If you’re a parent or guardian and you don’t know what to say or worry that you might say the wrong thing or you can never seem to find the right time, perhaps you can find someone who can be that safe person for the child, a trained therapist or counselor.
Yes, it can be awkward talking to gender-variant kids about something one might think very personal and private. But at the very least, like my Uncle Bud did for me, see if you can–in some small way–let them know you see them, the real them.
Don’t just ignore their discomfort, hoping it goes away or that they’ll outgrow it. They might, or they might not. But while they’re suffering through it, however long that is, they will appreciate being seen and having their pain recognized. And I bet they’ll never forget your kindness.
Me at 11 with my liberating new haircut, my resin-capped chipped tooth that always turned yellow (the dentist told me not to smile in the sun), and the plaid boy’s leisure suit my mom bought for me at Hamilton’s in Traverse City while shopping for my brothers (I didn’t even have to beg very hard! After the haircut, she gave up on making me wear dresses to school twice a week)
…where I go more in depth on the 4th and last question & answer from my previous two posts…
When I was a kid (1964 through 1978-ish), I aspired to be and identified so much more with being a boy that I convinced myself I was one. Or that I was at least part boy, mosty boy, some odd mixture of boy and girl. I used magical thinking and combined it with the evidence that was already obvious—a somewhat androgynous body and face—and truly thought I was meant to be a boy.
But did I really want to be a boy? 100% boy? No, even then I remember thinking that boys had it better than girls in every way except 1.) girls got to have babies [I loved babies] and 2.) they didn’t have to fight in the war. And as I got older and really started thinking about, looking back and trying to figure it all out—why I’d hated being a girl so much, why I wanted to be a boy so badly, why I’d thought I was more boy than girl—I realized that like unlike so many kids today who would want to transition and make actual physical changes to their bodies to become a boy, I would have had no interest in that. I did not want a penis. I did not want to grow up to be a man. I had no interest in ever kissing a girl or doing anything sexual with one. I did not want a penis any more than I wanted a vagina. I did not hate my vagina; I just totally ignored that it was there, …whatever it was that was there. It went unexplored. Never touched it (other to wipe going to the bathroom), never looked at it. Really, until the first time I tried a tampon in college, I had no interest in even checking if I really had one. The thing I dreaded was the idea that I might go through puberty and develop breasts. That for me, would be the true marker that I was meant to be a girl, a woman. As long as I stayed undeveloped, flat chested, narrow-hipped, androgynous looking in my body, then I could pass for a boy, then there was a chance I would not grow up to be a woman, and I could prove to the world that I was something different, not a real, normal girl, but some mixture of boy and girl, mostly boy, I’d show them. At bath time as a little kid, there was no denying that my older brothers and I looked different down there, that where they had penises, I had a little slit parting my flesh instead. We went pee differently. I wasn’t blind to that; that was the one thing I could not deny was “girl” about me. But it didn’t bother me; I didn’t dislike that part of me, didn’t covet what my brothers had instead. In fact, penises were kind of weird to me, gross even, worm-like, dangling there, in the way, in danger of being caught in zippers, obviously a great source of pain if you were to get hit there. My brothers could have their penises all to themselves.
But when I felt the hard, tender stones of a breast bud on my chest one day late in my 6th grade year, and looked in the mirror and saw my ever so slightly swollen nipple, panic set in. I slept on my stomach with my pillow hugged to my chest to keep it from growing. But then the same thing happened on the other side, that sore lump on top my rib cage. I kept hugging my pillow to my chest, wore woven shirts instead of knit shirts. Clingy, stretchy materials showed things that crisper drapey material did not. Thicker knits like sweatshirts or sweaters were OK. T-shirts with rubberized, ironed-on things printed across the chest were OK. But I preferred button up shirts, flannel shirts, western shirts, jean jackets; the thicker and stiffer the material, the better. The bib overalls that were in style were great, gave me another layer over my chest. If necessary, I slouched my shoulders forward so the material over my chest would hang rather than touch my chest and show that there was anything but flatness there. These ‘things’ (mentally, I couldn’t even use a word for them) were ruining my plan, my proof that I would never grow up to look like a normal teenage girl, that I wasn’t a girl and never would be!
If someone had presented me then with the idea that I could take a pill that would make it so that those breast buds would stop growing dead in their tracks, or even better yet go away, I would’ve wanted to take those pills. Right away. I would’ve tried to convince my mom that I NEEDED to.
I often think about that, how if I were a kid now and had access to the internet and cell phone and all the books and TV shows and magazines where stories and information about transgender kids are available, I definitely would have wanted to do whatever it was that could be done to stop puberty, to stop my body from changing. My 7th and 8th grade years were awkward ones filled with fraught over this one issue—getting “boobs.” I fought wearing the bras my mom bought me as long as I could. She’d rub my back hugging me goodbye as I left the house to go to the bus stop in the morning, and if she didn’t feel bra straps, she’d point me back to my bedroom. I’d trudge back there, put the stretchy little thing with the irritating straps (it was always riding up or the straps were falling off), and then once I got to school, I’d slip into the bathroom and take it off, put it in my backpack. I did that until the summer before 9th grade.
I had a favorite navy blue shirt I liked to play basketball in, an old mesh v-neck soccer jersey my brother had outgrown, made of a stiff, thick polyester material you never see in athletic attire anymore. It showed nothing. But it was rough and chaffed my nipples, and then when I’d sweat, the salt in my sweat would make them sting. The sting was worth it for me; I’d gladly pay that price. I thought I was successfully hiding things until one day that summer before 9th grade when I was at a basketball camp at my high school, in a gym full of girls warming up first thing in the morning before camp started. We were all shooting around and I didn’t notice what was going on, that the girls must’ve been slipping out to go to the bathroom or locker room one-by-one. But then one of the girls, a tall, assertive girl a year older than me (who believe it or not became one of my best friends despite what she was about to do), called out, “Hey, everybody, it’s JP day!” and she held her arms out wide and wiggled her shoulders back and forth to make her boobs shake. And she was braless. All the other girls then did the same, and the gym full of girls laughed; they were all braless and jiggling, had somehow conspired and gone and taken their bras off without my being aware of any of it. My face felt like it was on fire. There was no doubt their joke was directed at me—I was the only one in the gym whose initials were JP and I was the only one who’d come into that gym braless, who regularly went braless (unless her mom was around). After that, I wore a bra every day. I wasn’t fooling anyone with my stiff #14 soccer jersey.
But from the time I first felt the hard soreness of a developing breast bud in the winter of my 6th grade year until that day the summer before 9th grade, I was tortured by what was happening to my chest, obsessed with hiding it from the world. For those two-and-a-half years, I wore big baggy tops, or tops made of thick or stiff material, t-shirts with thick things printed across the chest. When I couldn’t, I slouched my shoulders forward, stretched out knit shirts. I don’t know how many times my mom would tell me, “Stand up straight, …Stop slouching, …Put your shoulders back.” I would tell her, “I can’t! See? This is as far as they’ll go…” She’d come over and grab my shoulders and say, “No, look. Relax, loosen up…” and try to pull them back. And of course, I’d stiffen to “prove” her wrong. Ridiculous. So, yes, I would’ve been very interested in puberty blockers, little magic pills that would make it so I never got boobs.
But thank God, I didn’t know about them then. What a mistake it would’ve been for me to take them. I like my “boobs” now (can even think of them and say the more mature word “breasts” sometimes!). How much more confusing it would have made things. How much I would have missed.
It’s been a long road, my coming to understand why I didn’t like being a girl, why I did not want to be one, thought I wasn’t a normal one, that I was more boy than girl, that I was meant to be a boy. In the end, maybe I wasn’t a “normal” girl, whatever that means. I didn’t fit the stereotype of a girl that was presented to me by everything I saw in my family and culture. I was built strong. I liked doing “boy” things, was good at them. Didn’t mind getting dirty, touching worms, frogs, spiders, and snakes. Liked to wrestle around and play rough-and-tumble. I was tough, didn’t cry when I got hurt, wasn’t (outwardly) emotional or sensitive. I didn’t like girly clothes, most girl toys, or playing with girls at school. I hated having long hair, begged to get my hair cut short like a boy. To this day, I like to do things I don’t see most girls and women doing. I like to do manual labor, use a chainsaw, push big rocks around, dig with a shovel, plant shrubs and trees, build things, fix things. I feel good when I do hard work and sweat. I’m a solidly built person, my shoulders are broad, my hips are narrow, and I have “guns” for arms, as many have commented. People often ask if I lift weights (I don’t; I wouldn’t want my arms getting even bigger). As a preschooler I remember overhearing an uncle say I looked like a “little football player.” So there’s no doubt there has always been something androgynous looking about my body. And the way I like to dress. And my preferences and physical abilities.
But I never wanted to actually/physically be 100% boy. I was happy to be something in between, would’ve been happy to stay that way, so long as I looked more boy than girl, could pass for a boy. What I really wanted was to be able to DO what boys could do, to be regarded as highly as boys, to have the opportunities and freedoms they had. In my mind/culture/family, girls were weak, silly, foolishly emotional and sentimental. Girls were to serve and take a back seat to boys and men, to pacify. Girls were to look pretty, for boys/men. Girls were eye candy and meat. Girls were to say quiet and not speak their minds if it was going to conflict with what the boys and men thought. Girls were servants and maids. Boys were strong, powerful, could do what they wanted, have fun. They could sit back and be fed and cleaned up after and then go have more fun. Boys could say whatever was on their mind. Boys made the rules, the decisions. THAT’s what I wanted.
It took me years to understand that I could be a different kind of girl than what my early years had taught me a girl was supposed to be. It took me even longer to realize that instead of aiming for some gray middle area between “boy” and “girl” and staying there, I could bop around between the “boy” end of the masculine/feminine spectrum (as if there is such a thing) and the “girl” end of it, that I could sometimes be very girly if I wanted to, and then the next moment put on my high, steel-toed rubber work boots and go muck around out in the cedar swamp woods cutting down dead but not yet rotten trees to build a fence. In fact, I could bop wildly around between “boy” and “girl,” and it didn’t have to make sense to anybody else, or even myself!
If I had taken those puberty delaying/stopping drugs, little late-blooming me would’ve never known that I would one day be attracted to a boy who I would marry and have three beautiful children with, and that I’d love being a mom and celebrate over 30 years of marriage with my best friend and sometimes even like wearing dresses. When I hear of women who have to have mastectomies due to breast cancer, I always think how awful it would be to lose my breasts, how much I’d miss them, and how ironic that is given how much I hated the idea of having breasts when I was younger. Young me would never believe that I’d come to like that part of my body.
I was so confused about what it was to be a girl, and I was androgynous, which made everything even more confusing, but I was and am a girl, female. A female who likes a lot of things the world thinks of as masculine. A female whose body still isn’t as curvy and soft as most women’s bodies are. A female who sometimes still feels like she is a “boy.” But a female who is glad to be female.
What a shame it would have been if I’d taken puberty blockers and missed out on being the female I am, and the parts of being female I’ve enjoyed so much.
I am not saying that it is wrong for a person to transition. I can only speak from my experience and how it was for me. Although I was SURE I was not meant to be a girl when I was young (from birth to maybe 13 or 14) but then came to see some psychological reasons for my denial of being girl (my misogyny, denial, magical thinking), I can never forget the certainty I felt then, how convinced I was that I would never grow up like other girls did and that time would tell, would prove to the world that I was different. If I could feel that certain I was meant to be a boy (or more exactly a “not-girl”), what do others feel who are even more androgynous than I was, those “girls” who reach puberty only to find out they have a micro-penis and are really a boy, those born with sex organs of both genders, those whose brains and hearts have never matched up with the gender assigned to them at birth? A person can only judge for his or her self what their gender is. No one knows what it feels like to be inside another person’s body or mind. We are all on our own journey. It takes time. We have to struggle through and wrestle with things, figure them out in our own time, go for guidance from people we trust, not be told what to do, not be forced to do things. It is a very difficult issue–not being comfortable identifying with the gender you were assigned at birth (that’s how it felt to me, like someone put the wrong label on me), not being comfortable in your own skin, your clothes, your hair, the group of kids they put you with at school… It’s difficult for kids and for parents, for grandparents and teachers… I don’t pretend to have all the answers. Just my own, which I’ve only come to as an adult.
I know there is a spectrum and we are all on different places on it. I am not speaking for anyone else’s situation. I’m just glad I am a woman, something I could’ve never imagined as the kid who did not want to be a girl so badly that she convinced herself she was more boy than girl.
In my previous post, I wrote about how I hated being a girl growing up and identified more with being “boy.” And about how as an adult I’ve wrestled with some questions as to why I was that way, and how I’ve finally come to answers that have helped me understand it all better. But I really only went into one of those questions and its answer in my last post and wanted to go over the others as well.
Here are the questions and the answers to them I’ve come to:
1. Did I really think I was meant to be a boy, that I was part or even mostly boy?
Yes. From early on until maybe 13, I was convinced of this. I never felt like I was 100% girl. It seemed some mistake had been made, and I’d been born with this one girl part (this one unfortunately defining part), but all the rest of me was boy. When I first felt the soreness and saw the slight swelling of breast buds the winter of my sixth grade year at 11-and-three-quarters, I freaked out. I wore clothes that hid what was happening. I slept on my stomach and hugged my pillow to my chest hoping I could stop or even reverse what was going on there. In addition to being a late-bloomer, I was a slow-bloomer, and it wasn’t until long after all the other girls my age had started wearing bras that I could no longer deny what was there. I was 14 when I gave into wearing a bra. That is about when I finally gave up on trying to fool the world into thinking I was a boy, meant to be a boy. But age 13 is when I secretly gave up on the notion that I wouldn’t/couldn’t grow up like other girls did. After age 14, I just felt like I really didn’t like being a girl and that my heart/soul/brain was maybe more boy than girl.
2. Was it that I didn’t feel like I was a girl or that I actually felt like I was a boy?
Well, I definitely didn’t feel like a girl, and I would’ve sworn on the Bible as a kid that I felt like I was a boy, but this one is tricky because I have to distinguish between gender and sex here. I never felt the sexual urges of a boy, was never attracted to a girl, never wanted a girlfriend, never dreamed of growing up and dating or marrying a girl. All of that would’ve been as yucky or even yuckier than the notion of growing up and kissing or marrying a man was to me then! I loved babies and little kids, wanted to have kids when I grew up, but tried hard not to think of what I might have to do to make that happen (my mom told us early on how babies were made). When I say I felt like a boy as a kid, I’m not talking about anything sexual; I’m talking strictly about gender. I thought that I saw the world as a boy, that I thought like a boy, wanted to do and play the things boys did, that I interpreted and reacted to things like most boys did. The way girls were seemed very foreign to me, even repulsive. I very much had misogynistic tendencies. I inwardly rolled my eyes and shook my head over the things girls and women said and did, they way they looked and dressed.
3. Or was it that I didn’t want to be a girl or that I wanted to be a boy? (Question 2 and 3 may seem the same, but I think there is a difference between wanting to be a boy or a girland feeling like you’re one or the other, which leads to my next question, #4 below…)
I very definitely did NOT want to be a girl, and at the time I may have thought I wanted to be a boy, but I see now that I was being selective about that, turning a blind eye to things about being a boy that I did not like. For example, even as a young kid, I remember thinking that everything about being a boy was better than being a girl except for two things—1.) boys had to fight in the war and 2.) they couldn’t have babies. The idea of having to fight in the war and kill another person terrified me; I was not one bit jealous of boys for having to face the draft. I was certain I would not be able to pull the trigger and kill another person. And although I didn’t like even imagining myself doing what you had to do to have a baby, I very much wanted to have a baby someday. My very own baby that was mine and had come from me. Boys couldn’t do that. They had to trust that the baby that had come out of someone else was theirs. The other thing is that I never wanted to have a penis. I never disliked that girl part of me down there that my clothes so conveniently hid, and that I was glad they hid. While I was glad it was hidden, and I had no desire in exploring it (I was more than content to simply look down and see what there was to see with a quick look), I felt no aversion to it like I did other girly things. And I did feel some aversion to penises. They seemed weird, even gross, this squishy, wormy, snaky thing hanging down between your legs. And those wrinkly ball sacks? Eew. Yes, my brothers could more easily take a pee outside, got to pee behind trees in some pretty public places when I’d get in trouble for trying to do the same, but otherwise I saw no benefit in having one. It seemed to get in the way. I saw my brothers get hit there by balls or knees, and the excruciating pain that resulted. Nothing ever hurt me that bad! I saw the fragile skin of them get caught in the zippers of their flies when they tried to go without wearing underwear. A penis? No thank you. You can have it. So I did not actually physically 100% want to be a boy. The answer to this question is that it was far more that I didn’t want to be a girl than it was that I actually wanted to be a boy; that is, the underlying reason for my being the way I was was that I did not want to be a girl.
4. Can you want something so badly that you convince yourself it’s true, that it really 100% actually feels like it’s true? (Or, likewise, can you not want something so badly that you convince yourself it’s not true?)
Yes, definitely. I did that. I realize that now. I hated being a girl, wanted to be the opposite of that, and in my mind, the opposite of girl was boy, so I thought that’s what I must be, at least mostly. I couldn’t deny the one girl part I knew I had (I knew I was at least a smidgen girl), but I was convinced that I was largely, mostly boy, and that some mistake had been made in my creation/birth, some mix-up, that had resulted in my having this girl part. Of course, this was a lot of dualistic, binary, magical thinking, and when I reached my teen years, I saw that I was mistaken—there was more girl to me than I’d known or wanted to believe possible.
Underneath it all, it was that I didn’t want to be a girl. I wanted to be a boy only in a childish nonsexual notion of boy (ignoring the idea that being a boy means having a penis, also not thinking beyond to the idea that a boy grew up to be a man, and all that comes with being a sexually mature man). I wanted to be able to do what boys did, to be as highly regarded as boys seemed to be (compared to girls, women), to have the opportunities to play sports that boys had. I wanted to be strong and powerful. I wanted to be able to wear boys’ clothes and have short hair, mostly because then people would think I was a boy and see me as strong/powerful/smart. SO… I’ve come to see that my whole gender issue really stemmed from my not wanting to be a girl, because I saw girls as weak/trivial/emotional/sentimental/subservient and not deserving of the freedoms and opportunities boys were.
#30 on the 7th Grade Boys Basketball team (with my first best friend who was a girl, #32; our class was so small they needed the two of us to field a team)
BUT, there can be no denying that I’m somewhat androgynous physically. I’ve always had wide shoulders, big muscles, been larger-boned/narrower-hipped/smaller-breasted than most females. I’m built strong and straight. I was the last girl in my school my age to develop, got my first period at 17, had fewer and lighter menstrual periods than most females, often would go for months without a period (but had no problem getting pregnant each time?), went through menopause at 47… So my hormones levels must be a bit different than what’s normal for a female. I must have, or have had, lower levels of estrogen or higher levels of testosterone or both.
My preferences (though some of them may have been culturally influenced to an extent) and tendencies could be said to be androgynous as well. I enjoy physical activity, exertion, doing manual labor. Always have; from baby on, I enjoyed rough-and-tumble play, being active, being outside, running, jumping, climbing, sawing, pounding… I have a high pain tolerance and was stoic as a kid. Nicknamed Toughie by my dad, I played through bloody stubbed toes and the pain of injuries that should have hurt me more than they did and prevented me from competing (playing college basketball, my feet hurt me mildly for several months, and then one day my foot broke—a bone scan showed 4 other stress fractures that should’ve been causing me great pain). Again, things like being stoic may be seen as being more masculine than feminine but may be a learned thing and not something you’re inherently born as/with, but my point is that many might judge my preferences or my “look” to be androgynous, then and even now still. And some things, like having a high pain tolerance or wide shoulders or big muscles, well, they just are. That’s undeniably just the way I am, the way I came out.
So, to summarize, if I can group all my related questions into one, it would be, “Why was I such an extreme tomboy who hated being a girl so much she was convinced she was mostly boy?” And if I had to condense my answers above and put them together into one answer, it would be, “Because I did not want to be a girl as I saw ‘girl’ defined in my world–I did not want to be that, did not identify with that, didn’t think I could be that–AND because the fact of my having been born somewhat androgynous made things all the more confusing.”
When I was a kid, I hated being a girl. But it was even more than that. I didn’t think I was meant to be a girl, felt I was meant to be a boy. While I couldn’t deny there was a key difference between my two older brothers’ bodies and mine (that piece of anatomy doctors look at to determine if a baby is a boy or a girl), to me that was just one small part, one easily-hidden-by-your clothes part. The rest of me looked exactly like a boy (or could have, if my mom just dressed me right and let me get hair cut how I wanted it!), and I felt like I was a boy. From very early on, as far back as I can remember, I was convinced a large part of me, most of me, was boy. There are stories from even further back than I can remember; one of my aunts tells how I’d be happy as a lark playing in my diaper as a baby, but then when it came time to be dressed and my mom would go to put something decidedly girly on me, I’d throw a fit, start crying and thrashing about, fighting her, fighting being stuffed in that frilly clothing. I’d try to tear things off afterwards. It didn’t surprise me to hear that even before I could walk, I disliked dresses and being put in anything different than what my brothers were wearing. I hated lace and ric rac, florals, pink, ruffles, gathers, ribbons, bows, hair barrettes, princess or ballerina stuff, tea party—almost everything girly (the exception was baby dolls, but I only played with baby dolls that looked like they could be boys). I liked doing boy things. I wanted to be seen as a boy, to wear boys’ clothes, get my hair cut short like a boy. If only I could wear boys’ clothes and have short hair, I knew people would think I was a boy!
Once I was finally allowed to get that haircut and wear more nearly what I wanted (not until the end of 5th grade) I delighted in being mistaken for a boy. I remember one time I was running down a stairwell in a hotel and I bumped into an older man going around a corner. He grabbed me by the arms and said, “Slow down, young fellow!” Another time, in 7th grade, I stood outside knocking on a window trying to get the attention of a girl classmate/teammate on the other side of it; a man inside tapped her and then pointed to me, saying, “That boy wants you.” (I couldn’t hear it; she told me what he said afterwards.) ‘See?!’ I thought, ‘See! I knew it. And now, when I don’t grow up like normal girls do, they’ll see even more how I’m not a girl, how I was meant to be a boy, how I’m part boy.’
I couldn’t possibly grow up to be a girl, a woman. It was inconceivable to me that I was physically capable of becoming THAT. It would kill me! My body would shrivel up and die before anything like that could happen to it. I might get bigger, taller, but my proportions would stay the same. I’d stay flat-chested and straight in the hips, no curves for me. I’d just be a larger version of my androgynous-looking childhood self. And then the world would see that I wasn’t really a normal girl after all, that I was something different, something more boy-like.
What happened when I did start to develop and grow up like a “normal” girl is a whole ‘nother blog post!
But there are some key questions that have popped up for me as an adult, in trying to come to understand why I was like this at this age (birth through 11, 12, 13) in regard to my gender, why I felt the way I did. The questions surprised me. For example, had I really thought I was a boy or even that I wanted to be a boy? Or had I just not wanted to be a girl so badly, that in my simple, dualistic, binary, black-and-white thinking, I just thought if you’re not a girl, you must be a boy? Or that if you don’t want to be a girl, you must want to be a boy? I mean what other options are there in a kid’s mind, what other options did I see? None. Everyone else I knew seemed happy to be a girl, or a boy, whatever they’d been born as and the world saw them as. I was the only one I knew who seemed not to like the category they’d been put in, the gender they’d been assigned at birth.
The questions I’ve struggled to answer are:
Did I really think I was meant to be a boy, or that I was part or even mostly boy?
Was it that I didn’t feel like I was a girl or that I actually felt like I was a boy?
Or was it that I didn’t want to be a girl or that I wanted to be a boy? (Questions 2 and 3 may seem the same, but I think there’s a difference between wantingto be a boy or a girl andfeelinglike you’re one or the other, which leads to my next question…)
Can you want something so badly that you convince yourself it’s true, that it really 100% actually feels like it’s true? (Or, can you not want something so badly that you convince yourself it’s not true?)
These questions may seem redundant. They’re about subtle differences. When they first occurred to me, it seemed they were ridiculously trivial. “What does it matter?” I’d think. “They’re practically the same thing, aren’t they?” But they did matter, they weren’t the same thing! I kept coming back to them in my head, or they kept coming back to me, as it seemed, and I realized how key they were, how I needed to wrestle with them and come up with the answers, if I could. These were mind-bending questions; they made my brain hurt. I could barely even put them into words. It was hard to think on them for very long at a time. They confused me. Sometimes they still do. Journaling about them, I would need to take a break and come back to it. Wrestling with these questions has taken years! But I think I know the answers now, and the answers are important, help me make sense of things.
One thing that really struck a chord with me and helped confirm one of my answers recently was a show I watched on a plane this summer. The movie and TV choices didn’t seem good at first, and there weren’t many to pick from, but there was one that featured a kid, and I enjoy stories with kids in them, so I decided to try it. It’s a Netflix series called AJ and the Queen, starring RuPaul Charles and child actor Izzy G (aka Izzy Gaspersz). The ten-year-old character AJ, played by Izzy G, looks like a boy and everyone in the show assumes AJ’s a boy at first, including the main character, Ruby Red, played by RuPaul. AJ is a tough talking, street-wise, smart-alec little thief, a ragamuffin orphan type who always wears a white wife-beater tank top with a zip-up hoodie and a knit hat. (Yes, AJ has a pretty face and always wears the knit hat, which begs the question “Why?” but some boys do have pretty faces and like to wear hats even when it’s warm out…).
But at the end of the first episode, Ruby discovers AJ is a girl when he accidently steps on her where she lies stowed away in the back of his RV; AJ’s hat comes off, revealing long hair.
Then, at the beginning of episode 2, while Ruby’s getting AJ something to eat for breakfast in a diner, there’s some amazing dialogue (to me, at least!):
Ruby asks AJ, “Why do you dress like a boy?”
“Why do you dress like a girl?” AJ throws the question right back at drag queen Ruby.
“Well, …I’m a performer and that’s how I make my living. That’s why I do it. Why do you do it? Do you want to be a boy?”
“Do you want to be a girl?” Again, AJ deflects the question.
“No. No, I don’t want to be a girl,” says Ruby.
AJ shrugs. “I don’t want to be a girl either.”
“Oh, OK.” Ruby is tender with AJ. “Well, kiddo, you can be whoever you want to be around me, because I’ve been told my whole life who I can’t be…”
AJ interrupts rudely and changes the subject and Ruby tells AJ she’s being rude, to which AJ says, “Don’t tell me what to do. You’re not my mother.”
“Correct, I’m not your mother. I’m a drag queen on a cross country tour…” Ruby goes on to say some things suggesting how inappropriate it is for AJ to be tagging along on his tour as a stowaway, ending with, “…you really don’t belong in the back of my RV.”
AJ straightens up a bit after the scolding, and Ruby asks AJ what her real name is. AJ says AJ stands for Amber Jasmine, that her mom named her after, “her stripper friend and a racist Disney cartoon.”
Later, when Ruby’s in his RV looking through AJ’s backpack for his phone (AJ has a habit of stealing from him), he discovers a Barbie-type Princess Jasmine doll hidden in a white athletic sock in AJ’s backpack. AJ walks in the RV, catches Ruby pulling the doll out, and yells, “Don’t touch my stuff!” Ruby explains he was looking for his phone. AJ shouts that she doesn’t have it. Ruby gestures toward the doll and says, “Princess Jasmine, right? …Do you have a Princess Jasmine doll because your name is Jasmine?”
AJ doesn’t answer.
Ruby says, “OK, one more question, and feel free not to answer it as well.”
AJ shakes her head. “Just go. Ask it. Jesus…”
So Ruby does, “Why are you always saying you want to be a boy, but then hiding a doll in a sweat sock?”
“I never said I wanted to be a boy,” says AJ.
“In the diner you said you wanted to be a boy,” says Ruby.
“No. I said I didn’t want to be a girl.” (***this is where it hit me, YES! The answer to my question #3 above…This is what/how it was for me, not so much that I wanted to be a boy, but that I didn’t want to be a girl. That was the key thing: I did not want to be a girl. Being a girl, as I knew and understood ‘girl,’ was not-me. No way, no thank you.)
“So if you don’t want to be a boy,” asks Ruby, “why are you pretending to be one?”
“’Cuz people leave boys alone.” AJ says, holding the Princess Jasmine doll. “And I wasn’t hiding this; I was protecting it.”
“Huh, it’s funny,” says Ruby. “I made my whole life about not letting people put me in a box, and I go and put you into one. A forward thinking, politically correct one, but, still a box nonetheless.”
Ruby goes on to ask AJ, “What’s wrong with being a girl?”
“Everything.”
“Uh, can you narrow it down for me?” says Ruby.
“Girls always do what people ask them to,” says AJ, “even if they don’t wanna.”
Ruby nods. “I see. Well, not all girls do that, you know. Some girls learn how to draw boundaries.”
AJ sighs. “Hhhh. OK, here we go… Thanks, Oatmeal. (AJ always teases Ruby for his fondness for Oprah and the Oprah videos he watches and finds inspirational).”
“Well, I can tell you one thing about being a girl,” says Ruby. “You grow up to be a woman. And these days women can be whatever they want to.”
“Yeah,” says AJ, “like a stripper, or a hooker, or drug addict.” (her mother is a stripper/hooker/addict)
“Well, for every stripper, there’s a …a woman doctor. For every drug addict there’s a Marie Curie, Justice Sotomayor, Beyonce, Serena Williams, and…” Ruby lists a bunch of accomplished women. “…yes, AJ, and Oprah.”
“That’s some crazy shit right there,” says AJ as she turns and leaves, stepping out of the RV.
Ruby goes after her, calling out the RV door, “Hey, I’m just saying, that little girls, no matter how they start out, can grow up to be strong, amazing, wonder-women!”
“Wonder Woman’s not real, yo,” says AJ.
“…OK, well, I tried,’ says Ruby.
I wish someone had tried to have this conversation with me when I was a kid AJ’s age. Not the girls-can-be-anything talk. I heard that from the adults in my life and believed it, but a conversation where someone actually recognized what I thought was obvious (that I did not like being a girl, was boy-like and trying to be even more boy-like) and asked me why, a safe conversation where I might explore my thoughts and feelings on it and bounce things off a caring older person. But of course people didn’t talk about these things back then, and I don’t know that I’d have been able to articulate things as AJ did, either. Unlike her, I was shy, slow and careful putting things into words. It’s taken me years to realize what exactly it was–not so much that I wanted to be a boy, but that I didn’t want to be a girl. Given a black-and-white choice between Boy and Girl (as I knew Girl), yes, Boy was the more appealing choice. But now we know Girls can be all sorts of things, in all sorts of different ways!
More about the answers to my other questions in two upcoming posts…
The sun coming up over the lake a little before 7 am.
This is the view I wake up to from the deck of our place up here in Michigan’s pinky. Most days I’m greeted by this sunrise and the reddish light of it stretching in across the floor. Some mornings, many mornings, it gets so bright there’s no way you can sleep in.
I’ve been able to spend more time up here this summer than I have in years, and I’m really enjoying being able to get in everything I always want to but can never usually squeeze in, even good alone time and writing time. Usually there’s so much family and friend time–reunions of siblings, nieces, nephews, kids, old friends we grew up with–that I don’t get enough alone time. And not even Steve is here with me most of this summer, so I truly am alone in our little humble, crumbling (literally) abode here. Although we have dreams of building a new house on this site (next door to my mom’s and the house where I grew up) and what’s here is nothing special and not worth putting anything into to make it any better, I kind of like having a place where you don’t care if people spill things or track stuff in on their feet or put a dent in the wall. It makes summer feel more carefree. I just kind of shrug when it comes to cleaning like I might otherwise clean our house. We spend most of our time outside anyway…
My mom’s husband D died in late June (I never called him my stepdad because my dad died when I was an adult, so D didn’t really take over for us in a dad sort of way), so I’m using her as an excuse for why I need to be here so much. I can’t leave her alone! I/we have to help her through her grieving! But seriously, it is that kind of summer to an extent. And I think the picture above reflects the mood: peaceful, a sense of relief (that D’s no longer lying in bed, dying and leading the frustrating, boring existence he was in his last months), pensive, and yet with lots of beauty and gratitude mixed in there, too. D was a guy who appreciated and even tried to capture beauty, a photographer and painter. He was a guy who liked to have fun. So he would’ve wanted us to move on and and enjoy things, notice and celebrate the sunrises and sunsets.
But it is a new chapter in my mom’s life, and change is always scary (or at least it can be, is for me and most I know), so I do want to be here with her, to help her however I can. My siblings and I (and our kids) have been feeling very protective of her. She’s had a lot to do the last month (as if she doesn’t always anyway, living on a lake and being such a do-it-yourselfer). She can use some help going through things, maintaining things, mowing the lawn, etc. And she’s thinking ahead and preparing for a new way of life, doing things to make herself feel more secure, since she’ll be living in a house in a remote place all alone. Like me, Mom doesn’t mind her alone time, even enjoys it, and she keeps busy with all her plants and flowers, sewing and reading and cleaning, walking and swimming. Her Mahjong group meets every Monday, she has a Bible study group and a book club she belongs to, goes to church on Sunday… She has good, long-time friends, a sister-in-law who lives nearby, a niece and nephew. She’s not alone in this community, loves this area and her home here. I know she will be OK. Even better than OK. She’ll be able to travel again, visit us, see places she’s always wanted to see, do things she hasn’t been able to while caring for D through his last years of dementia and health issues. And Mom’s just about the most optimistic person I’ve ever met, and her faith is strong. So she will be OK, no matter what. In Julian of Norwich’s words, “All shall be well, and all shall be well, and every kind/all manner of thing shall be well.”
Julie A. Swanson 