In the town where I grew up, you couldn’t go shopping without running into someone you knew. It was the icing atop the self-conscious cake of adolescence, to constantly anticipate stepping out of the dressing room to show your mom some jeans and into the surprise judgmental gaze of a classmate. It meant burying tampons under the other Target items you and your mom were buying, hoping that the attractive theater boy ringing you up didn’t notice them. I’m not sure if it’s this specific history that leaves me, still, constantly looking over my shoulder when I shop for clothes, or if it’s all the other self-doubt inducing associations I have with getting dressed, or if it’s perfectly normal and common to feel that, as you try to figure out how you want to look, every single person on earth is looking at you.
I thought I’d moved beyond my days of Panicking in Northeast Iowan Malls. But lately I’ve been trying to look like I want to, like I’ve always wanted to, and the minute I cross the threshold into the men’s department it’s like I’m 13 years old again, convinced I’ll be caught where I’m not supposed to be.
Many of my friends identify as adult nerds, a common category of whom are boys who grew up feeling like failures at masculinity for loving Star Wars or Spiderman more than sports. What strikes me about this is that there are millions of these boys, and now grown-ups, and yet, so many of them still felt alone. And that the internalized expectations for how Boys Should Be are so powerful that liking movies about wars in space and vigilante ass kickers still didn’t feel masculine enough. I identify with the childhood anxiety of knowing that you’re not expressing your assigned gender as others wish you would. But I’m jealous of the Star Wars boys. They tell me about how weird they were growing up, and ask me, was I weird too? And I don’t know where to start, if even those little boys didn’t feel Boy enough.
I was assigned female at birth and identify as female, which makes me cisgender, which is important to say because even though I also identify as gender non-conforming and not into the binary (I’m not unhappy identifying as female, but neither of the two choices feel quite right), I benefit from innumerable privileges of being cis, as well as straight, every minute of every day. As a young kid, I was often assumed to be male, which I almost always preferred despite the collective discomfort it produced in everyone involved once the assumption was corrected. The knowledge that I was making both adults and children uncomfortable (except my family, who was supportive and great), that I wasn’t being who I was supposed to be– a girl– correctly, came as early as when I began to form memories. Kids at the playground would call me “It” and speculate about my gender within earshot. I got very good at solo monkey bar tricks.
Internalizing early on that I was a failed girl, I took my inability to be normal and ran with it. I lived in, and looked like, an aggressive rejection of reality. I watched black and white comedy shorts from the 1920s, Charlie Chaplin silent movies, and tap dancing musicals, and modeled myself after the leading men and boys of the 20s, 30s, and 40s. I wore suspenders, my grandpa’s old hats, and sweatpants pulled up to my knees to look like knickerbockers. The very real social failures of my life at school were easier to cope with as a movie star from the first half of the century. I didn’t ever feel like a girl, and this way, I didn’t feel like a failure. As the boy protagonist in the black and white landscape of my imagination, I was friends with all the kids on the block, dancing and building things out of trash.
Adults who wanted to support me gave me books about “tomboys.” All the representations of tomboys were girls who had two long braids and wore overalls. I hated the word, except the “boy” part. I wasn’t a long haired girl in overalls, I was a short-haired kid in boy’s clothes who couldn’t be a boy but most certainly was not a girl. I was a person being called “It” on the playground who was getting increasingly depressed, and the long haired tomboy girls didn’t make me feel better. The only other female person I ever saw who looked anything like me was Ellen, and when she came out toward the end of my time in elementary school, I thought for a while that I must be gay too since I had short hair like her (despite the relentless crushes on boys I’d had already for years, and would continue to have).
Right before 6th grade, high off the momentum of spending the summer on a trampoline with my brother and his friends, who were older and emotionally intelligent enough to be nice to the strange younger kid, I decided I would do what I was supposed to do no matter how difficult it felt. I bought tight shirts and flare pants and grew my hair past my ears. On the first day of school, I abandoned my usual post at the monkey bars and approached the most popular girls in my grade, whose recess activity was to walk the perimeter of the playground. I asked the leader if I could walk around with them. Incredibly, she said yes. That’s how I began following girls, trying to do it right.
Girls who wanted to be my friend wanted to help me get better at being a girl. Like a Bridget Jones-esque makeover montage, I let them burn my forehead with curling irons, poke me in the eyes with eyeliner pencils, and look me up and down in dressing rooms. I was so thrilled for the friendships I was convinced I enjoyed the forehead burning (my same friend, always burning me in the same place, before every quarterly Junior High dance, as reliable as the changing of the seasons). What began in early adolescence– genuine friendships forged through drag-like gender performance– continued well into adulthood. I’ve made wonderful friends through playing dressing up with them. The friendships are real, and even the girlness was real, at the time. I really do like skinny jeans, but I wouldn’t know unless my college roommate had dragged me to the Mall of America and made me try them on. And then, after, yelled “Damn, girl!” every day I wore them, until she had convinced me that I could feel cool and hot, and I eventually really believed it. To go from Fictional Leading Man Child to Girl Who Felt Confident was such a transition that I wasn’t sure if my old self was real, because I knew the new one was.
I told myself I was just a weird kid who’d learned how to be normal, that the problem had been mine.
“Make sure it looks like a girl haircut,” I desperately told the stylist when I got my hair cut short again, in college, the first time since my Leading Man days. I wanted short hair, always did, but there was urgency in my voice as I repeated the phrase to her. “Look like a girl, look like a girl,” repeated year after year to haircutters and myself.
If I had put the amount of hours I spent worrying about looking like a girl into learning how to tap dance, I would currently be an excellent, self-accepting, gender non-conforming tap dancer. As it is, I am a 27-year-old who has only recently realized that, if the friendships I made through playing dress-up are real, I can stop being terrified that everyone will disappear. And I can dress myself.
I’m not sure what that means yet, but so far it’s been a lot of working through feeling self-conscious in the men’s department, simultaneously feeling comfortable in a way I’m not sure I’ve felt as an adult.
“Ms. Molly, you look like a boy,” one of my students said to me last year. The familiar words, coming from a first grader, made me briefly flash back to the playground and my lone post at the monkey bars. Momentarily, I was hurt, hearing the phrase that had always been used against me, until I realized that the little kid saying it had no maliciousness in his voice. “Are you a boy?”
“My name is Ms. Molly,” I said. He didn’t interpret it as an answer. “If I was a boy wouldn’t my name be Mister Molly?”
“But you have boy hair and boy boots,” he explained, pointing to my snow boots.
“What makes them boy boots?” I asked.
“Boys wear them.”
This particular boy has a girl twin, which I ambitiously hoped had endowed him with internalized knowledge that gender is largely influenced by socialization. Not yet.
“Aren’t I Ms. Molly?” I asked. He nodded. “And aren’t I wearing them?”
He was satisfied, and so was I.
Tags: gender, i am not going to make a good golly miss molly joke, malls, molly knefel, there are nine genders and one of them is hmm
This made me smile.
“the minute I cross the threshold into the men’s department it’s like I’m 13 years old again, convinced I’ll be caught where I’m not supposed to be.”
That. Yes.
my older sister called me “brother-sister” for most of my elementary/early middle school years. I kind of looked like Steve Agee from the Sarah Silverman Program.
Relate to a lot of this! I’m also a cis de-facto-straight female, but “You look like a boy” was the go-to insult towards me from elementary through high school–though except for the androgynous grunge phase, I generally dressed “like a girl.” I’ve got large features and a strong jaw, and prefer my hair short (because I’m lazy and don’t want to mess with it), so I guess I might look “masculine”? I did finally acquire hips and an ass when I hit 30, so now you can tell I’m a girl from the back.
I suspect, though, that I carry myself and speak “like a man”–in that I’m loud and assertive and think my opinions are important and don’t defer to authority. I was never taught that this was “unladylike”; my dad’s vocally proud of having raised daughters who aren’t shrinking violets. Generally my family was never into traditional gender roles: Mom handles the money and does the remodeling, Dad does the cooking. I thank my lucky stars for this every day.
Yes, to everything you just said. I’m also a “cis de-facto-straight female’. I’m thankful for the reaped versatility of not having had to adhere to ladylike standards as a kid. My sister and I were raised by a mom who hated make-up and never wore high heels and a dad who expected us to know our way around a hardware store.
I have to admit though, I turn into a bit of a shrinking violet when people openly speculate on my gender or call me “Pat” even though I’m clearly dressed like a woman…a comfortable, sensible shoes goddam woman.
Ha, yeah, my mom never wears heels cause she’s three inches taller than my dad.
And isn’t it weird that people who clearly believe masculinity’s superior use our perceived masculinity as an insult?
Yep. Yep yep yep yep yep.
I just wanted to be able to dress like Katherine Hepburn when she was off screen – slender, semi-androgynous to masculine, still smart-sexy. Or Dietrich. Unfortunately, the front of me does not drape well in a suit.
She is my style idol too – too bad I am genetically as far away from her body type as I could imagine while still being a cis-lady.
Loved reading this! And totally identified with many parts of it. Thank you!
DapperQ has become a great resource for those of us constantly figuring out how to find and wear kickass masculine & androgynous style on our not-cis-male bodies. http://www.dapperq.com/
And you’re even from Iowa? I didn’t know I had a twin.
Aww. This is really sweet. I’m so glad you are learning to feel comfortable as who you want to be. My boy/girl/girl triplets are 3 and are just learning about boys things and girls things (at daycare) and I have to combat it all at home, because I don’t want any of them to feel weird or that they’re missing out, if they want something that doesn’t “belong” to their perceived gender
“…boys who grew up feeling like failures at masculinity for loving Star Wars or Spiderman more than sports”
This was definitely me as a boy in the 80s. The thing about Star Wars Boys, though, is that while we grow up being told we’re failures at masculinity, there’s still plenty of pop culture out there, and was back then too (Weird Science, Revenge of the Nerds, etc) that says that straight cisgender white male nerds are heroes and deserve the adoration and love of the beautiful women of their dreams simply for being good students who don’t like sports and know what a parsec really is. It’s a different form of toxic masculinity, one that dresses itself up in (often) imagined oppression.
I was a person being called “It” on the playground who was getting increasingly depressed
It seems like every day I run into something that reminds me how dearly we need to start using gender-neutral pronouns, and this gutting little aside is today’s example.
Thanks so much for sharing this!
This was so well written and a really good read.
This reminds me of growing up in the 70’s with a short an androgynous bowl cut. I had a play date once, when I was 5, with the child of a co-worker of my father’s. This was the first time we had met. We eyed each other for a good hour before one of us finally asked if the other was a boy or a girl. Turns out we were both girls. 🙂 We became good friends until her family moved again (her dad was in the Navy).
Both my daughters love the boys section because it is the only place to find t-shirts with dinosaurs and kick-ass sweater vests.
True story, I had a neighborhood friend as a kid who I played with for months before I realized he thought I was a boy and he realized he was mistaken. I had a bowl haircut and my favorite colors were blue and red, which was apparently enough to get me mis-gendered by strangers about once a week.
Boy, yes, this. I made a friend when I was about seven. It wasn’t months, it was only a week or two. He liked me a lot until he found out I was a girl. Then he hated me for the rest of our lives — I mean until he moved away when we were both thirteen.
My first taste of the patriarchy.
That ending is wonderful!!
And dem tags: “there are nine genders and one of them is hmm.”
Toast, you slay me!
I enjoyed this, and so did my dressed-from-the-boys-dept daughter.
Good for you, and her, and us all.
“If I had put the amount of hours I spent worrying about [aspect of self] into learning how to tap dance, I would currently be an excellent, self-accepting, [aspect of self] tap dancer.”
Life lesson: COSIGNED X 1 MILLION
(though I found tap dancing terribly stressful, tbh)
Hi Molly, I loved this article. Someone else posted a link to DapperQ, but I wanted to leave this link to a very sweet post about someone (someones!) actually being awesome and helping out a gender nonconforming teen: http://www.dapperq.com/2010/05/a-great-dapperq-mo…
the most popular girls in my grade, whose recess activity was to walk the perimeter of the playground.
So it’s a universal, er…widespread…er…it wasn’t just my school then. But why? Why did they do that? Why is this what girls did for recess???
Boys run around and make noise, girls socialise and take a turn about the room.
Ha! I did that in elementary school, but my best friend and I were definitely the artsy weirdos rather than the cool girls (they were sitting on the picnic table, a very exclusive domain).
I wish I had this answer when my mother told me she thought I had a ‘masculine’ brain. ‘Am I not female? And is it not my brain?’
Instead I made some confused response about how that wasn’t true because I was bad at navigation like any ‘normal’ female.
I don’t really know if this has anything to do with anything, but something about this story reminded me of the summer of 2009 which I spent predominantly in an over-sized cotton plaid shirt that belonged to my ex-boyfriend(with out a bra), no makeup and jean shorts. Literally the whole summer. Never got so laid so often in my life.
Wow. It is rare for me to read an article about gender discomfort that I agree with so completely. I never had a problem with my body, it was fine with me to have female body parts, and I’m attracted to men, but I didn’t feel “like a girl” and I didn’t and don’t act much like one, apparently. It never felt like the problem was inside my skin, it just felt like there wasn’t a way in the world to be that fit with what I’m actually like.
Nothing to add besides this article was GREAT, thank you for sharing!
This is the first time ever I read an article that talks about my own life experience and does not trivialize it as many people who I try to share these feelings often do. I sound like a grown up man, I always did. I don’t know if I like wearing make-up or not because I started doing it to fit in, so I wear it every other day… I hate the word “tomboy” and its even worse french word equivalent : “garçon manqué” (failed boy) because I’m so not just boylike, I just don’t fit into stereotypes one way or another.
Thank you for putting words on this quiet suffering, this longing for acceptance, the self-doubts, the wondering and the loneliness it begets. I will re read this many times.
This article is inducing a slow-growing realization that I never identified with tomboys, although I read and reread Caddie Woodlawn feeling that I should, and that I also wanted to look like a boy from the 20s. That time I discovered knickers and newsboy caps via some PBS historical show and I pretended to be the boy in the show for weeks… how much I liked playing men’s parts in Shakespeare plays… it’s all starting to make sense.
Thank you for sharing — great read, and it’s nice to know there are others who had the same experiences.
Great text!
Something I am wondering is, why is there no kind of community for people like us, somthing to belong to? (Or is there?)
Because even though I have furtunately much like you arrived at a place where I like myself for exactly who I am and certankly feel no reason ti feel ashamed, I sometimes have the feeling that people don't really "get" me – and also as a consequence that i avoide to express myself quite as feely as I might do otherwise, in order not to confuse people.
I like to dress and behave rather androgynously, even though I am female, overally okay with and expecting to be percieved as female and I am into men and together with a man.
I somtimes wonder what people think about me
"Is she lesbian?" (no) "Is she just weird?" (probably yes ;-))
"Is she to shy or stupid to dress or behave more classically attactive?" (definitly not! it is just what I am confortable with, who I am. A genuine inner desire to be who I am.)
My childhood was pretty much very similar to what you described in your post by the way. (Except probaly that I was never so really successful with the popular girls, but at least I did at certain point decide to and succeed in "blending in" more or less)
What I ask myself amongst other/what is artly holding me back is:
Are lesbian people irritated by me or would they see me as an "imposter" if I would express myself even more freely?
Would tradional people automatically assume me as lesbian? (which I am not, but I principally don't have a problem if people want to think that.. )
But isn't it somehow strange that the notation of masculine presenting women is so closely coupled to homosexuality and/or transgenderism?
Gener on-conformity is not and should not be exclusive to these groups I think.
I think the reason why it is so closely couple in the minds of many people is that homosexuality and transgenderism has a clear public representation and acknowledgment and lobby, and we don't, which brings me back to my initial statement.
I think we should have a lobby. I want a group to belong to, people who really understand how I am feeling. (Which I do feel after reading your great post, but it is really relatively rare..)
And ultimately, perhaps also a way to express to the society who I am so that they can get it.
This other gret blog post pretty much summarizes it http://vagendamagazine.com/2015/01/theres-no-othe…
"being a butch straight women is _not_ a thing" (regardless whether, I or other around here now would identify themselves as "butch", but the articule covers pretty much a similar theme as yours)
Perhaps what I want is as well "my" color on the queer rainbow flag.. because, despite being "straight", I feel my identity somehow belongs to the queer movement (queer as in gender non conforming/not identifying with typical gender roles, but not trans), only there is no definitive place for me (us?) there yet..?
(I found some other discussion on the internet which was on the question of "straight" people who don't identify with typical gender roles can join a queer movement, and somebody suggested that in the long definition of LGBT (LGBTQQIP2SAA) there is also one q for "questioning" and the S for "supporter" so there is always a place for everyone
But, sorry, that is _not_ what I have in mind! – this is rather another example for me of people who don't get that we are also "a thing"..