The TOMBOY Paperback Is Out Today!

Some things have changed. Some things have not.

“It’s your book,” my editor said. “Write what you want.”

I had sent her the first three chapters of what would become TOMBOY, with an apology: It was kind of an info dump. I was so overwhelmed by the history I’d collected about how we’d come to the conclusion that there were boy and girl colors, clothes, toys, activities, that I wanted to include all of it. But I hadn’t yet arranged it to present an argument.

My editor urged me to find my own point of view. The book, after all, was born out of several op-eds I’d written about gender for The New York Times. My opinions were what had landed me a book contract.

Perhaps I was afraid at what I’d found in the research, not just about the history of gender norms but about the history of girls who didn’t conform to them. What I saw did not jive with the popular narrative starting to swirl in the press, that kids know their gender identity as young as two years old, that we can (and should) identify kids as transgender early and let them live as the opposite sex. Perhaps I was afraid to express my opinions because I had already been called a transphobe, a bigot, a child abuser because of gently suggesting that we should celebrate gender nonconformity and not assume anything about a child’s trajectory or identity because of it.

What I found, after interviewing dozens of kids who had been labeled as or called themselves tomboys, was exactly that: There was no way to predict how such children would turn out. There was a strong connection between childhood gender nonconformity and sexuality. A weaker one between it and transgender identity, but then again, that concept really hadn’t existed when most of these people were growing up. The one correlation I did observe almost universally was that between tomboyism and self-confidence. Kids who buck gender norms, and are supported in doing so, tend to feel comfortable with themselves. By embracing their otherness, they get used to dancing to the beat of their own drum. Tomboyism is connected to a host of positive outcomes: better marriages, better jobs, higher self-esteem. But it is not a predictor of any one outcome. Even the girls who desperately wanted to be boys, or assumed they would grow up to be a man, had wildly different adulthoods.

I said as much in the book, but I did so without challenging the dominant narratives about trans and non-binary people. I let them speak for themselves, though sometimes pointed out that their stories seemed very rooted in the stereotypes I was trying to explode. They told me they had no other language to explain it, and that they were celebrating the explosion of the binary, and I know that for many people, this new gender zeitgeist is liberating. For others, of course, it is limiting, to say the least.

My book was not about exposing the faultiness of the current zeitgeist, which presents sex as mutable, or about the rapid onset gender dysphoria kids being wrongly medicated, of which there are many. I talked to people who had happily transitioned, and those were the stories I told. I did take a lot of time to show that there was very little clear way to tell the difference between kids being called trans today and the very masculine tomboys of yore, who were never socially transitioned or assumed to be boys trapped in girls’ bodies, and that we shouldn’t create meaning from a boy in a dress or a girl playing football. Indeed, we should give them all the room in the world to explore and try things on, while teaching them that sex is immutable and that gender—how masculine or feminine a child is—is incredibly varied.

Interestingly, the World Professional Association of Transgender Health, which establishes guidelines for medical and mental health care for trans and gender-diverse people (though I’m not sure how many people follow them these days), has said as much in the draft of its new Standards of Care.

It opens with three tenets:

• Childhood gender diversity is an expected aspect of general human development.

• Childhood gender diversity is not a pathology or a mental health disorder.

• Diverse gender expressions in children cannot always be assumed to reflect a transgender identity or gender incongruence.

This is the thesis of my book, and of almost all my writing on this subject. For expressing these sentiments in the past, I have been threatened and called names, and perhaps because I wasn’t a tomboy and have low self-esteem, I allowed myself to be less critical than I might have, because of that bullying. Now the leading organization on trans health issues has echoed my sentiments.

I did find my point-of-view, however, and it is represented in this book; I changed some language in the paperback to reflect where I stand now, and my increasing willingness to speak out and speak up. In the end, this book is still very much a celebration of gender diversity and a call to let kids be kids without the pressure of labels that calm adults, who have trouble withstanding the discomfort of ambiguity. The book is full of information to help people understand today’s gender zeitgeist in a cultural and historical context, and to empower them, I hope, to be strong enough to express their opinions in a world which doesn’t accommodate deviating from the ideological norm.

Tomboys have always deviated from norms. I celebrate by trying to be more like them every day.

PLEASE BUY MY BOOK!