Were you a 'tom boy' growing up?

[LeslieKnopefan]

I grew up in the 80s / 90s and was a complete tom boy, I hated wearing dresses - in fact the only pictures of me wearing them growing up was at weddings wear I look miserable!

I loved football, watched it obsessively and played it in the garden and for a while played for a team but that wasn't very easy as there wasn't many about.

It wasn't easy, boys didnt want me to play football with them and from the age of about 13 playing sport wasnt cool for girls so I gave most of it up to fit in.

But, no one questioned if I was a girl, of course I was and now as an adult I am very happy to be a woman, even if I prefer the company of men and still hardly wear a dress or makeup and love sport.

Is it easier for girls to be tomboys (for a better word!) now? There does seem to be more sports but I am very worried that if I was a teen now I would think I was in the wrong body or have other people say that to me?

Yes I was. I felt like I didn't understand why people treated boys differently. Very happy in my clearly female body though. But had mermaids come to my primary school or even secondary who knows if I would have decided I needed medical changes etc.

Now a very happy grown woman.

Yes and my DD is the same.

I wasn't but looking at how things are currently it was perhaps easier back then.

Maybe there was a small window in the 90s when Sporty Spice was popular when it was okay to have typically masculine interests and still be a girl.

Now of course if you even look at a football you must consider whether you are really a boy.

I think it's harder for girls now. I was never ever questioned and I used to dress mostly in my dad's clothes, or very practical clothes - jeans, shirts, baggy sweaters etc. My favourite sweater age 10 had a motorbike on.

My dd was constantly questioned by other girls. 'Why aren't your socks pink' etc.

If I found out mermaids were coming to DDs school I would keep her home that day. She is highly impressionable and I will be doing everything to ensure she finds her own way not someone else’s way.

Yes. My brother and I used to tell people we were twins. I had short hair and boys' pass-me-downs.

I was lucky in that my brothers and their friends (all boys) included me as a child, but it was a hell of a shock when I got to 12 and they no longer accepted me. I remember being really upset the day I realised they saw me as a girl. I had no girl friends at the time - I only started making them as a teenager.

If I was a child today I would be asking to trans. I would want to be a boy, with their freedom to wear and do what they like. I would have wanted my breasts bound or chopped off, I would have wanted to avoid starting periods.

Sadly I'd be an infertile boy. I would have missed out on having wonderful children and a fulfilling life - though I'd still be happy to lose the boobs and I could have done without the attention they brought me, as well as the awful periods, endometriosis, horrendous menopause etc etc.

Yes there certainly wasn't all the pink stuff in the 80s, I did have the odd doll but mostly played with the same toys as my older brother.

Yes. I can remember getting out of the bath and slicking my hair back and with just jeans on I would look in the mirror and pretend to be a boy. Pretend being the operative word.

It scares me that today this could be misconstrued as me wanting to be a boy, I most certainly do not want to change my identity I wanted to role play, as children do.

I am lucky DD has not had the experiences you describe. All of her group of friends (about 6 with DD) would probably fall into the tom boy category. They play football with the boys at break. Loads of dds clothes come from boys section as she is starwars mad. No one has ever said a word to her. At her communion all the boys from her class walked she looking totally not herself in a communion dress, came straight up to her and all got their multiple photos doing their dab in front of the altar. —We live in Ireland where Catholicism a weird combination of forced on everyone who wants to be educated and al la carte at the same time.—

Maryz - I remember the same thing with my neighbours. From the age of about 6 to 14 I spent all my holidays hanging out with them (both boys) Having water fights, playing computer games, football and basketball.

I remember one day going round and they just didnt want to hang out with me anymore as they wanted to go hang out with other boys or girls that they fancied :(

I also found girls tended not to really like me as I got on well with boys. For example when I was about 10 I was playing football at the park and a group of older girls turned up and beat me up for no reason except that I was hanging out with some older boys.

But yes luckily i was accepted just as a tomboy by my family, although my Mum did ask me if I was gay once as I went through a phase of hanging out with lesbians - nope, just liked their company.

I was definitely a tom boy, but I think that was more common in the 80s as clothing (in particular) was less gendered. We all lived in jeans and tops and dresses and skirts were very much for 'best'. (I vividly remember the impact Princess Diana had on fashion actually, suddenly a lot of people started wearing frills.)

Growing up in a mining town though meant I was surrounded by female role models who didn't have the money or inclination to indulge in the kind of stuff it's expected for women to do these days. Genuinely don't think there was anything more 'girly' than a hairdressers in my home town till 2000 or so - now there are around a half dozen nail places, tanning places, beauticians etc.

I was ridiculously girly. It was all so innocent then (90s). It's alarming to think that today my parents would be accused of brainwashing me into conforming to gender stereotypes and pressured into forcing me into doing things that I didn't want to to 'breakdown' stereotypes. meanwhile my best friends parents you gavebotobably been encouraged to give her hormone blockers (extreme tom boy). I'm glad that we were able to enjoy our childhoods without these ridiculous political angles.

Yes I was, I had no dolls, only cars and star wars toys. I played football and climbed trees. I hated dresses, and as a teen I hid under baggy clothes. I hated my breasts and my curves. I walked like a boy. Now I'm feminine when I want to be, I quite like heels, dresses and make up now and again. I think society accepts masculine women much better than feminine men though, I think masculine women are less of a threat to collective patriarchy than feminine men.

I was a ‘Tom boy’ I guess. I hated dresses, because they restricted my movement and I couldn’t climb trees properly.

I desperately loved football, but girls weren’t allowed to play.

I hated wearing dresses at school as I could never do handstands or cartwheels without flashing my knickers.

I only had boys as friends at school. Boys were easy to get on with, the girls were quite spiteful and I didn’t fit in with my short hair.

Come 13, I found make up, grew my hair, and found boys

So glad girls can wear trousers at school now.

Yeah, sort of. I loved dressing up, but I also spent a lot of time up trees and pretending to be Indiana Jones.

I doubt this is true btw Now of course if you even look at a football you must consider whether you are really a boy.
There are a couple of girls on my sons football team, they are considered regular team mates but I am pretty sure noone thinks they should wonder if they are really boys!
I know gender has become quite rigid in some ways but football is one of the few areas that is really opening up to women.

Outy

I was ridiculously girly. It was all so innocent then (90s). It's alarming to think that today my parents would be accused of brainwashing me into conforming to gender stereotypes and pressured into forcing me into doing things that I didn't want to to 'breakdown' stereotypes.

That is an interesting point. There were many girls who love to perform feminity around me at school. It just wasn’t the extreme version of feminity around today that you could spend hours per day struggling to meet.

I will say though that gender roles were far, far more definite when I grew up than they are today. It was an absolute rarity that a woman would go out to work where I grew up. This is inspite if the town I grew up in being majorly working class. But it was a provincial town in Ireland.

@Yellow working mothers were the norm where/when I grew up. I suppose you could say that we didn't really have gender roles in my household. Both parents worked, both parents did housework, both parents did childcare, both parents did 'feminine' things like sewing and knitting. Oh dear, I think I just realised why I was so girly. My household was just really feminine (father raised by a single mother so probably had a similar experience and very much a lace making man rather than a football watcher). Right, well, I'm going to mull that I've over.

@Yellow working mothers were the norm where/when I grew up

Yes Outy a lot of my family emigrated to the UKand would have grown up in households similar to yours where both parents worked. Still and maybe this was a hang up from home but tbh I doubt it, there was still a very strong gendered split in terms of the domestic chores. The women essentially did all of the indoor work and child rearing and worked. In Ireland even wc women in rural town communities could live off a single factory income though not comfortably.

I was very much a tomboy although I wasn't allowed to play football with the boys (not cool enough at play time and only boys in the primary school team). I did play football at secondary school (all girls) and with my younger brother. I also hung out with a mix of girls and boys and ended up doing a mix of sport, computer games, and trying to fit in so just doing whatever other people wanted.

At home I had stereotypical girly stuff forced on me quite a lot. My mum even insisted that my room was decorated mostly in pink at one point even though she knew my favourite colour is blue. Age 13 or so I had my boob-length hair cut super short and only wore very unisex clothing outside school.

Not much has changed really! I still don't do make up or dresses/skirts, although I wear more fitted tops instead of just t-shirts and don't hate pink as much as I did. I've never questioned the fact that I'm female - maybe being at an all girls secondary school helped that in a weird way - I know I don't fit the stereotypical expectations but then I don't think I ever have for anything so I'm used to that. I actually got mistaken for a boy a few times as a 13 yr old (I hit puberty fairly late) and it actually upset me quite a lot at the time. I think I was so used to walking around in my school uniform (we had to wear skirts) that on the few occasions I went out in public in sporty clothes I hadn't realised people would see me totally differently.

I did a lot of ‘masculine’ stuff. Not so much as a child, but def as a teen. We were country kids and spent a lot of time in trees or roaming fields - it was very gender neutral (if you lost in a wood or building a dam on a river then no one cared if you had a penis.
I trained pretty hard as a teen - just running - and spent weekends backpacking/ rock climbing, mostly with guys as there weren’t a lot of girls doing it. The occasional one. I drank beer and out of date cider with them in the arse end of nowhere by campfires.
I want to make it super clear that I in no way wanted to be male. It just didn’t make any difference to me that I had a different body, and as a kid and teen, it didn’t make any difference to anyone else in those activities.
I joined cadets when our local unit decided to allow girls in, which meant opportunities to do a lot of shooting, learn to fly, and more opportunities for sport and outdoor recreation. I became a sort of ‘rent-a-girl’ when anyone needed a female to accompany another female on expeditions. It gave me the opportunity to do even more, as it meant I was invited into national level stuff too. Weeks doing winter mountaineering etc. It proved to me that someone else was like me but was very interesting - in all of these there was a tacit understanding that we were there together because we had to be, but we were never a pair - just two more of the bigger group who happened to be girls. I didn’t ever bond more specifically with the other girl member, as opposed to any of the guys. We were, in fact, just more of the guys in that respect, although I did get a fair amount of follow-up calls for dates so maybe not quite as much as I thought
No one ever suggested I should have been a boy. And no one had a real problem with me disappearing for days, climbing, swimming in rivers (with the obligatory discussion about skinny dipping - no) and then coming home and falling asleep on the floor. (And I didn’t have a problem with the amount of male interest but I was very picky!)
This was all tacitly accepted as a kid, and I was lucky to be in the right time. It’s only as an adult that society has told me no.
I assumed by now that gender would been busted as a defining force. I’m frankly horrified that the west has practically put it on a pedestal and are butchering children to conform to it. What a fucking mess.

Yep! Didn't start dressing "like a girl" until puberty.

I think it's harder for girls now, since the girls formerly known as tomboys are now often assumed to have genderfeels regardless of their own feelings about the issue and that has to create some social pressure.

Oh yes i was very boisterous too and at the age of 10 I was tall for my age and was super confident.

This led to me being sent to guides from Brownies a few months early. I remember trying to explain to Brown Owl that I wasn't old enough for guides yet but she had other ideas and sent me to guides before she probably had a breakdown.

She famously told my parents I had made more baking than any brownie she had ever had! Poor woman, I must have been a nightmare ha ha

Oh interestingly - two of the male instructors that I got to work with a lot during those years have subsequently been locked up as paedophiles (and it is fairly likely that they were preying on the teenage boys I was hanging out with). It’s very interesting to me that I didn’t recognize sexual predators when they were targeting my friends, but was more than able to feel it directed at me in other environments (predatory males at school, in town, the usual groping). None of this happened to me in this environment. But abuse was clearly happening. To the boys. (All different groups - like I said, rent-a-girl). Not a masculine idyll. But an interesting memory that I, as a female, felt completely safe, when at least some of the guys were not.

Very much so.

I loved climbing trees, and spent my life working out how many ways each of the trees at the end of our garden could be climbed. I had an Aston Villa football strip, I hated wearing skirts, and I wanted to be a boy.

I used to wish and wish to turn into a boy, and I had a kind of idea that cats were young dogs and could make the change at the start of being a teen. (I was about 7 when I thought that).

I hated that girls were treated differently, and that at big family gatherings at my aunts the girls were dragged into the kitchen for endless washing up, not the boys.

I really hated it when all friends wanted to do was play with our hair! Brushing it, plaiting it, playing hairdressers, I couldn’t stand it.

But gradually, as adolescence approached, I grew into womanhood.

From teens onwards I stopped wishing to be a boy and loved being a strong troublesome feminist woman.

I still can’t bear ‘pampering ‘, a ‘girlie day’ involving shopping and a spa fills me with horror, I despair at the pinkification of stuff ‘for girls’ etc etc.

I am really glad that I was not persuaded I was trans though. I know I am not, but could have been persuaded so between the ages of 7 and 12.

I was born in the early 70s and the youngest of a large family of mostly females. My father desperately and vocally wanted more sons. It was very accepted that boys were the preferred sex.
I don't think I was a "Tom boy" as a result of this but I am sure there were some influencing factors.
I grew up in a small village and I loved the climbing trees, fishing, playing in mud and football. I think most kids were gender less. However most of my friends were boys but also I was very close in age with my brother and we played together always. I only dressed in boys clothes and I really yearned to be a boy. I didn't get any pressure from anyone to be anything other than to be "myself". Mostly I think those times everyone just accepted who you were.
Once I hit puberty I was very happy to hang out with the girls, however they weren't really sporty enough (just by circumstance more than anything else). I enjoyed the attention of boys.It was the height of Thatcher era when all girls should be engineers. Which wasn't great for me as my maths and sciences whilst pretty good weren't as good as the other areas so I ended up making choices that weren't necessarily the best choices for me. I did feel some pressure to be something I wasn't necessarily.
I do feel lucky i wasn't expected to make choices about my gender when I was that that age. So much pressure before I even knew myself.