Do Tom Boys have female socialisation?

[DJLippy]

Does presenting as a boy in childhood effect the development of "female socialisation."

As a child I had short hair and wore boys clothes. Strangers would assume I was a boy and I was constantly mis-sexed. Without secondary sex characteristics the only way we can tell what sex a child is is via signifiers like hair and clothes.

I played rough and tumble with the lads and didnt really have any female friends until I went to secondary school. Most of my play (which helps yo inform interests and behaviours) was "as a boy" - wrestling and climbing trees and playing war.

Now obviously these are all arbitrary things and they dont have a 'gender' but as a society we ascribe meaning onto these things.

The adults and my friends knew I was really a girl so I dont know whether I was ever treated 'as a boy' but strangers would have had no idea. Also, did the constant mismatch between my gender presentation and sex 'trick' their brains into viewing me as a boy?

A significant amount of a child development comes from interacting with your peers. I never really had any close female friends until I went to secondary school. I didnt sit quietly and play 'nice'. I dont know if I ever learnt that knack. As an adult I can be quite tactless with female friends because I dont play along with the hidden code of behaviour we are all supposed to have learnt.

When I went to secondary school I had to grow out my hair and the sexes became segregated again so I could say my 'male identity' ended then. Puberty has a significant effect in the formation of female socialisation because you realise how vulnerable you are to aggressive male sexuality - even via small acts like having your bra string pulled.

Now obviously I didnt experience true 'male socialisation' but I dont think I experienced true 'female socialisation.' How much did my childhood gender incongruence effect my development as a girl and a woman? Did I manage to avoid a certain amount of my socialisation?

OneEpisode

The figures for Scotland are
The Scottish Funding Council says nearly six out of 10 first-year Scottish students are women

In 2015, 41.3% of new Scottish university students were men compared to 42.5% in 2011

Scotland has very few single sex schools- even private schools tend to be mixed so girls doing better in tests isn't down to single sex schools. It sounds as if your daughter is at a rubbish school because exam results and university entrance do not bear out your assertion that being good at tests isn't a girl thing.

Maybe what this discussion shows us is that all forms of childhood play, exploration and presentation are normal. Normal for both girls and boys, by nature restricted only according to the tastes of each individual. But society judges and therefore restricts these things by gender.

Is it because of the age of the average FWR poster that we see the 70s as halcyon days of ungenderered expectations?

But this phrase struck me about the OP: As an adult I can be quite tactless with female friends because I dont play along with the hidden code of behaviour we are all supposed to have learnt.

In women and girls being gender non-conforming is associated with autism. I'm not diagnosing you! But it is striking.

Wendy

Yes, I agree.
In fact your experience is like the stereotypical trans kid experience. But of course the nerdy quiet pink loving boys still have male socialization and privilege - this is applied to them from the outside whether they want it or not, unfortunately. This means they are eg expected to excel at computers and math and such, will be harassed for failing to be more masculine, etc. if they were experiencing “female socialization” this would not be the case. There would be no expectation that they are failing to meet. As a tomboy presumably at least SOME people conveyed their disapproval to you, once they realized you were female. That wouldn’t have happened if you were actually male.

I was a tomboy, desperately wanted to be an actual boy but I definitely still experienced female socialisation (that was part of why I wanted to be a boy, wanting to be treated like my brothers instead of differently because I was a girl)

I was definitely ‘like the other girls’ and I’m gender critical as I understood it through second wave feminism. Also believe we are all a mix of things traditionally ascribed male or female but structural oppression means women are expected (at times backed up by very overt societal structures) to behave in the feminine ways. At times it can mean that the person is disapproved of or even punished for not following expectations - and that applies to men and women.

Or that "hard" subjects like medicine , veterinary medicine, law and accountancy are female dominated?

And women had to fight to get into some of those subjects as they were seen to not be able to do them. When societal oppression was very overt.

Walk into a maths, physics, engineering department and start counting up the number of females there. Plenty of evidence socialisation factors impact, but more subtle than a straightforward view that ‘women can’t do them’.

Hi Dido, I do think my daughter’s school is lacking. It is considered “Good” by ofsted which I think means average for England. I don’t have much choice.
Girls clearly include some extraordinary humans and many go onto great things. I hope my daughter will be amongst them,

Maybe what this discussion shows us is that all forms of childhood play, exploration and presentation are normal. Normal for both girls and boys, by nature restricted only according to the tastes of each individual

Agreed- why this has to be turned into "I was a tom boy" is very odd. I don't see the point beyond some sort of attempt to distance oneself from other (lesser?) girls.

I wanted to be a boy when i was little because they had more freedom/choices.
I even managed to convince myself I was "one of the boys" for years. The house of cards started falling once puberty started and friends weren't just friends anymore and I gathered a few sexual assaults under my belt.

There was a period when I tried even harder to delude myself and was so happy when I "passed". I thought I was special and "safe". Daft really.

And I rejected girls a lot based on what society told me girls were and did .

Took me years to realise it all, and even more to see that despite my "rebellion " in some areas I was heavily socialised female.

Even if some things are so deeply ingrained now that I still can't go against them, at least I see them for what they are.

Interesting thread. And yes it's what we've always said, that when you start to list what is meant to 'boy behaviour and girl behaviour' it starts to fall apart.

Perhaps it's more to do with the expectations placed on children, which ramp up at puberty?

Because although I did all those things as a kid riding bikes, climbing trees, etc, expectations were still different. Boys had to find a career, but it wasn't 'as important' for girls.

How many times did we see, in adverts, and media, the woman doing the ironing, with the man sitting down reading the paper? The woman doing the cooking, the man doing the carving - always at the head of the table too.

Even if you didn't yet act accordingly, the messages were everywhere. And we all know the power of advertising.

To what extent does your choice if peers influence your socialisation?

I played with boys and girls growing up but my best mates were always boys. It's quite a long time ago and i dont want to 'project' but I wonder to what extent I was actively rejected by my female peers for failing at being a girl. Playing with your mates is such such an important part of developing. Now, maybe my pals always saw me as a "girl" but I dunno, it was never an issue - I was never told by them I couldn't play certain characters because I was a girl. I think this is a significant part of your development. There is extensive evidence on the difference between the way that boys and girls play. How does playing with the "opposite gender" effect you as an adult?

The adults and my friends knew I was really a girl so I dont know whether I was ever treated 'as a boy' but strangers would have had no idea

You aren't socialised by strangers.
Of course you're socialised around strangers, and social rules are agreed to within a system that include people you don't know, but ultimately, as a tom boy everyone would have treated you like a girl. Eg "be nice, don't be bossy" etc.

You will have been acutely aware of the expectations put upon girls, so although deciding these expectations were not for you, you will never had the same expectations that are put upon boys.

So yes, tom boys are a type of girls and will have experienced female socialisation like other girls.

Dido you misunderstand. I was saying how ordinary these things are and how they are female / womanly “ this says more about society’s expectations than anything else because I am a womanly”.
Whilst you may not be aware of the fact exams have always comparatively favoured boys over girls - girls results are better when coursework is a bigger component.

I agree with you Dido. I notice the stereotypes thing. Incidentally, I hated pretty dresses (although apparently used to love looking at sari fabric), but as an adult was diagnosed with ASD, and I realise now it was because of sensitivity to certain fabrics. I insisted on trousers and comfortable clothes at all times, but I don't think makes me anymore feminine or masculine than the next person, it was a sensory issue, not a personality one.

To use pink as an example, it's a colour. Liking or disliking it doesn't say anything about you any more than liking or disliking the colour orange. Personally, I find it a bit weird to have such strong feelings about a colour once you hit a certain age, though I understand with pink it can be more about what represents. I've noticed in some feminist circles, there can be a lot of appearance-based judgement. Some women and girls naturally look a lot more masculine than others, and some couldn't look "butch" if they tried. I don't think it makes one a better person than the other, or says anything about that person's interests or traits. I just think we should be careful to not place the same connotations on things that we say we want to escape. I think that's why I prefer gender abolishionist to gender critical. I think we need to do more than be critical of the current gender stereotypes.

I do think if you look more masculine as a child, you can miss out on a little bit of female socialisation, from strangers etc. But you know you're a girl and some people know you're a girl and treat you as such, so you can't escape it entirely. And then once puberty really kicks in, it's largely unavoidable.

How does playing with the "opposite gender" effect you as an adult?

No one I grew up with played exclusively with only girls or only boys. Most children have loads of friends of both sexes. The problem is adults saying girls can't do xyz boys can't do xyz. Having friends of both sexes makes for a fully rounded and normal childhood.

I will try and find the American research about their tests. There is no discrimination in the marking (multi choice). If at the end of the test they ask for sex, the results are similar. Girls do a little better than boys of the same age. Better at tests, maybe clever, maybe spent longer practicing this particular skill. Dunno.
If they ask for sex at the start, girls do worse. It’s not in the marking. And it’s probably not every girl, but on average, reminding the subjects of their sex before they do a test of ability drops their performance.
This is modern US teenagers.

This is a nice little summary of the academic results www.themarysue.com/gender-in-test-taking/
As well as the girls having internalised sexism it showed internalised racial stereotypes too.
I’m sure few families actually tried to teach black girls not to be clever, but this study shows society has achieved a statistically observable result,

Dido I think you've missed the fact that I was comparing myself as a child to my sister as a child, and how now my sister is different to me and less practical. I wondered, as per the OP, whether playing out and being physical led to great spatial awareness.

I am ex Army and ex fire brigade and have never ever been anything other than female. I fought for my rights to be treated equally as my male peers and made some headway. I'm old now but the baton was taken up by other women and now we have better equality than we had when I was a young woman. My stance is nothing to do with anything trans but very much pro women.

You can eff off with your rudeness.

why this has to be turned into "I was a tom boy" is very odd. I don't see the point beyond some sort of attempt to distance oneself from other (lesser?) girls.

Because growing up I WAS different from other girls. It's a bit of a cop out to say "we all loved playing with trucks get over yourself." My male identification wasnt arbitrary- I think that i liked those things explicitly because they WEREN'T for girls. I actively rejected my sex it wasnt coincidental. And yes I do believe that being a tomboy was a form of "not like other girls." It would be nice to have an honest conversation about what childhood gender incongruence is really all about and how it impacts your development. I dont think I escaped female socialisation but I'd say that I had a different type of female socialisation to my little sister who was very much a "girly girl."

Can we change back to the subject? I think we do take roles based on the opportunities and circumstances. For a while I was the girly girl and chose the pink cake, my sister had the blue one. We are both fully women.
My husband believed he liked the soft centred chocolates because those were the unpopular ones in his birth family, unfortunately, he grew out of that defined role.

Sorry DJ crossed post

Answering the question first before reading thread

Yes I think tomboys do/ did get female socialisation
Your parents and family always know
Every teacher knows if you are male or female. So did every other child, because we had 2 to a desk, boys left, girls right.
You couldn't talk to a boy in our primary without being accused of fancying the lad, so if you didn't play with the girls you played alone
Although children who would avoid me at school would play with me outside of school

And once you are past primary, unless you are very lucky, you get a female shape which no amount of baggy clothing will disguise

Hmm.

I have a sister, growing up (and still now, really, thinking about it) she was very much a tomboy - short hair, hated skirts and dresses, v sporty etc. I was much more of a girly-girl - dresses/ makeup, more traditionally feminine interests.

When we reached adulthood we each relaxed a bit - I'm much more androgynously dressed, have fairly un-feminine interests. My sister is much more open to wearing dresses on special occasions.

Like you, OP, my sister was bullied by other girls, so I can see why she wouldn't have wanted to waste effort trying to fit in - or maybe she was a bit different to start with and the bullying crystallised around that?

Our mother was very glamorous, and very controlling and critical. She was openly critical of my sister's appearance and openly praised me for wearing dresses etc (although not for working hard at school). I think it's quite possible that my sister rebelled and I then saw an opportunity to ingratiate myself.... but then again, my mother also had a sister, who was a tomboy, so how many generations back might it go?

I think my girly-girl-ness was very much learned - I hate even pattern on clothes now. Pretty much everything I own is plain, and I'm just not comfortable in skirts and dresses.

I always think about this but slightly differently as I went to an all girls school. So certainly my experience between 11-18 was that girls were not 'less than' or particularly stereotyped as that was the only option! So no push towards or away from any particular subjects / interests as they were simply all open to all of us regardless if that makes sense??

Didn't really experience any negative behaviour that was directly related to my sex until I was much older and more 'formed'

You can eff off with your rudeness

Oh dear - perhaps I'm not sufficiently "socialised as female".

These threads come across to me as very little more than a form of one-up (wo)manship. Someone has even quoted liking lego as proof of her being a tomboy.

Because growing up I WAS different from other girls. It's a bit of a cop out to say "we all loved playing with trucks get over yourself." My male identification wasnt arbitrary- I think that i liked those things explicitly because they WEREN'T for girls. I actively rejected my sex it wasnt coincidental. And yes I do believe that being a tomboy was a form of "not like other girls." It would be nice to have an honest conversation about what childhood gender incongruence is really all about and how it impacts your development. I dont think I escaped female socialisation but I'd say that I had a different type of female socialisation to my little sister who was very much a "girly girl."

You presumably had largely similar parental socialisation to your sister, but you responded differently -- her response was conceivably largely against your 'tomboy' tendencies, perhaps in order to carve out a separate space for herself in the family, especially if you were effortlessly outdoorsy and physical. (I was also a tomboyish child in the 70s, with a much more traditionally 'feminine' sister two years younger.) In short, I think that the contrast between you is as much about birth order as anything else.

I also don't feel that being tomboyish was remotely outside the realm of normal female childhood in the 70s, when the 'throw them out on their bikes in the woods in the morning and tell them to come home when it's dark' school of parenting was in vogue.