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?

Sorry a quicker way of saying it would be like I was sort of a reverse tom boy - presenting as more 'masculine' than I felt

@Spotsonmyapples - I think until maybe between 70s and early 80s, having short hair on young girls was considered 'smart' and 'sensible' , as it meant less time styling and brushing, but then some time in between then and maybe 90s the whole girly princess thing started in earnest.

I didn't have short hair due to it's un-girliness, just that it suited me, my hair was not of any interesting colour or texture, and short hair made something memorable of my otherwise fairly mousy looks. DD just doesn't like the fuss of long hair and feels shorter suits her (which it does). MIL tries to encourage her to grow her hair and constantly hints how it looks so nice when 'it's a bit longer' but luckily DD knows MIL is full of crap sometimes!

@Echobelly I don't think I have ever done it to be ungirly either. I just want to say hurrah to your DD for being wise to your MIL

The most physical and high-spirirted of my three kids was my middle child, a daughter. She also didn't often to quote the OP "sit quietly and play 'nice'." Also this applies to her "I dont know if I ever learnt that knack. As an adult I can be quite tactless with females" but she has never been thought as anything except a girl, just a very loud and active one.

She got a trouble in primary school for being confrontational when she was angry and then forgetting all about it by the next day. Many of the girls used exclusion and social cues to show their anger, which often went on for days. I did feel she was displaying behavior considered normal in boys. She didn't pick up on the subtle social cues and would do anything for a laugh and to have fun. So I often felt her behavior was considered problematic because she was female when it would not have raised an eyebrow if she was male.

She has always had the most dominant personality of the three. The most quiet, retiring and introverted is my son. But all three loved very active play and all could sit and concentrate to play if necessary. I think we often just don't notice that both sexes display a range of behaviours.

But why hair?!?

A very interesting question. I grew my hair out because I knew (to what conscious extend I dont know) that I would be bullied if I didnt. Did I want to avoid homophobic bullying? Short hair = lesbian. That is a gendered message. I dont agree with that assumption. Lots of lesbians have long hair and lots of straight women have short hair. But hair IS gendered. I'm bisexual so I think that I felt a need to conform to gender norms to avoid homophobia.

I think having appropriate hair is also a way to superficially "conform." Lots of interesting discussions have been had about the nature of gender conformity. Does superficially rejecting "look" base gender norms mean you reject deeper behaviour based norms? It's all a bit of a quagmire

Does superficially rejecting "look" base gender norms mean you reject deeper behaviour based norms?

I don't think it necessarily does mean this. I also think that sometimes when someone goes out of their way to reject gender norms, they can end up indirectly enforcing them.

@DJLippy - as I said, and I've thought about this because of discussions about transing, although I liked 'boy' toys and had short hair, I was still a fairly classically 'female' in personality and interests.

I still feel rather alienated from the idea of womanhood presented by the media/online, though I expect a lot of women do. I've never been out on the pull with my mates, I don't have a close group of gal-pals I share my intimate secrets with, I've never worried about my looks or my body.

That last one I find interesting, because I never had any part as a teenager (or older) in those discussions girls have about how 'fat' they are and 'how big my arse is' or 'how minging I am' etc

Also interesting is that I never experienced the sort of constant harrassment a lot of women describe. I used to think that other women were just protesting too much but I think it's just that at the peak time it would be a thing (teens and 20s) I had short hair, was flat chested - I think I just didn't register as 'woman' on the radar of the sort of guy who harrasses women. Though doubtless other women have stories to counteract this narrative so I'm probably wrong. I have to say, it's an experience I am not sorry to have missed. I have long hair, but I'm old now, LOL!

Being a 'tomboy' as a child is a statement that proves that of course you were raised to believe that any of the preferences you mentioned 'aren't for girls'

I think we do have to leave some room for personal preference. I've never even considered Oasis to be 'for boys' but maybe you just liked them? Maybe someone else just likes short hair? I'm sure you like loads of different foods, people, smells because that's just you. It's a bit suffocating to think absolutely everything is either confirming to or rejecting something. I know decisions aren't made in a vacuum but we also have some autonomy not related to others' influence and expectations. We are so much more than that. I don't know why that feels important to me, I think I feel like I'm defending the right to like something just because because we are so much more than our gender and boys and girls are far more similar than they are different. It just seems sad to see so much of your unique preferences through a gender lens and question yourself so much.

@BlueBooby - I would say that you and SIL had different socialisation. In a sense that you had different expectations of you related to your sex.

I personally feel socialisation is a vague term that doesn’t capture individual experience. There are different expectations within families within the same culture and different expectations in different cultures. Yes, you can say there are unconscious norms everywhere but their strength and relative effect are different in different situations.

The term ‘tomboy’ just refers to people who like what society sees as ‘boy’ things. It doesn’t mean that the person who uses this description believes society should perceive this - it’s just a shorthand.

I certainly got the full force of female socialization from my mother and grandmother as well as all the various foster parents I lived with, in the form of constant criticism for being a 1950s horse crazy tomboy who had no interest in playing with dolls no matter how many of them I was presented with at birthdays and Christmas.

I'm not sure I buy the idea that strangers wouldn't have known what sex would were regardless of how you dressed or behaved. Some kids are more androgynous looking than others, obviously, but in general it's pretty clear what sex children are regardless of clothes or hair length.

I feel like I spent equal parts of my childhood running around outside engaged in physical play and curled up somewhere reading a book, so I tend to find descriptions of a childhood spent sort of performing gender on purpose odd. I definitely chafed at "girls don't do that" stuff, but it never came from my parents or grandparents so it was relatively easy to brush off and came across more as, huh, some adults are weird. It seems like maybe it's harder for parents to achieve that kind of childhood for their kids now and that the external pressure to force kids to perform gender is worse, but at the same time a child perceives things differently to the way an adult has so there's a level of, are my perceptions of this entirely reliable or am I just idealizing my childhood because that's a thing people tend to do?

On the idea that anyone received opposite sex socialization, I don't think that's really possible. Your parents, even if very egalitarian, knew what sex you were, as did your extended family, schoolmates, etc. and as I said above I don't think it's true that the sex of pre pubertal kids isn't generally obvious from a glance at the face.

The tomboy versus feminine girl dynamic in this thread with assumptions from some on both sides that they were/are looked down on by women on the other side of that line also seems very odd to me. Like maybe in little kids that could be a thing (wasn't in my friends group), but at the age most of us are now it just sort of seems like something everyone should have moved beyond by this point.

I was at an all girls school from age 11 and am glad that I was because it does seem to remove a lot of the "girls shouldn't" stuff. I knew that stuff was out there, but at my school the general vibe was more "girls should excel at something and be at least average at everything", so you'd have some kids who were more sporty and some who were more academic and some who were more artsy but the assumption was that nobody would be truly bad at anything and that the goal was to produce accomplished, well rounded adults. I'm not sure how different being in a mixed sex school would have been but I had plenty of opportunities to socialize with boys outside school when I wanted to and have always been pretty happy with that experience.

Does rejecting gender norms and not identifying with girls alter how you receive all these gendered messages?

These are two very different things. I always, from very early on, rejected gender norms and got angry when I saw attempts to force them on the adult women around me, but I also identified with other girls, and with adults women. It was always "this isn't fair to any of us" rather than "not like the other girls". If you interpreted the fact that you didn't like the gender norms as just a you thing rather than a this isn't fair to anyone thing then I can see how that would change how you interpreted some things, and I think that's the same path that's producing a lot of young transmen now.

I wonder if what your relationship with your mother is like is a key difference here, and the other women surrounding you when you're a child. I had a whole group of "aunties" (not blood relatives) who I adored, and since they were from multiple different countries and cultures I was picking up on the fact that the imposition of the support role on women is a global issue from a very young age. My father's side of the family has some women who're very keen on enforcing gender roles on both sexes and I rejected them for that reason from a very young age, as did the cousin who was most obviously never going to be able to adjust to those roles (he's gay and it was obvious he was going to be from when he was young, and he got far more shit from those relatives than I did since he lived closer to them and his parents were less proactive about intervening and supporting him).

We used to roam freely... riding bikes over humps, making dens, exploring disused railway platforms and abandoned houses, sliding down old bridges, making dams in brooks. None of these places exist now - they are all roads or housing estates. So, perhaps fewer opportunities nowadays to do 'tomboy' stuff.

And thank goodness for Punk.