Like a Boy but Not a Boy

Navigating Life, Mental Health, and Parenthood Outside the Gender Binary

andrea bennett

Inquisitive and expansive, Like a Boy but Not a Boy explores author andrea bennett's experiences with gender expectations, being a non-binary parent, and the sometimes funny and sometimes difficult task of living in a body. The book's fourteen essays also delve incisively into the interconnected themes of mental illness, mortality, creative work, class, and bike mechanics (apparently you can learn a lot about yourself through truing a wheel).

In "Tomboy," andrea articulates what it means to live in a gender in-between space, and why one might be necessary; "37 Jobs 21 Houses" interrogates the notion that the key to a better life is working hard and moving house. And interspersed throughout the book is "Everyone Is Sober and No One Can Drive," sixteen stories about queer millennials who grew up and came of age in small communities.

With the same poignant spirit as Ivan Coyote's Tomboy Survival Guide, Like a Boy but Not a Boy addresses the struggle to find acceptance, and to accept oneself; and how one can find one's place while learning to make space for others. The book also wonders it means to be an atheist and search for faith that everything will be okay; what it means to learn how to love life even as you obsess over its brevity; and how to give birth, to bring new life, at what feels like the end of the world.

With thoughtfulness and acute observation, andrea bennett reveal intimate truths about the human experience, whether one is outside the gender binary or not.

1

TOMBOY

IN GRADE FOUR, OUR CLASS WAS IN A PORTABLE about 100 metres beyond the school’s back door. A small wooden porch flanked by two railings and a set of stairs led up to the portable; it also provided a multi-level platform useful for playing WWF WrestleMania. One other girl sometimes played with us, but mostly it was just me and a whole bunch of boys. The goal was to hurl ourselves at each other hard enough to pin—to push and jostle and launch off the porch onto an unsuspecting crowd of wrestlers. The boys weren’t my friends, but they let me play with them. (Sports is all about numbers.) I had long hair, but it was unkempt, and this was the era of nineties Jaromír Jágr—his glorious, curly mullet unfurling from his hockey helmet in much the same way my dark waves bunched at my shoulders.

That year, I turned nine and was finally allowed to play hockey. The first time I knocked over a fellow girl—not on my team—I stopped skating and helped her back to her feet as my father hollered from the stands. Afterwards, he and my coaches told me to “use my size,” the way it was beneficial on the porch behind the portable.

That year, in school, we played a math game called Around the World, based on the times tables, in which the goal was to circle the classroom, defeating your classmates one by one. That year, drunk on wrestling and hockey and math—a subject I understood to be best suited to real (read: male) nerds—I requested that my classmates call me Andy. They did not comply.

I grew up in a time and place—born in 1984, raised in a small town called Dundas, Ontario—when gender roles were binary. I grew up in a place where my favourite tomboy classmate later ridiculed my unshaven legs. I grew up in a place where, when I was walking to work or the library, people yelled gendered, homophobic slurs out of their cars. I grew up with a mother I thoroughly confused and disappointed, just by virtue of being myself. It’s hard to say what kind of a person I’d be today if these conditions had been different. Given these conditions, though, I took refuge in the word “tomboy.”

THE WORD “TOMBOY” FIRST EMERGED in the mid-sixteenth century to describe rude, forward boys. A couple decades later, it began to apply to women—more specifically, bold and immodest, impudent and unchaste women. Soon after that, the term found the home we’re familiar with, referring to girls who behaved like “spirited or boisterous” boys. (Men got to keep “tomcat”—creepy if you’ve ever googled “cat sex” after hearing alleyway yowling in the middle of the night.)

By the time I hit elementary school, tomboy’s denotation had remained unchanged, but its connotation had shifted: acting like a spirited and boisterous boy wasn’t such a bad thing. Second-wave feminism had crested, power suits had come and gone, and we all understood that embodying certain aspects of masculinity provided a shortcut—albeit tenuous—to power in adulthood, and freedom in childhood. As Jack Halberstam writes in his 1998 book Female Masculinity, tomboyism tended, at that time, to be “associated with a ‘natural’ desire for the greater freedom and mobility enjoyed by boys.” Of course, there were boundaries: eschewing girls’ clothing altogether, say, or asking your classmates to opt for a more masculine version of your name.

“Tomboy,” as an adult term, is most often applied to straight women who are somewhat masculine or boyish, or maybe “androgynous”—a word most often applied by the mainstream to masculine women with model-like proportions, proportions that are clothing-flexible because they are narrow and boxy. The first sentence of Lizzie Garrett Mettler’s introduction to Tomboy Style: Beyond the Boundaries of Fashion, goes like so: “When I arrived on campus for my first day at Brooks School in North Andover, Massachusetts, I was thirteen and as plumb a tomboy as any.” A couple of paragraphs later, when Mettler describes breaking her collarbone playing field hockey, she writes that her new Brooks best friend, Kingsley Woolworth, “decorated [her] sling with Lilly Pulitzer fabric sourced from a pair of my mother’s cigarette pants.” Mettler’s tomboyhood fashion icons, featured in the full-colour book, are universally thin, generally white, and cover the usual gamut from Coco Chanel to Patti Smith, Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy, and Diane Keaton, with more contemporary additions like Tilda Swinton and Janelle Monáe.

My favourite photo is probably the one of Eartha Kitt, in mid-swing, playing baseball. Most of the other photos and icons—not to take anything away from these great women—don’t include people like me. I don’t and can’t see myself in these wealthy celebrities: their small breasts, their bony shoulders, the ease with which a pair of trousers glides over their hips and thighs. Taken together with Mettler’s narrative, these images frame “tomboy” as a way of being a woman that fits quite neatly into what we expect of “woman”: a conventional BMI, tousled hair, a camera-friendly approach. Bodies with hips cocked, odalisque’d across the hood of a fifties car. Style from brands and stories that are very parochially New York, or what you’d call continental, European. Style that reaches out to rich women who want to marry rich men, style that lets them know everything will be okay: here is a way forward that will still appeal to the men and women in your social niche.

SEVERAL YEARS AGO, I WAS EATING LUNCH AT A CAFÉ in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. Behind me, a mom and daughter spoke Polish while they waited for their order. They were a matched set: both blonde and blue-eyed, similar facial structure, similar feminine clothing styles, similar body types.

When I was very young and could be forced into puffy-sleeved dresses, could be convinced or strong-armed into wearing curls and tights, my mother foresaw a future where we would be a set. My hair wasn’t blonde like hers, my eyes weren’t blue, my ears stuck out farther from my head than they were supposed to, but none of these things was immutable.

At eight or nine I began to grow. My body shot up and broadened. My legs lengthened, my belly got round, I became chubby, grew breasts. Next to my peers, who still looked like children, I felt monstrous. My mom urged the hairdresser to “soften” my face with feathered bangs. We fought about clothes. I wanted to dress like the boy from two doors down who wore low-riding shorts and untucked T-shirts; wearing my pants like that, my mom said, would draw attention to my stomach. We bought clothing in aspirational sizes. We put me on a diet. I starved and binged. I forgot to close my legs when I was made to wear a skirt. Instead of being part of a set with my mom, I resented her as much as I resented my inability to give her what she wanted from me.

The word “tomboy” provided me with my first out. Being a tomboy offered me a way to pursue masculinity from what felt like a failed female body. I gave up mimicking girlhood, accepted a ruptured relationship with my mother, and slowly began to build a relationship with my body and my selfhood that wasn’t based in self-negation. The world I grew up in—the world we live in now—still places an inordinate amount of pressure on female bodies to be consumable; opting out of femininity, even privately, freed me to see myself as a whole person, and it also freed me to interrogate the legitimacy of the boundaries I was breaching with my monstrosity. Tomboyhood offered me a kind of self-acceptance I never got to experience as a girl.

But conventional gender-code breaking—allowed, within boundaries, for girls—ends, too often, with adulthood. As Halberstam writes, “If adolescence for boys represents a rite of passage … for girls, adolescence is a lesson in restraint, punishment, and repression.” In popular culture (Pippi Longstocking, for example), tomboyism is often folded into narratives about resisting adulthood; there’s a tacit understanding that with time, a tomboy will grow out of her (his, their) affinity for masculine presentation, masculine-coded pastimes, masculine-coded work. And so “tomboy” gets roped in, like everything else, to safety and convention—swanning into simple, elegant, usually white, womanhood. A conventionally attractive woman devouring a burger in a men’s magazine profile, an unadorned silk dress.

My masculinity never turned men’s mag icon. I have never been an uncomplicated body in a silky dress; instead, I began to identify with the world of female masculinity best understood and embraced by queer theory. I pursued masculine-coded work, becoming a bike mechanic. I grew up and, though I dated men, came to identify as queer.

For more than a year, I have had a BuzzFeed video bookmarked on my computer: “What Is Female Masculinity?” I watch it about once a month. The video starts with identifications: “I don’t really identify with anything, but if anything, I guess it would be butch”; “MOC, which is, like, masculine of centre”; “genderqueer butch mahoo”; two “gender-neutral”s; “LHB: long-haired butch.” Everybody has similar but diverging things to say about masculinity, female masculinity, aesthetics, and the benefits and disadvantages of being female and masculine in a world that prizes many aspects of masculinity. Near the end, one of the participants says, “A lot of times, butch women are blessed with the burden of boobs. That’s a very funny cross to bear on top of everything else.”

I have large breasts—boobs—and like many people who experience gender dysphoria, I do everything in my power to keep this detail from the general public (I own a binder, surreptitiously wear sports bras under collared shirts, curve my wide shoulders forward in an attempt to hide myself). Often, I’m proud of myself and I accept my body. But sometimes, I feel alone, quite alone. I can’t sum up the power of watching someone express my secret shame as a warmly funny in-joke.

I understand why people balk at labels—why further subdivide the world? But I think of them—tomboy, butch, genderqueer, MOC—as functional and hopeful. If I can’t describe who I am in this world—I am who I am, whether or not I can describe it—then I can’t seek out others like me.

IN 2016, MEREDITH HALE, CREATOR OF THE MOMMY A TO Z BLOG, wrote “Don’t Call My Daughter a Tomboy” for the Huffington Post. Hale’s daughter comes home from school one day and announces that she feels she is like a boy—in fact, a tomboy—because she likes sports. Hale writes, in part, that she herself had once “been guilty of using the label ‘tomboy’”—but only before she “knew better.” The previous year, feminist Catherine Connors wrote a piece on Her Bad Mother (later reprinted by Medium and BUST) called “Don’t Call Her a Tomboy.” Connors’s kid, who rides dirt bikes, self-identifies as a tomboy. “I wouldn’t call you a tomboy, sweetie. I think that you’re you,” Connors tells her kid. “And you like a lot of different things, and they’re not just ‘boy things’ or ‘girl things,’ they’re things that you like.” Similarly, Hale wants her daughter to grow up embracing her femininity and at the same time feeling free to pursue whatever sports and pastimes draw her attention.

Eventually, Connors comes to the conclusion that these ongoing conversations are not really about tomboys, after all—they are about feminism. That girls and boys can contain multitudes. That gender stereotypes must be challenged. That parents must contest the ways in which society—with its pink aisles and camo prints—boxes in boys and girls.

Has our conception of gender changed so much that the in-between space that was so useful for me as a child—that is useful for me as an adult—is no longer necessary? After mulling over these pieces—and, more broadly, the differences between mainstream feminism and queer feminism—I wish there was room to embrace both “tomboy” and the fight to move beyond gender stereotyping. I wonder: How would I have felt if I received these messages from my mother? What if, instead, we told kids that girls and boys can do and like and be who they want—but if they’re not a girl, or not a boy, that’s okay, too?

I have done a lot of work to disentangle myself from misogyny—to embrace what exists of my own femininity, to move past the ways I rejected femininity broadly because it was foisted upon me. I can’t help but feel that mainstream feminism has not done the same amount of work to understand genderqueerness, to understand trans identities. Why, otherwise, would you call to kill a term that still holds some usefulness for me, and others like me? If the world has told us for much of our lives that we are not quite women, and, moreover, the labels “girl” and “woman” never quite fit, is it our responsibility to forcibly expand girlhood and womanhood until it grudgingly accepts us? Can I not just be woman-adjacent in peace?

Identity exists at the crux point of internal and external pressures—who we feel we are, and how others see us. Far from being discrete, one feeds into the other. I have no way of knowing how I’d feel if I hadn’t spent my youth feeling shamed into, and failing at, femininity. I wouldn’t be a feminine woman; maybe I’d feel more comfortable stretching “woman” until it fit, but also, maybe not. As it stands, I’m not a woman, and I’m not a man; I’m not a tomboy anymore, either, though kernels of tomboyhood remain useful for me. In adolescence, tomboyhood offered me a positive way to describe myself instead of repeating “I’m not, I’m not, I’m not.” It emphasized doing rather than being; it offered the option of finding power, and community, and freedom, in monstrosity.

david

DAVID IS THIRTY-FIVE, QUEER, AND MOSTLY CIS. He sometimes feels a little non-gender-y, but not in a very defined way. Usually like, “What would aliens think about our construct of gender?” David doesn’t really even care enough to pick a label. If he had to, he’d choose agender.

David was born in Ontario, but because his dad was in the army, his family moved to Germany a month or two after he was born. David lived on an English-speaking military base in Germany until he was five. Then his family moved to Saint-Hubert, just outside Montreal. They were there until David was eight. Finally, they moved to Fredericton, New Brunswick, where David lived until he was seventeen. He went to school in English in Germany, in French in Saint-Hubert, and in English in Fredericton.

All of David’s earliest memories are of Germany and of travelling around Europe. He doesn’t really remember Saint-Hubert, but he thinks it was probably stressful, since he doesn’t remember it. He didn’t really speak the language.

When his family arrived in Fredericton, David didn’t know that was where he’d be until he left home to go to university. The one nice thing about moving there was that his family lived with civilians in a regular neighbourhood for the first time. Living on base, only with other military people, had sometimes felt a bit like living in a cult. They moved to the suburban neighbourhood of New Maryland, about a ten-minute drive from Fredericton, and bought a nice house, on about an acre of land, right next to a forest. The edge of their property ended at the forest line, and David spent a lot of time in the woods.

David doesn’t remember when he actually realized that being queer was a thing. At fourteen, he watched Jack on Dawson’s Creek come out. That was when he realized that coming out was something he’d have to do. He came out to his friend Maggie first, at fifteen. His parents learned soon after. The closest he got to telling them was a moment when he was sitting on the living room floor watching TV with them, but he didn’t do it. And then he was really angsty, so his mom read his journal. And that’s how she found out. David’s mom told his dad, and his dad had a very uneventful conversation with him about it. Like, “So your mother tells me you’re gay.” “Mm-hmm.” “And that you didn’t clean out the litter box.”

David has an older sister. They were close until puberty, but she grew up first and was out exploring, away from David, so they grew apart a little. They’re close again now. David wasn’t very close to either of his parents as a teenager. Now, his relationship is good with his dad, and not good with his mom. David feels like his dad is more open to growing and changing and acknowledging the impact that he’s had on him. He’s made some remarks that have felt apologetic to David, whereas his mom has never really been interested in acknowledging any effect that she’s had on him.

David was at his sister’s cottage once, and his stepmom asked if she could take a photo. His dad brought David and his sister in close, and David made some comment like, “I thought you taught us to never touch each other.” And his dad was like, “Oh yeah, sorry about that.” He acknowledged it, and apologized for not expressing physical affection when David was a kid.

For David’s master’s in social work, he had to write a paper about the intergenerational emotional patterns in his family, which required asking his parents questions. David’s dad was very open to sharing information, and he also apologized for going away for a large portion of David’s grade twelve year. That year, it was just David and his mom, and they fought all the time.

There were other out kids at David’s high school. At least, there were after his mom outed them. In grade eleven, he started hanging out with two gay kids in grade twelve, and he started seeing one of them. They were sort of out to their friends, but not super out. One day, David was supposed to go home, but instead, he hung out with the kids from grade twelve. David’s mom found out where the boy lived, went to his house, and told his parents that he was gay. David still doesn’t know why, to this day. The boy immediately wanted nothing to do with David.

David’s high school principal didn’t like him because David handed out a survey about gay attitudes and experiences for his grade twelve sociology class. He handed it out to his friends, some of whom were out in high school and some of whom came out later, but also to other, random students. Someone reported him, and he got called into the principal’s office. His sociology teacher didn’t stand up for him. His principal yelled at him and said the survey was inappropriate. The principal stood up and walked around his desk so that he was standing over David, his cheeks quivering he was so angry. After, one of his classmates who was an intern at a TV studio got David on a local show to talk about high school homophobia. David badmouthed his principal on TV. It was funny. David was almost prevented from attending prom. Not because he ha...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1. Tomboy
• 2. Living with Death
• 3. On Being Bipolar
• 4. Like a Boy but Not a Boy
• 5. Death and Birth
• 6. Milk and Time
• 7. On Class and Writing
• 8. The Bottomless Pit of Self-Loathing / A Peak
• 9. What I Learned Trueing Bike Wheels
• 10. Mom, Dad, Other
• 11. Milk and Generativeness
• 12. The People’s Poetry
• 13. 37 Jobs and 21 Houses
• Notes
• Acknowledgments