What was your connection to butch or tomboy ID growing up?
I have always been butch. Some of my earliest memories include dressing up in suits and carrying a brief case. I had a very negative impression. I had never met or seen a butch woman in person. I had the classic stereotype of a hairy, man-hating lesbian in my head. I was a huge tomboy, but I got punished for it a lot and was often ashamed to be such. I had short hair, loved playing in the mud, and hated skirts with a passion. I was very much a tomboy growing up, despite efforts to change me. The one difference between me now and me as a child is that I've cut my hair off. Compulsory heteronormativity meant that I didn't see a thing until I was decades older. I wanted to wear play clothes that would let me play and climb and get dirty. Once church was over, I ditched the dress, from roughly the age of five. I wanted to be a cowboy or a sea captain. Played with cars and boy toys. I was always a tomboy. I loved playing in the woods, wearing "boyish" clothes, hanging out with boys and doing things that a lot of people would consider "boy" things: video games, baseball, fishing, that kind of stuff. But as I grew older, being a tomboy became less and less acceptable, and there was more and more pressure on me to conform and be feminine, at least to some degree. Sometimes this pressure was explicit, like my mother telling me that I had to wear a dress to my high school graduation, and sometimes it was implicit, like the fact that I never ever saw anyone on TV, in movies, or read about anyone in books who was like me—who was a girl (and later a woman) in the same way that I was. There was also the regular assumption that I was a lesbian, and while that ultimately turned out to be correct, I found it so upsetting that people would presume to know something like that about me that I denied it for much, much longer than was healthy or necessary. I knew of it when I was a child and it made so much sense. I only lost sight of it in college and at the start of my professional career. I knew butch was a word my father called me in disgust, in a way to mock me. I thought it was a slur for a long time and I didn’t quite understand what it meant. As a child I connected deeply with butch and tomboy but I lacked the vocabulary, understanding, and language around it. I tried to be as gender non-conforming as possible as a kid, even if it did not seem like it to the outside world. I received a lot of pressure from those around me to be feminine and had cutting my hair/being made to look "like a boy" used as a threat against me when I didn't perform femininity correctly. I worked briefly for a butch lesbian when I was 15, who in hindsight I deeply admire. I vaguely recall having a brief tomboy phase where I aggressively rejected feminine presentation, but it was not encouraged and the brand of feminism I could parse at the time was very much about glorifying feminine things as radical. |
When I was a kid, I wasn't a tomboy actually and I wasn't really aware I could ever be one. I performed as much as a kid can a certain level of femininity in gender expression and even in hobbies and dreams (things like wanting to become a classical dancer or a mum of six children—side note, I know these aren't inherently feminine activities now) but I never seemed to get it right. As a teenager I truly blossomed—I started dressing in a more tomboy-ish manner and generally not caring what people thought of me, and most importantly I met my first lesbian friend. I didn't know I was a lesbian then, but I started tentatively getting informed about this whole new world. I have to specify though that at this point I was aware I could be a tomboy, but not that I could be truly masculine (the way I think of butch presentation), so I still had some internalized misogyny to work on. There were some things that to me simply crossed the line: not shaving, etc. Butch has always been seen as negative in my family. They support gays and lesbians, but in their mind you need to be your gender and act as your gender does. Thankfully I am a very determined person and continued to ignore their standards. I was a tomboy as a kid, and towards the end of high school I got tired of trying to fit in and started embracing my butchness. I didn't know any butches growing up because I was born to a Southern Baptist, fundamentalist family. I was a tomboy and family members joked about how I'd never get married. I hated dresses growing up but was forced to wear them/wear my hair long, and in my teenage years and early 20s I thought I could be feminine and happy if I just tried hard enough. I had a fairly isolated childhood and adolescence, but I knew some girls who considered themselves tomboys and I envied their apparent confidence. I was more of a tomboy when I was little. Absolutely hated anything that made me feel girly. I was always a tomboy—skinning my knees, toughing out the boys, wearing my dad's hats and clothes. I never knew any lesbian personally until I was in my 20s, so when puberty came, I had no example of how to be a young butch woman. It was an expectation that I would leave my boyishness behind and become a young lady. It sounds stupid, because it is stupid, but that's how it was. I don't really have any recollections, although I kind of wish I did. However, I did play soccer and street hockey with a group of mostly boys at my school and didn't think much of it. I played sports so that I could be me. I even pulled off being a “boy” for a summer of lacrosse season with my parents’ doing!!! I had mainly hand-me-downs from all brothers, so I loved that! Dresses made me feel in drag until I embraced my high school kilt as butch. I remember being a pretty feminine kid, but as I got a little older I started wanting to wear more "masculine" leaning clothes. I was afraid at first, however, that people would think I was "that" type of lesbian, and didn't want to be seen as butch or stereotypical. |