Adolescent crushes, sheep and goats; or, The Road Not Travelled

[Leo Lane]

I recently stumbled across this on a child behaviour site. It was written in response to a grandmother's worry about her small granddaughter who wants to be a boy. It interests me because the author could be describing my childhood -- until she says that she started to wear girls' clothes to attract boys. I too started to notice boys and wanted them to notice me, but I didn't start dressing as a girl for the purpose; that was never an option -- I knew I was a boy. Never mind the female body: I was a boy attracted to boys, ergo, I was homosexual.

So, do adolescent crushes separate the sheep from the goats, the transguys from the tomboys? What do you guys think? Here's the post:

"I wouldn't worry too much about this. I'm 23 years old, and when I was a kid, about the age of 5, I wanted to identify myself as a boy. I wanted short hair and to wear boys' clothes, and most of my casual friends were boys. My poor mom, lol, would always shake her head and look so disappointed at times; she'd want me to grow my hair a bit longer and wear down-to-earth girl clothes (not even the frilly, girly kind), but I wanted no part of it. She just let me develop as I wanted, though, and I'm glad she did. The only thing she enforced to me is that I have to accept that I am a girl, and so that's how I have to identify myself--but as for clothing, hairstyles, toys, sports, etc. she let me have my choice.

I think back on it now (I've grown up to be an average, straight, make-up wearing female) and realize that the reason I did not want to 'be a girl' was because they seemed so vulnerable, so cutsie, like little dolls that everyone wanted to dress up and dote on.

My thoughts about that: Barf.

I wanted to feel tough, respected, free from the confines of dresses and snug-fitting girly clothes and long hair care and maintenance, play in the mud and collect rocks, climb trees, jump bikes off dirt embankments and take taekwondo and horseback riding lessons.

When I hit puberty, it was horrible for me. The last things I wanted were breasts, hips and a period. I hid in a clothes rack when my mom took my training bra to the register to pay for it. Well, I learned, with great dismay and plenty of tearful moments of frustration, that puberty can't be halted and I was just going to have to deal with it.

Then I started noticing guys and wanting them to notice me. That didn't quite work out the way I wanted it at first, seeing as I'd been 'one of the boys; for so long. So I grew my hair long enough to have a short, feminine hairstyle and started to wear girls' clothes. By golly, it worked!

I'm still a tomboy, but I came to my senses and realized that being a girl is not such a bad thing after all. And fortunately, I was never pushed or forced to be someone I wasn't, which, if I was, probably would've made me a completely different person than I am today and a lot more negative about my gender.

Your granddaughter should be just fine. I think the best thing you can do for her is have a talk with her and tell her she can play and dress how she wants to, but she IS a girl, and that's just how it is. But she can be who she wants to be."

[WalT]

I went to dressing in feminine clothing for a bit but that was mostly due to the fact I was tired of being beaten up and berated because of my very genderqueer appearance (and the fact my partner kept on pressuring me to "dress better"). It had nothing to do with wanting to attract straight men; I unfortunately seem to be able to do that on my own.

I'm bisexual so I've been attracted to all sorts of people. Unfortunately the women I've had crushes on turned out to be straight... >.<

Just to clarify, I haven't formally started the transition process yet. I need to make a gender therapist appointment sometime. Right now I'm seeing a therapist for related issues who is willing to help me, but it's qualified to deal with that.

It's just hard convincing most people you're really male when all they see is a scrappy female... :/

[4serrus]

It interests me because the author could be describing my childhood -- until she says that she started to wear girls' clothes to attract boys. I too started to notice boys and wanted them to notice me, but I didn't start dressing as a girl for the purpose; that was never an option -- I knew I was a boy. Never mind the female body: I was a boy attracted to boys, ergo, I was homosexual.

I did. Now, I might not be as wholly trans as most of the other guys here, but I'm definitely NOT female, and I did wear girly clothes in my early teens. It was a combination of "I want to fit in SO BAD" and "I want boys to notice me no matter what kind of rediculousness I have to put up with!" Even now I know if I want my husband to pay instant attention to me I put on a skirt. I have absolutely no interest in skirts or any feminine clothing other than how it makes dudes look at me (and I can't really bring myself to wear frilly girly underwear no matter because it's kind of ick and ....yeah). But it works, so, hey.

So, do adolescent crushes separate the sheep from the goats, the transguys from the tomboys? What do you guys think?

Nope.

I think back on it now (I've grown up to be an average, straight, make-up wearing female) and realize that the reason I did not want to 'be a girl' was because they seemed so vulnerable, so cutsie, like little dolls that everyone wanted to dress up and dote on.

My thoughts about that: Barf.

(feminism) well maybe if s/he had more strong female role models who went out into the world and did stuff instead of having nothing but princesses and housewives to look up to, s/he wouldn't feel so marginalized! (/feminism)

I think the best thing you can do for her is have a talk with her and tell her she can play and dress how she wants to, but she IS a girl, and that's just how it is.

Unless s/he's not. Which, well, can be hard for anyone but hir to know.

But she can be who she wants to be.

Unless it's a boy. Because that's just wrong and perverted, right?

[Leo Lane]

4serrus -- Yes, I also thought the 'Tell her she's a girl no matter what' advice was a bit...dodgy...

Interesting that you feel OK with putting on female clothes to get male attention. Maybe you're just more relaxed than me!

Unfortunately the women I've had crushes on turned out to be straight... >.<

It's just hard convincing most people you're really male when all they see is a scrappy female... :/

Tell me about it!

[4serrus]

4serrus -- Yes, I also thought the 'Tell her she's a girl no matter what' advice was a bit...dodgy...

Interesting that you feel OK with putting on female clothes to get male attention. Maybe you're just more relaxed than me!

Well the thing is, the point is not to have the clothes on for very long...

[Ze]

I grew up and dressed--albeit in varying degrees, depending--as female for two reasons:

1. I wanted so badly to at least have a friend. I've been an outcast for as long as I can remember and the pseudo-female presentation never worked, but I continued to do it anyway out of desperation.

2. I didn't know there was any alternative. I figured I was "stuck" and would have to just deal with it.

So I guess I never got to the "dress this way and boys will like me" mentality. That seemed like an impossible goal, so it never really crossed my mind. Though I'll admit now it's extremely difficult to find a guy that's into me. They get weirded out, regardless of their orientation. It's a socialization thing.

Socialization screws us over.

[WalT]

So I guess I never got to the "dress this way and boys will like me" mentality. That seemed like an impossible goal, so it never really crossed my mind. Though I'll admit now it's extremely difficult to find a guy that's into me. They get weirded out, regardless of their orientation. It's a socialization thing.

Socialization screws us over.

I can understand the mentality, it's just something I've never done. I've never had problems getting (straight male) attention, but at this point it's not attention I desire for a variety of reasons (I have a lover, they don't swing my way, etc.). Though typically I've just been one of those people that others only want to be friends with (which used to upset me).

Now women are an entirely different matter. Whereas I have no problem with men, it just seems women don't like me. I've never been able to keep female friends and I'm not quite sure why ('course, the first and last woman I admitted to having a crush on, despite saying they had lesbian and bisexual friends, freaked out and stopped talking to me after I told her I thought she was attractive... -_-).

[Leo Lane]

Well the thing is, the point is not to have the clothes on for very long...

[Leo Lane]

I've just been watching the Channel Four documentary 'The Boy who was Born a Girl' and this translad too went through a girly stage in early adolescence. So maybe I'm atypical?! There was never much pressure on me to look 'girly', since I hung out with the geeks and later with the indie kids, and my mother dresses pretty androgynously too; so the farthest I ever took it was wearing a pink T-shirt to school once in a while to say "Hey, see, I'm normal!". If there had been pressure on me to 'act more like a girl', who knows?

I do think, though, that something important often happens to people like us in adolescence -- things crystallise. Once, when I was 15, in the girls' locker room after PE class one of the girls said, a propos of what I cannot remember, that when she was little she had wanted to be a boy, and a lot of girls chimed in saying they had too. I thought, "Great, I'm not the only one!" and then "But these girls only used to want to be boys -- now they don't. I still do." Many tomboyish girls grow up to be women who, whilst not particularly 'feminine', aren't 'masculine' either, and have no gender dysphoria. Me, I stayed a tomboy.

Here, from the 'A Boy's Life' article in the Atlantic Monthly, is a similar story to the one I originally posted:

"The girl’s case was even more extreme in some ways. She insisted on peeing standing up and playing only with boys. When her mother bought her Barbies, she’d pop their heads off. Once, when she was 6, her father, Mike, said out of the blue: 'Chris, you’re a girl.' In response, he recalls, she 'started screaming and freaking out', closing her hand into a fist and punching herself between the legs, over and over. After that, her parents took her to see Zucker [a gender identity therapist]. He connected Chris’s behavior to the early years of her parents’ marriage; her mother had gotten pregnant and Mike had been resentful of having to marry her, and verbally abusive. Chris, Zucker told them, saw her mother as weak and couldn’t identify with her. For four years, they saw no progress. When Chris turned 11 and other girls in school started getting their periods, her mother found her on the bed one night, weeping. She 'said she wanted to kill herself', her mother told me. 'She said, "In my head, I’ve always been a boy." '

"But about a month after that, everything began to change. Chris had joined a softball team and made some female friends; her mother figured she had cottoned to the idea that girls could be tough and competitive. Then one day, Chris went to her mother and said, 'Mom, I need to talk to you. We need to go shopping.' She bought clothes that were tighter and had her ears pierced. She let her hair grow out. Eventually she gave her boys’ clothes away.

"Now Chris wears her hair in a ponytail, walks like a girl, and spends hours on the phone, talking to girlfriends about boys. Her mother recently watched her through a bedroom window as she was jumping on their trampoline, looking slyly at her own reflection and tossing her hair around. At her parents’ insistence, Chris has never been to a support group or a conference, never talked to another girl who wanted to be a boy. For all she knew, she was the only person in the world who felt as she once had felt.

"The week before I arrived in Toronto, the Barbara Walters special about Jazz had been re-aired, and both sets of parents had seen it. 'I was aghast', said John’s mother. 'It really affected us to see this poor little peanut, and her parents just going to the teacher and saying "He is a 'she' now." Why would you assume a 4-year-old would understand the ramifications of that?'

" 'We were shocked', Chris’s father said. 'They gave up on their kid too early. Regardless of our beliefs and our values, you look at Chris, and you look at these kids, and they have to go through a sex-change operation and they’ll never look right and they’ll never have a normal life. Look at Chris’s chance for a happy, decent life, and look at theirs. Seeing those kids, it just broke our hearts.' "


H'mmm...It's possible that Chris would have stopped being a tomboy anyway; a lot of tomboys do. But I don't like the attitude of the parents. My mother never saw anything wrong with my tomboyishness when I was small. I dread to think how I'd have felt if she had. Later on in the same article, there's this: "Yet Zucker’s approach has its own disturbing elements. It’s easy to imagine that his methods—steering parents toward removing pink crayons from the box, extolling a patriarchy no one believes in—could instill in some children a sense of shame and a double life. A 2008 study of 25 girls who had been seen in Zucker’s clinic showed positive results; 22 were no longer gender-dysphoric, meaning they were comfortable living as girls. But that doesn’t mean they were happy. I spoke to the mother of one Zucker patient in her late 20s, who said her daughter was repulsed by the thought of a sex change but was still suffering—she’d become an alcoholic, and was cutting herself. 'I’d be surprised if she outlived me', her mother said."

[gemsay32]

Not everyone ends up like you do.

My guess is some people don't grow out of it.

[WalT]

Not everyone ends up like you do.

My guess is some people don't grow out of it.

Indeed. In order for me to have been a tomboy I would have had to identify as female (which I haven't since I was 3 or 4). I knew, with quite certainty, from a young age I was FtM, it just wasn't until I was a tween that I realized that FtMs could have surgery too.

[Andy66]

Well, one thing is clear: there's no way to generalize or to tell who a child will be when they grow up. If the child is lucky they will know, but it's not unusual to meet adults in their thirties and forties who are still discovering themselves or evolving.

I definitely don't think what someone feels in their teen years tells the whole story. It's a notoriously confusing time, and there's still plenty of time for change. I think parents try to do what they believe is best, but most people in society are so ignorant on the subject of gender, they have no idea they may be doing more harm than good. It's up to people like us to educate society because we're the only ones who can.

Oh, in case you're wondering...
I grew up going to private schools with uniforms - those horrible plaid skirts. I was never super frilly though. My mom has absolutely no sense of fashion and bought me fairly androgynous yet nerdy clothes. I actually wished I could have dressed more like other girls to blend in and be more popular.

I've gone through girly phases and tomboy phases throughout my life. And yes, I too was horrified at the changes puberty brought. I was embarrassed and felt like my own body was betraying me. I didn't necessarily want to be a boy or a girl; I just wasn't comfortable with sexuality in general. I never dressed frilly to attract boys in high school, but in my early twenties I experimented a bit with the sexy/****ty look. I could never pull off the macho look as much as I would like to because my body and face are way too feminine. I'm bisexual, but it took me a while to figure that out. For a while in my thirties I told myself I was glad to be female - I tried to have a positive outlook... but the fact of the matter is that I'm pretty ambivalent about it. I feel like my body adequately suits its purpose (which is carrying my mind/spirit around) but I think if I had been born into a boy's body that would have been adequate too. Meh. I hope that doesn't sound too weird.

[Leo Lane]

Meh. I hope that doesn't sound too weird.

Not in the slightest. I can identify with a lot of what you say.

[gemsay32]

It's too easy to blame FTM on parents. The arguemnt is that no one was there when they were growing up to re-affirm their gender. Same for MTF. There's an element of doubt and people use this doubt to support their arguments (without proving it). Most of these arguments are circular arguments. Society tends to look away when people use these arguments when the issue is controversial. They're, nonetheless, equally fallacious, regardless of how society feels.

What is a circular argument??

Argument: 500 years ago, no one used anti-biotics and yet our species was fine that way. So we don't need to use them either. Sadly, billions of dollars are needlessly spent to keep us hooked on them.

That is a circular argument because the argument is the premise! (that is not proven) It's not proven, for example, that ftm or mtf become that way because of bad parenting. That's conjecture, at best, NOT an argument (not conclusive).

There comes a point where we hurt people more by enforcing our circular arguments on them than if we had just attempted to first remain critical of our own prejudices before leaping forward to save the day.

The tough part in all this, is that there're many things we still do not understand about the human body and these uncertainties lead to doubts that galvanize opposition. This is especially true for people who're religiously opposed. When it comes to a little girl who wants to be a boy, you can bet that there will be a lot of attention given to it until she's an adult and can make her own choices. The problem, of course, is that by that time she has already undergone puberty and some things cannot be changed at that point - even if she was right all along that she was a boy in a girls body.

Bottom line, these days, unless you're an adult, you're probably stuck with the body you were born with. I'm a liberal in almost every way. I was a christian for most my life. I am now agnostic, not quite atheist. So my feeling on this is not religious. I could not allow my conscience to allow my child (if i had one) to change his or her gender until they're an adult. I could not cope with that kind of responsibility. What I'm wrong? What if this hurts her or him? I can't do it. I wouldn't do it. But if he or she chose to do that when they're adult, I'd support them every way I know how to.