Quote Originally Posted by Madame George View Post
No. A tomboy is not necessarily transgender. A tomboy is most often a girl or woman who exhibits qualities that are associated with boys. She is, in most cases, not trying to "be" a boy. Just herself.
If you stick with your description then most CDs are not transgendered either. Indeed only a small percentage of the members here could call themselves transgendered. Yet clearly their feelings would be labeled as transgenderness.

The word transgendered means to exhibit characteristics associated with the opposite sex. Hence tomboys most certainly do fall under that description except they generally behave differently from MTF CDS by not engaging in closet induced fantasies and emulations. But then many CDs dont do that either.

It is more accurate to say that tomboys are the female equivalent to MTF CDs except that in their case tomboy behavior is widely tolerated by society and carries no terrible stigma hence tomboys do not enter into a closeted mode with all its side effects. The result is that most people never consider tomboys to be transgendered because it is known that it is not an indicator of transsexuality or homosexuality precisely because it is not closeted. It is also a consideration of the fact that women gain status by developing their masculine side unlike MTF CDS who lose status.

These days most women openly admit to being a "bit of a tomboy" because they acknowledge they expend little effort to live up to traditional definitions of femininity and instead choose androgyny. This means at the most basic level women wearing pants are reacting to the same idea that CDs do, namely escaping the confines of their assigned gender roles and absorbing the good parts of the other sex.