Being a tomboy is socially acceptable up until a certain point. After puberty hits pressure is on to grow up and into your gender. I held onto my tomboy status for as long as humanly possible. It helps if you get involved in sports. Active clothing is pretty practical and being “sporty” can buy some more time to come up with another plan for staying comfortable in non-feminine clothing.
I remember receiving ominous threats from my Nan who would tell me I couldn’t be a tomboy forever and would eventually have to start acting like a girl. She was right, time did appear to be running out. The number of girls in my grade that still wore baggy shirts and shorts were rapidly depleting. G Day was coming.
What am i going to wear when I have to be a girl? I would think to myself in a panic.
I studied the clothing girls my age wore and whether there was any version of that I would feel comfortable in. Shorts were short, jeans were tight and tops seemed to reveal as much flesh as possible. It was going to be a struggle. I didn’t want anything revealing or that would cling to my body and show off the feminine figure I was developing. Thankfully surf and skate culture was in vogue when I hit upper primary and early high school. I was able to get away with some hideously ugly hibiscus shirts and boardshorts in summer, and Dickies and hoodies in winter without appearing too out of fashion.
In grade five we moved to a new school in a fancier area and they had a lot more expectation of what you should look like and how you should act. At my old school so long as you showed up dressed in something that resembled the school colours they were more than impressed. At this school I wasn’t allowed to wear boys shorts anymore, I had to wear skirts and dresses. This is it, I thought to myself. I can’t fight a whole institution i’ll have to conform and wear a dress. It’s too hard.
At lunch when the bell went I got ready to take off down to the oval to play soccer like we all did at my old school, only there was something wrong. None of the girls were moving. Only the boys were yelling and laughing and bounding for the oval. I looked down at my completely impractical clothing and wondered whether this was why the girls didn’t want to play. It was going to make it pretty difficult to dive for the ball and I felt very uncomfortable lifting my arms up. I guess my days of being like a boy and having fun are over, it is time to resign to my boring gender role. There really didn’t seem to be any benefit to being female at this point in my life.
Feeling defeated I sat back down and let a group of girls surround me and start to swallow me up with their questions. They were scanning for common interests, of which there were very few. I grunted replies and watched as they screwed their nose up when I said where my old school was. They asked about my family and made note of my absent father, inquired where I lived, and commented on my footwear and its lack of branding. If it weren’t for one girl quietly confiding in me that she too wished they could still play soccer, I might have turned and ran away right then and there. Up until this point, I had not considered my status as any less advantaged than anyone else but all of a sudden I felt oddly poor.
It was a brutal awakening in which I came to understand classism and the power of the patriarchy in the space of about five minutes. It appeared I needed to develop some sort of strategy for not becoming a social outcast or I was going to be reasonably screwed for the remainder of my schooling life. Thank fuck people thought I was funny. I quickly learnt the class clown didn’t need to conform to gender roles quite as much as others were expected to. They just needed to make people laugh.
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