Like a Boy but Not a Boy contains thirteen more or less personal essays, covering a range of topics from queer pregnancy and parenting to nonbinary identity, bike mechanics, mortality, anxiety, class, and mental illness. It also contains a sixteen-part essay titled “Everyone Is Sober and No One Can Drive,” which is drawn from interviews with queer millennials who grew up in small communities across Canada. My intention with “Everyone Is Sober” is to give snapshots of what it was like to come of age right around the time that same-sex marriage was legalized in this country—a cultural crux point that may be looked back on as a definitive marker between “before” and “after” but that is perhaps better seen as one red push-pin on a transitional arc. The segments resulting from these interviews are listed by the subjects’ first names (“Jane” is a pseudonym) in the table of contents and seeded throughout the book.
Like a Boy but Not a Boy is ultimately about the simultaneously banal but engrossing task of living in a body. Although most of the essays are about living in my body, I’m very grateful to the sixteen other queer millennials who shared their stories so that we might become a type of chorus.
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