It's time to retire the term ‘tomboy'

Boston Globe

03-07-2025

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This hits home for me. As someone who grew up preferring jeans instead of dresses, playing ball instead of jumping rope, and toy cars instead of baby dolls, I was often called a tomboy. For Christmas, I wanted the Hot Wheels race track my male cousin received, not the
As cute as calling me a tomboy may have seemed to some, it was also an unwanted designation that put me outside of what was deemed 'normal' behavior for a girl, which, at times, felt alienating. I didn't like 'boy' things and I didn't want to be a boy. I was a girl who simply liked what I liked and did what came naturally.
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But I was too young to understand that girls like me challenged the rigid order of femininity by which we were expected to abide. Those Suzy Homemaker ovens and vacuum cleaners and those blue-eyed dolls in strollers weren't really toys; they were training tools for future wives and mothers.
But being called a tomboy — a term I didn't like but I used because I sometimes felt compelled to explain myself — became a kind of scarlet T that marked certain girls as different, and not in ways that others would necessarily appreciate or allow.
Of course, boys who liked 'girl' things had it even worse. Tomboys could be an amusing anomaly. But boys branded as 'sissies' were berated and beaten up for failing to fall within the narrow boundaries of budding masculinity. A boy who hated sports was a social outcast; a girl who liked sports and was good at them might be invited to play on a boys' team.
(My mother, who dressed me in little white gloves and hair ribbons and put me in ballet school at age 5, perhaps to femme me up, also bought me my first baseball mitt, a MacGregor glove with the great Henry Aaron's name imprinted on the palm, when the boys in my junior high school asked me to play on their softball team. I still have it.)
Then and now, restrictive gender labels ostracize kids who only want to express who they are. In particular, being stamped as a tomboy or sissy was perceived as a predictor of sexual or gender identity, which didn't always apply. But there was still a sometimes subtle, sometimes fervent need to eradicate such tendencies as quickly as possible.
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Society runs into trouble — and eventually runs over people's rights — when it draws arbitrary lines about who we are and then gets twisted when people inevitably cross those lines. Gender is a construct, as are gender roles. 'Boy things' and 'girl things' are nonexistent. What you like and enjoy — who you are — is no one else's business.
With unscripted lives, the tomboys and sissies were gender warriors. Gender has been fashioned into a minefield that even the conservative-led Supreme Court has inserted itself into as the Trump administration continues its ruthless attacks against the transgender community. While sissy is largely seen as pejorative, tomboy remains an unwanted artifact from another time. It needs to go, and it should take with it every rote description and archaic idea about women that builds walls and shames them for being who they are meant to be.
This is an excerpt from
, a Globe Opinion newsletter from columnist Renée Graham.
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Renée Graham is a Globe columnist. She can be reached at