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| Photo by Marc Goldberg |
Lisa Selin Davis is the author of the new book Tomboy: The Surprising History and Future of Girls Who Dare to Be Different. She also has written the novels Lost Stars and Belly, and her work has appeared in a variety of publications, including The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. She lives in Brooklyn.
Q: Why did you decide to write about tomboys, and how would
you define a tomboy?
A: I first wrote about the experience of my daughter not
conforming to society's standards of what a girl should look like and do in an
essay for Parenting, and later, in an op-ed for The New York Times, which
focused on people assuming she was trans, when she called herself a tomboy.
There was a lot of backlash to and also a lot of support for
that piece, and I spent a long time wading through both, trying to understand
the intensity of emotion around gender generally and tomboys specifically. That
attempt to understand became this book.
Tomboy is considered an outdated term now, but it once meant
a girl who acted, and sometimes looked, like a boy. But that assumes that
sportiness and short hair and independence really belong to boys, and we know
that's not true. The question is, what replaces it? Some people think we should
just use "girl." Others like "gender nonconforming."
Q: What would you say are some of the most common
perceptions and misperceptions about tomboys?
A: The most important thing to know about a kid who's not
acting or dressing the way you thought they would, based on their body parts,
is that it might be a phase, and it might not.
There's a longstanding stereotype that tomboys grow up to be
lesbians. Well, sometimes they do! Sometimes they don't. Sometimes they come
out as trans. Sometimes they're cis.
I would say the misconception is that childhood tomboyism is
predictive of anything...except self-confidence. I did find that a lot of girls
who ran with, looked like, we treated like boys, ended up with high
self-esteem.
Q: How did you research the book, and did you learn anything
especially surprising?
A: I started by interviewing as many people as I could:
people who had reached out to me. People I connected to via social media. Friends
of friends. Anyone who currently or once claimed the mantle of tomboy.
Then I read through dozens of scholarly studies, and
interviewed psychologists and sociologists and neuroscientists, trying to
gather as many puzzle pieces as I could to make a picture of gender
nonconformity.
I think everything surprised me, but perhaps what impressed
me the most was how children learn about gender, and how they understand
stereotypes by age 3—but they don't know that they're cultural constructions.
They think those are the real rules of girl and boyhood, and police each other
accordingly, insisting that others conform.
It was shocking to me how early girls and boys learn that
traditional femininity is to be looked down upon.
Q: You write that "the biological and the cultural are
in a constant dance; sex, gender, and sexuality are
independent and interdependent. What’s most natural, I believe, is
diversity in all three." What do you see looking ahead?
A: That's a great question. Sometimes I see a glorious
rainbow of understanding and acceptance. But usually I see confusion. I see
endless culture wars. I see people with different definitions of man and woman
and male and female duking it out in the courts and on school boards and in the
hearts and minds of our citizens.
What I hope for is 1) to reduce the gendering of children's
material worlds, and encourage them to gather as much as they can from both
sides of the pink/blue divide, or to get rid of that divide altogether and 2)
to accept that we can believe in different things and still respect and make
room for each other. But it's a little hard to feel hopeful about that at this
moment in history, I'll admit.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: I am working on articles about what we're learning while
we're at home—how are we seeing the world differently when it's upside down. I
want to know how this period is changing us and how we see the world.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: Just that learning to see the world through other
people's eyes is a gift and a challenge!
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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