I know what it’s like to be invisible. To be ignored or overlooked, to watch eyes avert, to have my identity denied. At the same time, I know what it’s like to be visible: to be watched, to be stared at, to be the object of a glance, a gawk, a gaze, a frown, a furrowed brow, a rubberneck, a double take. I know what it’s like to have a pair of eyes follow as I pass—locked on my body, questioning and scrutinizing and trying to decipher my code, to figure out what exactly I am. I’ve been called a faggot, a dyke, a bitch, a cunt, and countless creative combinations thereof. Once, when I was in graduate school in suburban New York, a car full of young men drove by as I walked home. They yelled “Fag!” and threw an entire uneaten taco at me through the window. (Imagine the level of hate it would take to waste a taco.) Once, in the same town, I was walking down the sidewalk and a middle-aged man and his young son approached. I smiled as they passed. The man looked me in the eye, scowled, and tucked his son into one wing of his suit coat—to hide me from view, to protect his small, impressionable progeny from the vile and blasphemous fact of my body.
It’s no surprise that when I talk about harassment, I’m talking about men. When I talk about violence, I’m talking about men. Disproportionately, the people committing hate crimes are men. Those beating trans people to death are men. Because, in the end, men are taught to be threatened by those who disrupt their understanding of power. That threat becomes fear, which becomes rage, which becomes violence—and its main target is the very body that threatens them.
In A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf’s famous treatise on the work of being a woman writer, she writes that men are bred with “the instinct for possession, the rage for acquisition.” Such rage, Woolf writes, is “not merely the cry of wounded vanity; it [is] a protest against some infringement of his power to believe in himself.”
If a man looks at my body and can’t tell what I am—whether I am a woman or not, whether he is attracted to me or not, whether I might have sex with him or not, whether I might be some kind of deviant or the dirtiest word—a feminist—he might feel confused. He might feel angry. He might feel like everything he’s been led to believe about himself and the world has been taken away. In the case of a serial rapist who stalked my neighborhood a few years ago, he might decide to start attacking women who look queer, because their bodies contradict his ideas of what women should be. Because their very existence defies his belief that their bodies should belong to him.
These days, I don’t get catcalled when I walk down the street. I don’t get whistled at on my way to the grocery store or standing on the subway platform. I don’t get Hey, baby or What’s up, mama? or Give me a smile, sugar, like I did when I looked more feminine. I don’t fear the kind of daily unwanted attention that so many women and femme queer people get just for existing in public. But when I walk out of my apartment at night, when I round dark corners or pass beneath unlit scaffolding, I think of the man in the bodega. He is what I’m afraid of.
Growing up, I was a tomboy. It’s what people called me and what I eventually started calling myself. At first, I resisted the word: I knew when people called me tomboy it was meant to call out my difference, that it set me apart from the other girls in my small midwestern town. And back then, I didn’t want to be different. On more than one occasion I recall my small self, fists on hips, insisting, “I’m a tomgirl,” and campaigning to get the word to stick. But I also secretly loved the word boy attached to me. I played with the boys and acted like a boy. I fought and spat and swore and yelled, climbed trees and built forts and splashed in the mud. I played sports and rode bikes and banged up my knees. I hated anything deemed girly, rejected dresses and dolls and the color pink. When I was in second grade, I insisted my mother let me cut my hair short and spiky, like all the other boys. (After weeks of begging she relented, with the caveat that I leave it long in the back. She cut around my ears and I sculpted my spikes with gel, the rest of my hair cascading down my back, the first of several horrible mullets.)
On a deeper level, I often felt like a boy. I often wished I was a boy. Sometimes I even prayed to be a boy, pleading with a God I wasn’t even sure I believed in that I might wake up the following day and everything would be different. Being a girl made me angry. It felt like a curse to be a girl, a cruel injustice that I had to be anything other than a boy. I fought with the boys who called me girl and with the girls who called me boy. On the school bus, when the older boys called me beast and spat in my hair, I spat back. I plucked the head off the only Barbie I owned, her impossibly proportioned and headless body serving as the one thing I understood a woman’s body to be: the object of male desire. Alone in the bathtub, I smashed the green muscled bodies of my Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles action figures against the smooth pale skin of my headless plastic woman. In my childhood fantasy, she fulfilled the role of girlfriend to Leonardo, the manliest hero of the sewer-dwelling mutant quartet. Their romance was always narrated from Leo’s perspective, his repressed sexual energies expended deep below the surface of the water, among the bubbles, out of sight even from me.
One day, at the Montessori school I attended for preschool and kindergarten in my small Wisconsin town, my friends and I played outside in the sun. It was hot, and the boys ran around with their shirts off. So I took mine off too.
“Girls need to wear their shirts, Melissa,” a teacher said.
Instead of putting my shirt back on, I climbed to the roof of the school. I have no idea how I got there, but in my memory there I stand, shirtless and defiant, bare feet on the hot slate shingles, waving my T-shirt triumphantly in the air and refusing to come down. In one version of the memory, I whip the shirt above my head like a lasso and launch it to the ground, laughing maniacally at my own dissidence. However it happened, what I know for sure is, at least for a little while, I stayed there—a veritable boy of summer, bare chested in the sun.
The word tomboy has a complicated past. First recorded in the mid-sixteenth century, it was used to describe a “rude and boisterous” boy. By the 1590s, it had become a slur used against “a wild, romping girl who acts like a boy” or, more commonly, a “strumpet, a bold or immodest woman.” It was wielded, in particular, at girls of lower classes who behaved in ways deemed unladylike, classless, and vile. By the mid-1800s, tomboy became more than a word; it defined a code of conduct used as a way to encourage a more active lifestyle in young girls. While this might seem wholesome on the surface, the subtext was sinister. As Michelle Ann Abate writes in Tomboys: A Literary and Cultural History, when slavery was abolished in the United Kingdom, upper- and middle-class white families grew concerned that the white race would become the minority. The patriarchy encouraged girls to run and play and live more like boys, to eat a healthy diet, to exercise. Ultimately, to move away from the Victorian ideal of the “fair lady”—the frail, thin, pale, and inactive girl—and toward a robust, active one was a way to ensure that girls would be healthy enough to procreate, thus keeping the kingdom’s white-majority status strong. This, too, was true in the antebellum United States: Combined with declining birth rates among upper- and middle-class whites and the decreasing vitality of the children they did produce, the abolition of slavery and an influx of immigrants led many white people to fear that a potential “race suicide” would soon be underway, and they would become the minority in the United States. Tomboyism among white American girls offered a solution. It was specifically encouraged so that girls would become vital, healthy, childbearing adults—so that, ultimately, they would become mothers. And what began as a word to deride those who bucked traditional expectations of femininity became, in essence, a way to perpetuate it.