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"I was happy to fit into a category that explained and permitted my breach from conventional girlhood, that gave me temporary license to act dangerously like a little boy without being one. What worried me, though, was . . . that someday, this would all have to change. There was no such expression as 'tom-man."'
-S. Cytron & H. Malinowitz, 1999, p. 215
. . . gender is not fixed, but mixed.
-Ken Corbett, 1999, p. 121
This article investigates the relations between the identity categories of "butch" lesbian and of "tomboy," and the troubled relations between some mainstream psychoanalytic approaches to questions of cross-gender identification in girls and recent lesbian and gay perspectives on this issue.
The sometimes radical divergences in attitudes toward cross-gender identifications in childhood found in psychoanalytic contributions, which build on psychiatric descriptions of gender pathology, and in lesbian and gay approaches point to a difficult theoretical and political gulf. I argue in this article that in a discussion of gender nonconformity and gender pathology, contributions from both psychological (and arguably, psychoanalytic) and the more socially oriented lesbian and gay approaches are necessary. Specifically, an adequate account of childhood female masculinity that can address both its potentially celebratory and painful aspects, its complicated relationship to gender health and pathology, and the interaction of psychic and social dimensions is best achieved by an integration of the psychoanalytic and lesbian and gay perspectives (Corbett, 1999; Halberstam, 1999; Pearlman, 1995). This article represents an effort to think through some of the necessary elements for and problems in the way of such an integration.
"Tomboy" is the category for girlhood cross-identification and behavior, anywhere from the age of two through to the end of latency. It includes prehomosexual, prebisexual and preheterosexual girls, and can form the basis for gender identifications ranging from normative heterosexual femininity to lesbian, transsexual, and transgendered identities. In the few empirical studies on tomboys, as many as fifty percent of heterosexual girls recall a tomboy childhood (Burn, Nederend, & O'Neill, 1994 quoted in Elise, 1999, p. 147; Hyde, Rosenberg, & Behrman, 1977 quoted in Elise, 1999, p. 147). Importantly, gender nonconformity in childhood is more common among lesbians than among heterosexual women (Calapinto, 2000, quoted in Friedman, 2001, p. 1118;...