Tomboy And A Transgender Boyhood In Films
What does a boyhood consist of? Every experience is as unique as the boy living it. Touchstones do not make for a universal experience but there is an idea of a standard boyhood, a shorthand, a commonality shared amongst boys. Sports, adventure, violence, teasing, liking girls, rough and tumble fun, and the scent of masculinity underneath it all. Even with all of the advancements feminism has made, childhood is still extremely gendered for most children. The idea of the standard boyhood is further complicated for boys who don’t fit the mold – effeminate gay boys and transgender kids. There are very few films that address either one of these topics and a lack of representation is detrimental to those who already feel as if they are “other” in some way.
What does it mean that I lived a female bodied childhood and was socialized as a girl? Does any of this make my childhood, my boyhood, less valid? The colloquial “tomboy” surely applied to me, it always seemed to be code for dyke, but I felt as if I was a boy. Self-hatred was rampant in my mind due to the incongruence between my physical body and how others perceived me. I led excursions into creeks and onto Native American burial grounds trying to replicate the characters of Stand By Me (1986) and The Goonies (1985), trying to replicate the boyhood camaraderie shown to me in films.
A film such as Stand By Me is a great example of the classic childhood adventure story/coming of age story that can only really consist of boys. Only boys would have the freedom to take off on an unsupervised adventure without causing mass hysteria. It matters little that the film is set in the late 1950s, this could easily be a modern day story because boys are always afforded these freedoms. Even in these times of helicopter parents and kids involved in several after school activities to build scholastic resumes, boys are still afforded freedoms that girls aren’t. Little boys navigate the subway, walk home from school alone, and run around with other little boys. Girls are safely ensconced at home to be kept safe from things parents don’t think boys need protecting from. The bonds of boys in childhood are given a lot of weight and Stand By Me explores them from the perspective of adulthood.
Many people can go see a film and relate to a film star or a character they are portraying. When you grow up as “other” film can be used as an escape from a depressing reality or it can be used as a place to fantasize and pretend that you are “normal” or even that you already exist in the world as who you feel that you are in your mind. Body and society be damned, you can exist in a safe space. As a child I was allowed to live as a tomboy and do “boy” things until roughly the age of 12. Films became the place that I could go and feel safe; I could pretend that I was any number of male actors playing at hyper-masculinity, nobody could question it, make fun of me, or make me feel badly for it. In my early adolescence, the discovery of The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975) and the kids who performed it live let me know and believe that maybe there was a place in cinema for someone like me when I grew up, but as a child there was nothing for me to latch onto as a guide.
The idea behind coming of age narratives for effeminate gay men or transgender children hasn’t really been given in depth exploration in film thus far but Céline Sciamma’s film Tomboy (2011) is a great starting point for this conversation. Whether or not it’s a narrative about childhood, transgender issues, or just an “othered” child, it’s incredibly important for this film to exist. Films that offer complex depictions of childhood are especially difficult to make for numerous reasons such as the rare child actor who can pull off weighty roles, the restrictions of working with child actors, and the worry over box office appeal with children in lead roles. American filmmakers have mostly shied away from depicting gay and/or trans youth on film. European filmmakers have consistently been more progressive in portraying these things with adults so it’s no real surprise that two of the best films, the other being Ma Vie en Rose (1997), regarding children and gender identity would also come from Europe.
When I first watched Tomboy I finally saw something that resembled my boyhood. Adults are still very careful to not assign a transgender identity to children, often times ignoring the child and stating that adults know better than what the child is feeling. The filmmaker is careful to not assign any identity to the character, making the film less of a statement and more of a capturing of a summer, yet so many of the scenes are difficult to interpret in any way other than that of a trans narrative. The use of nature, color, and gender performance don’t let us escape the idea that we are watching a little boy grow up.
The opening shot juxtaposes the androgynous lead character against blue sky and green trees. Ricardo Zulueta writes, “The debate of nature versus nurture and the origin of homosexuality and transsexuality are obviously at play within the multiple references made to the significance of nature's determination in the film”. The trees in particular are a recurrent theme in the film and one of the most compelling scenes of the entire film takes place in a forest type space. Zulueta goes on to argue that,
Nature's omnipresence, particularly in the forest, signifies biological determinism's role in the establishment of Laure's identity. The woods appear as a central and liminal space of transformation that exists between the female and the male … Céline Sciamma clearly makes a not-so-neutral claim in favor of nature in the long-standing debate.
In one of the final scenes in the film, after Mikael/Laure has been “outed” by their (I will be using gender neutral pronouns throughout this piece as the character’s gender is represented in different ways and this seems to be most in line with honoring the narrative while also making things less confusing for the reader) mother, they run off into the forest space. They strip out of the dress they had been forced to wear and is back in their uniform of a tank top and shorts. A wide shot shows us the dress hanging from a branch and represents a killing of the female identity that they had rejected all summer.
Sciamma uses subtle visual cues to encourage the audience to read the character as male. The opening scene involves them riding in the car with their father, the father letting them sit on his lap and drive, and the scene reads as father/son bonding. The character is seen in “boyish” clothes, wearing a blue shirt, and goes into their new bedroom which is painted in blue – all things the audience has been socially conditioned to view as masculine. Contrasting the character with Jeanne, the little sister, who is portrayed as very traditionally feminine in a pink room with stuffed animals all around, further increases the idea that this character is a little boy. Furthermore, the relationship between the siblings is portrayed as that of a protective but loving older brother with a precocious little sister. Jeanne later becomes Mikael/Laure’s biggest ally.
As the family has moved to a new neighborhood, this gives Mikael/Laure an opportunity to re-invent themselves as the person they want to be. When they are asked their name by Lisa, a neighborhood girl, they respond Mikael. Lisa takes this at face value, as does the audience, because Sciamma has set it up so we view the character as a boy. Lisa goes on to introduce them as Mikael to the neighborhood boys and they are accepted without question. It isn’t until the next scene in which we see the siblings taking a bath together that we as an audience are clued in. The mother (none of the adult characters are given names) calls out to “Laure” and when they stand up we see that they are female bodied. Now the audience knows Mikael/Laure’s secret and can confront its own ideas on gender and gender identity. Sciamaa does a great job showing that gender is a social construct and allowing the audience to hopefully arrive at that conclusion by asking themselves why they viewed the character as a boy and what changes for them when they learn that the character is female bodied.
What does gender matter? Why are there gendered divisions, especially amongst children? When Mikael is accepted into the group of children, they are allowed to play soccer with the boys, something that the girls are excluded from doing. They study the boys, learning their behaviors and what qualifies as boyish behavior – no shirt, spitting, playing sports, and kissing girls. In one scene, Mikael examines their naked torso in the mirror and then begins mirroring the boys’ poses and spitting into the sink, making sure they are performing gender correctly so they can maintain their status of boy. The children accept Mikael as a boy without question and it isn’t until they are told that Mikael is a girl named Laure that they no longer accept her as one of them, denying the boyhood that Mikael/Laure is striving for.
Often times issues of transgender identity comes down to genitalia. If not blunt questions such as, “Have you had surgery?” which is a highly problematic question for numerous reasons, the glances towards crotches attempting to figure out what you have in your pants don’t escape unnoticed. Even Mikael knows this and for a swimming adventure they roll a penis out of molding clay in order to give the illusion that he has male genitalia. They also cut their female bathing suit into a male style swim short. When Mikael comes in and reverts to Laure inside the house, the penis must be put away. As Zulueta writes,
Laure hides her prosthetic penis in a box containing her baby teeth. These charged objects symbolize two stages of development in Laure's childhood: the baby teeth represent the passage from infant to child and the artificial penis symbolizes the transformation from childhood to adolescence and simultaneously from female to male.
This also represents the hiding of one’s true self from parents and family when there is gender incongruence. The family is shown as warm, loving, and supportive and yet even children know when they are crossing gender boundaries that it must remain unspoken and that it’s not the norm.
This is further shown when Mikael comes home from Lisa’s house wearing make-up. While both mother and father accept that Laure is a tomboy, the mother is over the moon ecstatic when female gender norms are embraced. When the mother finds out about Mikael/Laure’s double-life, she makes them put on a dress to apologize to neighborhood kids. It seems particularly cruel and veers towards gender corrective therapy treatments by which some people believe you can re-program the gender identity of a trans child. The mortification is so clearly conveyed on Laure’s face that it makes for one of the more heartbreaking scenes in the film. For me personally, this calls back to my graduation from 8th grade. I was forced to wear a dress, have my hair done, and have make-up put on. Being forced to uncomfortably perform a gender I was lost in portraying, I made sure to leave high school before this could be forced upon me again.
Sciamma is able to convey the shame of being born in the wrong body via simple scenes. When Mikael has to crouch down to pee in the woods and instead urinates on themselves, not only is there a shame in the other kids thinking they pee their pants, but when they are rinsing out their shorts the look on their face is that of having a body betray you by not giving you the equipment that you need, their internal shame over not having a penis is apparent. The idea that gender comes down to genitals is brought back again and again – Mikael can outperform the male gender yet once they are “discovered” as female bodied they are placed back in the ghetto of being a girl.
Mikael’s biggest advocate is Jeanne, the precocious little sister. When Lisa comes to the door looking for Mikael, Jeanne quickly puts it together and covers for him. She then blackmails him to be brought along to play outside and proves to be adept at spinning stories about what a protective older brother they are. There’s a bit of foreshadowing here as how she describes them proves to be their downfall. Jeanne is another example of how quickly and easily children can roll with gender ambiguities.
One of the most disturbing scenes in the film is when the group of young boys who had accepted Mikael then turn on him after he is outed. It feels similar to the scene in Boys Don’t Cry (1999) where John and Tom set upon Brandon to examine his genitalia and then perform a “corrective” rape. What’s so troubling about the scene in Tomboy is that we don’t expect this learned behavior to manifest itself in children so young. As John and Tom demand acknowledgement from Lana about what Brandon “really” is, the boys in Tomboy make Lisa confirm Mikael’s sex and then force her to admit that if Mikael is female bodied that would make them lesbians and that would be “disgusting” all of which forces the audience to address our own issues with homosexuality and transsexuality.
There is a growing awareness in the United States about transgender children. Parents are taking their children seriously when they express unhappiness with their birth sex, gender presentation, and experiences in the world when perceived as their birth sex. On his piece about Tomboy Darren Waldron writes,
Much has been written by parents of transgender and/or ‘gender fluid’ children and published on the web, thereby revealing the importance of the Internet in providing a forum for articulating and transmitting alternative narratives of child development and rearing. Parents whose children do not identify with their prescribed gender have acquired a stronger voice, while the experiences of their offspring have received greater exposure. Such testimonies convey the frustration of many parents at a broader inability to accommodate the forms of self-identification claimed by their children. These accounts reveal the paradox of democratic societies that found themselves on the principle of freedom of expression, but in which gender nonconformity is actively discouraged, even vilified.
The children whose parents give them a safe space to navigate gender and explore their feelings are much happier and emotionally healthier than those raised by parents who force them to perform the wrong gender and adhere to rigid roles of the gender binary. Mikael’s mother is a complex character in the sense that she is obviously a loving mother who wants her children to be happy. Yet, her rage and lack of understanding towards Mikael is heartbreaking. Her weak excuses and false attempts at empathy regarding the situation seem puzzling from an otherwise accepting mom who allows for a boyish girl but not a girl who is actually claiming a male identity. It’s worth noting that she is pregnant with a boy and perhaps the stress in conjunction with the new baby has prompted Mikael’s gender crisis, but on the other hand it’s irrelevant since Mikael is actively experiencing it and regardless of what’s triggered it, it’s happening.
There is a false idea that there is one transgender narrative and that is: I knew from childhood that I was trans. While that may be the case for some of us, myself included, it is not the universal narrative, with many people coming to the realization after puberty. Certainly not everyone who is transgender will respond to Tomboy in the way that I did. However, I can’t help but wonder if seeing a version of yourself or someone you can relate to in a very strong manner wouldn’t help some people with earlier self-identification. For people like myself, to see something closer to my narrative than ever before was quite meaningful. My own experiences are all that I know. To me, I had a complicated boyhood. By societal standards I was not ever feminine in any way. It was only at puberty that other kids expressed that it was no longer acceptable for me to have “male” interests. Since Mikael/Laure is captured at a pre-pubescent state of development there is room to play with both the children’s and adult’s responses to their gender identity.
What does it mean to be a female bodied child but have a boyhood? In my experience, it was something unique – a mix of both – but even though the idea of a boyhood is a commonality of language and experience, each one is as different as the boy who lives it. Is my version of boyhood inaccurate because I had a female bodied childhood? Does the female body negate my experiences of being accepted by and playing with boys and having closer relationships to male friends throughout adolescence even though I always felt like a boy? When we ask, “What does it mean to feel like a boy?” the expectation of trans people is to be able to explain gender in some magical way. Cis people are not expected to do this and their gender is accepted without question. We need to get there with trans people. The onus is not on us to explain our gender identity to you. If socialization is the difference we point to when we speak of boys and girl, men and women, the idea of being socialized as one gender and feeling like another shouldn’t matter so much. These simply provide social cues for other to “read” us as one gender or the other.
As time goes on, genderqueer and non-binary identities along with trans identities are gaining popularity. It’s time to move beyond the binary. Ultimately, isn’t our internalized idea of our experiences the accurate one? How we synthesize the external forces and process them internally is what makes ALL of us individual. Trans people, like everyone else, construct our own identities. My boyhood was different but it doesn’t lack validity just because I experienced it as a female-bodied child.
