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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 ‘torn-man.’”
… gender is not fixed, but mixed.
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