The Girl-Boy
The author of “The Girl-Boy” struck a similarly celebratory tone when describing the gender transgressions of the main character, Willie. They described Willie as “a mild, gentle, and beautiful boy.” Quickly we learn that many of the reasons Will has earned the nickname “girl-boy” have to do with his propensity for playing with girls and doing girl-like things such as dressing dolls. The author confesses Willie’s deepest thoughts to us: “If he had spoken the truth outright to Charlie, he would have told him that he preferred to stay in the house and play doll, than to go out and have a rough-and-tumble time.” His mother noticed this propensity and often said “he ought to have been a girl.” Kids laughed at Willie and teased him, but he seemed nonplussed. Willie also loved to read and “preferred a book and the sewing circle to no book and a game of ball.” Unlike some stories where the author sets up the transgender child for ridicule and punishment, here Willie is the hero. Willie’s special combination of masculine and feminine are held up as models. “In a word, girl-boys are generally so amiable and promising, that they win the esteem and love of all who know them.” Some of the traits that make them so special are: 1. Temperament: mild, gentle, and subdued 2. Work ethic: a willingness to help around the house and do “girl’s work if necessary” 3. Love of reading and school. 4. Lack of interest in fighting. Still, even this favorable portrayal has its limits. It ends by asserting that not just any combination of masculine and feminine are ideal – only the right combination. (Again, this is something that contemporary transgender people know all too well. It is one thing for you to cross or reject or subvert or challenge gender roles, but some transgressions are more understandable, more widely accepted than others.) Back in 1860, our author asserted first of all that “girl-boys” must be sure to “not have too much girl about them, but just enough to make them gentle, refined, polite, and book-lovers.” This set up quite a narrow space for an aspiring “girl-boy” to occupy, especially when it was never clear how much girl was “too much.” That was likely something one would learn only after going “too far.” Second, the author explicitly did not like or respect “boy-girls” – the “girl-boys” compliment. Rather than embodying the best traits of masculinity and femininity in a girl’s body, the author claimed that “boy-girls” were difficult, less amiable, less friendly, less polite, and not at all refined. It is of course easy to see a class analysis as much as a gendered one in this critique, for the “boy-girl” is characterized as rather brutish and not at all polished in the ways of proper white middle-class femininity.
