But I was a girl, too: musings on gender from a little girl with a bowl cut
- clairecdthompson
- Feb 22
- 17 min read
I won’t forget when Peter Pan came to my house, took my hand
My freshman year of high school, I was sitting in civics class reading when the girl sitting in front of me turned around and asked me if I was transgender, or just a tomboy. At fourteen, I had a haircut somewhere between a bowl cut and a crew cut, wore cargo shorts and t-shirts, and was just starting to have more friends who were girls than boys after ten years of the ratio being reversed. I was no stranger to questions of these sorts – there were multiple occasions when I was stopped or questioned trying to enter a bathroom, resulting in me avoiding using the school restroom for most of the fourth grade, as well as multiple people (kids and adults) who thought I was a boy and would be corrected by my friends, with varying degrees of success. Despite all of that, the question caught me off guard. I think I sputtered out an answer about being “neither,” and returned to my book. I didn’t think too much of it at the time, and it wasn’t until three years later when I was writing my essay for my Common App that I had a chance to examine the interaction and figure out why it had left more of an impression than other instances just like it that I had encountered.
With her phrasing of the question, the girl in my civics class only gave me two options and neither of them was the “normal” one. Because of how I looked, how I dressed, and who my friends were, I had lost the chance to be considered a girl. The question wasn’t asked in malice – there seemed to be genuine curiosity behind it – but even then, there was an unspoken expectation that obviously, I wasn’t just a girl, because girls didn’t look or act like I did. There had to be something else going on.
I said I was a boy, I’m glad he didn’t check
Gender expression and sexuality have long been a point of political contention, and progress has ebbed and flowed throughout history. Often, the issues feel as though they take a “two steps forward, one step back” approach, with prohibitions quickly following any sort of legal or political victory that is achieved. In recent years, legislation on issues of gender and sexuality has been passionate and polarizing, with states and countries scrambling to either protect or attack, most of it being done for the sake of “the children” who are seen as perpetually at risk from ideas that stray from the norm.
In March of 2022, Florida passed legislation that was popularly termed the “Don’t Say Gay” bill, officially titled the “Parental Rights in Education” bill. The bill prohibits instruction and discussion about sexual orientation and gender identity in some elementary school grades, and was sold as a way for parents to feel safe sending their children to school without fear of “indoctrination.” This bill is one of many passed recently attempting to control what can be discussed in public schools, with some other bills (including one passed in May 2023, again in Florida) prohibiting teachers from referring to their students by the student’s preferred pronouns, requiring teachers to report any information about a student’s gender identity or sexuality that is disclosed to them in confidence, and even authorize parents who allow their children to receive gender-affirming care to be charged with felonies and be labeled abusers.
These types of legislation are not limited to the United States. Multiple European countries have placed restrictions on gender-affirming care, and the Vatican released a statement that condemned gender transition as a “threat to human dignity.”
I learned to fly, I learned to fight
When I was six, my family lived in Dublin, Ireland for a year, where my brother and I attended state-funded Catholic schools. Schools, plural, because while the schools we went to shared an outside wall, they were divided by gender. Apart from some minor hiccups, the year went pretty smoothly – there was some minor religious trauma when I learned the true story of Easter, and a couple of instances where being the only American kid wasn’t a great thing, but overall it was fine. I compared morning and afternoon prayer to the Pledge of Allegiance, trips to the church to assemblies, and viewed the religion lessons as some very interesting stories. The biggest issue for me was the uniforms.
I started the year reluctant to put on my uniform, which consisted of a white button-up shirt, a royal blue sweater, and the option between a navy skirt and a navy dress. At six years old, I had started asking if I could cut my hair short like my mom’s, but been denied thanks to its lack of volume (and the subsequent fear of my parents that my head would look like a cue ball with short hair) and was at the beginning of my years-long aversion to dresses and skirts.
After a few weeks of tantrums when it came time to get dressed for school, my mom discovered from some of the other mothers that pants were allowed in school, as long as they were navy and went down to the ankle. She left that morning coffee and immediately set off on a quest, walking around Dublin’s city center until she found a suitable pair of trousers, which she presented to me that night to ecstatic results. Suddenly mornings weren’t as much of a fight anymore, and going to school didn’t seem to be as uncomfortable.
And I hear somebody tell me it’s not safe,
In October of 2023, Mike Johnson, an evangelical Christian senator from Louisiana, was named Speaker of the House of Representatives. In a New York Times article that ran after his confirmation, he was characterized as a self-proclaimed “Bible-believing Christian,” and that to understand his politics, one “only needs to pick up a Bible off your shelf and read it.” He opposes abortion, which he refers to as “a holocaust,” same-sex marriage, and homosexuality in general, which he says is “inherently unnatural” and a “dangerous lifestyle.” Johnson proclaims these beliefs proudly, and indeed, they played a substantial part in securing him the title of Speaker.
Alongside his beliefs about reproductive rights and homosexuality lie moral judgments about the state of an American society that is far from secular, but not nearly Christian enough for his tastes. He blames divorce laws, abortions, and feminism for school shootings, and remarked that “We’ve taught a whole generation — couple of generations, now — of Americans that there is no right and wrong,” – in short, saying that morality has died out as queerness and reproductive healthcare has achieved more secure footing, and implying a direct correlation between the two. This link between morality and progressive sexual policies is unsurprising – there has long been a link between morality and sex, just as there has been a link between sex and religion, and religion and morality in America. During the AIDS epidemic of the late 20th century, many people ignored the issue for years because it was seen as a moral punishment for sinners: queer people and drug users, those who posed a threat to the family and the system that was in place. This attitude seems to be a direct contradiction of the “love the sinner, hate the sin” attitude that those who use their faith to discriminate hide behind. However, in the words of the Speaker of the House, while the Bible teaches Christians to practice “‘personal charity,’ that commandment was ‘never directed to the government,’” and therefore laws that do, indeed, hate the sinner remain a moral loophole to those in power attempting to justify their search for salvation coexisting alongside their prejudice.
someone should help me
When I was eight years old, my hair freshly shorn down to an inch or two from my scalp, we attended a baseball game in upstate New York with my mom’s side of the family. I don’t remember where we were or who was playing, but I do remember that partway through the game I had to go to the bathroom. The stadium we were in wasn’t huge, the bathrooms weren’t far from our seats, and I was eight, so my parents let me go by myself.
Before entering the bathroom, I stopped at the water fountain to get a drink of water. I remember looking around, trying to wait until there was less traffic entering the bathroom to make my way inside. I don’t remember why I was nervous – perhaps it was intuition or an understanding that I had moved outside of what was acceptable for an eight-year-old girl to appear as – but I know I was actively thinking about if there were people watching me. Right before I was about to walk into the women’s restroom, a middle aged woman stopped me. She was probably in her 40s, and had dark blonde hair that went down to her collarbone. Putting an arm in front of my path, she looked down at me and said “Hang on! This is the girl’s restroom.” I remember looking up at her and stuttering out “I am a girl,” resulting in her face softening a little and her arm being raised out of my path. I ran into the bathroom and used the toilet, but I found myself blinking back tears as I washed my hands. After I left the bathroom, I took the long way back to where my family was sitting, making sure any evidence of me being upset was gone before I sat down. I didn’t want them to make a big fuss, and I didn’t want to explain what happened.
I don’t remember the woman being malicious, but I was jarred – it was the first time someone had looked at me and challenged my identity based on what they saw. The first time I was excluded from girlhood on account of my appearance. It would not be the last.
Over the next eight years, I became hyper-aware of using the bathroom in public. The entire year of fourth grade, I think I used the school bathroom six times. When I entered middle school, the first couple of weeks every year would be a dance of figuring out which teachers would let me use the bathroom during class, so I could reduce the chances I would run into someone when I went. Everyone in my year knew who I was, but each new year brought new students, and so I would wait for word to spread about the girl who looked like a boy. When I was younger, I didn’t want to be challenged by the older students, and when I was older I didn’t want to make the younger students feel uncomfortable. Outside of school I would either not use the restroom or wait until someone I was with was using it – a friend, my mom, an aunt – and tag along with them, often making an effort to be actively talking to them as we both entered the bathroom, so that anyone watching would see that the person I was with didn’t have a reaction. It was an exhausting awareness to have, and I was simply trying to avoid side eyes and whispers – I was never threatened with physical violence for daring to use the bathroom. There are many, many people who cannot say the same.
I need to find a nice man to walk me home
On January 20th, while a presidential inauguration was happening inside in Washington D.C., my uncle stood outside in a gazebo in upstate New York and held a filibuster. While politicians and billionaires huddled inside 400 miles south, a high school social studies teacher braved the cold from dawn to dusk and spoke about life and love, loss and hope, of dreams and reality. It was the latest action undertaken by him since the election that strived to spread hope and joy alongside knowledge to his community. In weather that never passed 20 degrees Fahrenheit, one man spoke for eleven hours in an act of protest that the majority of people would never know about, but he did it anyway because it mattered to the people who did know about it. That same day, separated by 300 miles, my mother and I wore matching socks I found in a local crafts store after the election, socks that bore the message “Hate Will Fucking Lose” on the ankles. I don’t think anyone saw our socks, but it made me feel a little better knowing I had them on.
Years before this, my father designed a yard sign that had the image of the American flag on it, and on the white stripes were written truths that he believed were integral. His motivation for doing so was born out of a desire he had to “reclaim” the flag, to attempt to combat the idea that the flag stands for the views of the extremists in the country who use it as a symbol of their hatred. That sign has stood in my parents’ front yard every day since it arrived, being stuck in the tops of snow piles and hammered into frozen ground, often accompanied by a pride flag flying from the porch. In the summer of 2023, my father acquired a rainbow hat from Norway and it quickly became his go-to winter hat. Recently he wore it to work, and one of his colleagues jokingly asked him if he was making a statement, before saying “we all need to be making statements right now.”
The world needs more than these small statements – the world needs the big moments, the loud protests, the unavoidable demands to do better and the collective action that is undertaken. But people also need these small moments – the little reminders, the private hopes, the quiet reassurances that we are not alone in the fight. The big moments will be what brings change, but the small moments are what get us through the day. We need thousands of people showing up in the streets, but if what we get on any given day is a lone man standing in a cold gazebo in upstate NY, we can use that too.
And I don’t know how I survived
When I was fifteen, I started growing my hair out for the first time in eight years. By the time I graduated high school, my hair was down to my shoulders, and I was no longer being questioned when I walked into a women’s restroom. My life became easier in all these little ways, things that would have been inconsequential if they happened once or twice but had been inescapable for years, behaviors and interactions I had grown so accustomed to that their absence was surprising. All of a sudden, I was accepted at face value as being a woman – something that previously I had to fight for and prove I was. It made me wonder what would have been different if I had always received that acceptance from the world as a child, regardless of how I presented myself on the outside.
Would I have still wanted to cut my hair to emulate my mother and my best friend? Would it have gone hand in hand with a rejection of dresses? Would the boy from whom I was inseparable for ten years of my youth still have been my best friend? Would I still have fought for so many years against crying in public, or at all? Would I have lain awake at night during the lonely semesters of a freshman year spent in a COVID-induced isolation and tried to parse out if I was denying I was queer because it was true, or because I was so reluctant to let everyone who had looked at me in middle school and automatically assumed I had to be queer be right about me? Would the eventual acceptance have been easier to come to? Would it have arrived at all? I don’t know. I would hope that all of these internalized rules would not be present, or would at least be lighter. They certainly weren’t instilled in me by my parents, or religious doctrine, or anything about my direct upbringing. They were a result of how the world treated me, and I still haven’t managed to shake it off completely.
I guess I knew the tricks that all boys knew
My mom likes to say she was raised with “Social-Justice Catholicism” – meaning she went to Catholic school for twelve years and never wears navy anymore, but she had “cool nuns” as teachers and was taught to think about the world beyond herself. It means that when my mom played college basketball her parents would host team dinners at their house once a season, and in the years following college when most of her teammates came out as lesbians, Mr. and Mrs. Dickerson didn’t cut off the women they had fed spaghetti to years earlier. It means that while my grandparents were both proud Reaganites, during the 2020 election my Irish Catholic grandmother shared a Facebook post defending Biden’s pro-choice views to other Catholic voters who perhaps didn’t agree.
My brother and I were not raised any sort of Catholic – the extent of our religious upbringing was attending the occasional mass with our grandparents, the one year of Catholic school we each attended in Ireland, and going to the Unitarian Universalist service on Christmas Eve each year with family friends (an activity I didn’t even realize was religious until I was around ten and heard it referred to as “church” for the first time).
I’ve had a few conversations with my mom about her lack of continuing faith – three of her four other siblings are still practicing, and she never had any traumatic experiences with the church growing up to my knowledge. Aside from the fact that she has the mind of a scientist, which doesn’t always pair well with religion, she said it came down to four main factors: the Catholic abuse scandals that came to light in the early 2000s (the last straw for my father); the attitude of some other Christian groups in Grand Rapids, Michigan, where my parents lived for two years (and their opinions on social issues such as abortion and homosexuality); her lack of belief in a god; and having me. After having a daughter, my mom couldn’t justify being a part of a belief system that would impress on that daughter that she was inherently less than her brother, her father, and her male friends, just because of her gender. It was something that she had worked through on her own, thinking that she could fight the system from the inside, but in her endless quest to make things better for the future, that was one system she opted out of for me.
Eight years later, as soon as my hair was thick enough that my head wouldn’t look like a cue ball, my mom walked me to the salon and sat with me as April, the hairdresser, cut my hair close to my scalp.
and you can walk me home
Johnson, DeSantos, Republicans at large, the laws they have passed and endorsed, the attitudes and beliefs they bolster – these are the latest in a long line of repressive and restrictive movements that are carried out in the name of religion and morality, purity and salvation, enlightenment. Anything that threatens the moral and societal norms poses a threat, and those who are the most threatened are those who have the most to lose: in this case, conservative, white, Christian men. They use their faith as a crutch (or a weapon), conveniently turning a blind eye when their actions don’t line up with their God’s teachings, or when a lesson in their Bible doesn’t fit their agenda. I wonder if Johnson’s claim that one needs only to pick up a Bible, any Bible, off the shelf to know his worldview extends to matters outside of sex and gender; to channel an episode of The West Wing, does Johnson believe that crops should be segregated, that slavery should be legal, that wearing clothes made from different threads should be punishable by death? Are all Bibles equal in his eyes? Somehow, I find that hard to believe.
The chant of “love the sinner, hate the sin” is a reflexive defense whenever accusations of prejudice, of hatred, of discrimination get tossed around. It is the political version of the child on the playground, who when faced with a teacher and a crying peer, states that they “said he was being a jerk, not that he was a jerk.” One has to wonder if the irony is completely lost on those who point towards their faith as an excuse to spread “justified” moral judgments while at the same time claiming their God is both loving and omniscient.
but I was a boy too
Freshman year of high school for me spanned the fall of 2016 to the spring of 2017 – when that girl turned around in civics class to ask me her question, Obama had been out of office for a couple of months. Now, eight years later, we are staring at another four years of an administration driven by hate, with a more organized starting platform and a more polarized world. In conversations with people about the future, I have found myself saying things like “I hope it gets bad enough that people realize what the reality is and there is a swing away from him, but not so bad that thousands of people die.” That is the world in which we are living. A world where if I was currently a high school freshman, and that question was asked of me, it almost certainly wouldn’t have been with the well-intentioned-if-inappropriate curiosity, but rather a level of vitriol that I mostly managed to escape as a child. I can’t help but wonder what it would’ve been like for Little Claire if this was happening ten, fifteen years ago. I certainly didn’t view my very existence as a political statement, but today that is precisely how some people would interpret a little girl who has short hair, runs around with the boys, wears cargo shorts, and hates the color pink.
I think that if my parents hadn’t made the decision to separate their kids from the religious institutions that they had spent so much time in, they wouldn’t be the same people they are today, and therefore I wouldn’t be either. I don’t think that’s a bad thing, though. It shows that people can change, a truth I learned when my parents, who, while they were never the most pious, enjoyed church at some point in their lives, but made the decision to leave that behind in favor of helping their kids. When my aunt, who used to be a single issue abortion voter, cast her vote for multiple pro-choice candidates because the alternative was no longer an option. When my Irish Catholic grandmother asked about my first girlfriend over a game of online Scrabble and I knew she genuinely wanted an answer. There are good people out there, people who let their daughters cut their hair and their sons grow theirs out, who go to Pride parades and offer free hugs to anyone who needs one, who open their house up as a safe haven for any kids who might need somewhere to go. There are people who aren’t there yet, but can get there in the future, if only they make the decision to try.
you were just like me, and I was just like you
For all my struggles with gender presentation and societal expectations and reactions, I want to acknowledge that I’ve had it fairly easy. I am lucky in that as I grew up, things got easier for me, not harder. I am not trying to pretend that I am the expert on these struggles, that my experiences are singular or make me the ultimate authority on anything. Rather, I am here to say that I have a level of understanding of what the abstract attitudes in the world today look like in actuality, and if that is what it was like for me, a young, white, cisgender, middle class girl from Maine who was raised with a loving and supportive family, and if I still carry that weight with me today, imagine what it is like for those who are not as fortunate. Who are facing much worse than some side eye when they enter a restroom, but rather live in fear of a full out assault. Who face hatred from people who don’t even know them and are targeted by their government simply for existing as themselves. I didn’t have the vocabulary when I was younger for what it meant to be misgendered, I just knew I didn’t like it when people didn’t believe I was a girl and would look me in the eye and tell me I was a boy. I didn’t know that was the root of a much larger problem of prejudice and hatred – I just thought people were making honest mistakes (at least at first). However, as I grew up and started becoming more aware of the world around me, both my little corner of Maine and everything beyond it, I became aware of the larger system that my experiences were simply a drop in the ocean of.
The first time I sat down to write about any of this was my senior year of high school. We were writing essays for the Common App, and I opened mine in a similar manner to this essay – with an account of that freshman year civics class, and what happened when the girl in front of me turned around. My English teacher asked me in class one day if he could project my essay on the board, to use my opening as an example for the class. I got flustered and shook my head. At seventeen, I wasn’t ready to share that experience with my peers. I knew how I was perceived, and I wasn’t comfortable with everyone knowing that I had issues with that perception, that I was struggling to find a place for myself amidst what people expected from me and what I wanted from myself. Five years later, I have reached more of an understanding about my identity. I wouldn’t say I have figured everything out, but I have moved on to new questions and gotten more comfortable with not knowing the answers to others. I am still not entirely comfortable with the idea of sharing details of my life with the world, but I know that if I want to try to make the world even a little bit better for the next Little Claire that comes along, this is how that happens. This is my filibuster in a gazebo. My rainbow hat. My small statement. It won’t change the world, but it’s gotten me through the last handful of days.
I hope it can do the same for you.
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