Do Tomboys Grow Up to Be Lesbian?

Source: By Rambler0 (Own work) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

There are many definitions of “tomboy” and disagreements about whether it is a positive label, a negative label, or even a current label that should be used is debatable. These issues I’ll address in Part 2 of this post. In this one, I’ll give a brief overview of what we know about tomboys.

Broody defined a tomboy as, “A girl who dresses and sometimes behaves the way boys are expected to, often into more masculine things like ‘stronger’ sports, computers, or cars. Stereotypically wears jeans, baseball caps, and denim vests/jackets.”

There is no direct connection in this definition between tomboyism and lesbianism, though a later definition links the two—but most don’t. And, in this, the writers are consistent with the research literature. That is, a gender expression among girls that has been labeled as tomboy has been unhitched from any particular sexuality.

Across many gender-related activities and personality characteristics, relatively few decisively discriminate homoerotic from heteroerotic girls either when they are children or adolescents. The ones that do are more often a matter of degree (e.g., interest in some boys as friends) rather than in kind (e.g., having only boys as friends). A girl’s behavioral gender deviations toward a male-typical direction are somewhat weaker (compared to boys) predictors of her sexual and romantic orientations. The best gender-atypical predictors of female homosexuality are cross-dressing and having a cross-gender reputation as a tomboy. However, even here the power of these two to distinguish sexual orientations is muted, especially as “masculine” clothing is losing its ties to masculinity and as girls increasingly participate in “strong” sports.

Early research (Bell and associates, 1981) illustrated these mixed results. Lesbian-identified adult women reported that as girls they seldom participated in typical girl activities and often recalled preferring the activities of boys, wearing boys’ clothes, and pretending to be a boy. However, only slightly more than half of the heterosexual women recalled these girl-typical activities and just one-third of lesbians reported extreme versions of masculine behavior during their childhood. For activities deemed neither masculine nor feminine (e.g., drawing, music, reading) no sexual orientation differences existed. Similarly, on childhood personality characteristics, sexual orientation effects were even more meager, though lesbians were slightly more likely to recall being dominant and independent girls.

Since the 1980s, research has continued to support these somewhat weak findings. In a study of 4- to 9-year-old girls identified by their parents as tomboys, based on observations, child reports, and parent reports, tomboy girls were more similar to their brothers than to their sisters in their play, toy, and activity preferences but they were less masculine than their brother (Bailey et al., 2002).

In a more recent study, self-identified tomboys and non-tomboys, mean age 9 years old, were equally aware of gender stereotypes (playing with dolls, playing football) (Martin & Dinella, 2012). Although tomboys did not differ from non-tomboys in liking feminine activities, they had greater interest in masculine activities.

In part, this is consistent with a study comparing gender conformity and nonconformity among preschool children. Gender-atypical 4-year-old girls were less likely than gender-typical girls to play with girls and more likely to play with boys, yet in their masculine versus feminine play activities, the two did not differ (Martin et al., 2012).

Based on childhood home videos, correlations between observed child gender-atypical behavior and later gender expressions were considerably lower among young adult lesbians than gay men (Rieger et al., 2008).

In an early review of the literature, with perhaps less representative samples than is generally true today, childhood gender nonconformity was a significant predictor of homosexuality among women (Bailey & Zucker, 1995). However, only about 6% of girls with an average degree of cross-sex behavior among lesbians became lesbians, whereas for boys the proportion was considerably larger, 51%. “Thus, early cross-gender behavior appears to be substantially more predictive of homosexuality in men than in women” (p. 49).

I might add that it is more the addition of masculinity rather than a deletion of femininity that distinguishes tomboy from non-tomboy girls. And, this pattern characterizes not only lesbian but also many straight, bisexual, and other nonexclusive girls.

Why is this the case? We’ll explore this issue in the next post.