The Curious Case of the Disappearing “Tombody”: Holding the Questions Before Grabbing the Hormone Needle

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You wake up one day and you cannot run as fast as the boys. Your hips and breasts are slowing you down. You are bleeding and you are worried your newly acquired menstruation equipment might slip and embarrass you to death. The boys you used to play soccer with look at you in a different way. You, who were once one of the star players, have been exiled from the club.
A lot of biological women, who feel somehow male or masculine, claim to have always felt like a boy. I am one of them. But do we actually feel like men? I never dreamed I would grow up to be a man. But I never imagined I would become a woman.

What is important, as people rush increasingly towards the testosterone hormones, is to hold the questions.

Tomboys become women. Someone once called it an involuntary sex change; an entire gender is doomed to disappear with the onset of puberty. No one ever experiences puberty quite like a tomboy does. How can an entire gender exist only temporarily? Who is responsible for this? Why didn’t anyone warn us? Where do I go with this heavy grief and these big boobs?

The next question is, of course, what do I do now? In recent times, the numbers of female to male transitions as a solution increased exponentially, as if to point out how deep the tomboy crisis actually is and has been. Where has the crisis and all this grief been hiding prior to this phenomenon? Did it exist? How did it manifest? Is transitioning the solution? What options are available to you as a tomboy in a grownup binary world of man and woman?  Is feeling like a boy the same as wanting to be a man? Are tomboys disappearing into manhood just like they disappeared earlier into womanhood? How come our gender has never been officially named or really taken seriously by the world? Why is our crisis not being addressed in a full sense?

- Contributed by Raphamahl

Tags: gender, man, puberty, tomboy, transsexual, woman