May 17, 2024

Sam Deacon and Samantha Dean

"Where have all the tomboys gone?" the transphobes ask. Two fictional characters from my childhood offer a partial answer

Sam Deacon was a character I created for myself to serve as a companion and inspiration in what would probably nowadays be called social transition. I just thought of it as trying to be a boy. Her1 backstory was essentially mine, her appearance grew out of a cartoon I scribbled one wet lunchtime, and her name had quite an interesting origin.

Around the same time I was beginning to explore my boy side, I read a comic strip in a Mandy or Judy annual about a girl called Samantha Dean (Sam for short). Samantha played football and hung out with boys, but she was exasperated at being mistaken for a boy herself. She decided to do the most feminine thing she could and enter a beauty contest, and despite the best attempts of a Mean Girl to sabotage her, she emerged victorious. "Goodbye Sam the tomboy," she declared. "Hello Samantha Dean - beauty queen."

I was happy for her success, but "Goodbye Sam the tomboy" made me sad. Why couldn't she be a beauty queen and still enjoy football? The implication that to remind people she wasn't really a boy she had to change her entire personality left a bad taste in my mouth, and the supposedly triumphant ending felt hollow.

So when I created my own Sam, I was determined that she would never stop being Sam the tomboy. Whatever she went through, she would stay true to that boyish core.

My Sam was everything I wished I could be. I was clumsy and embarrassed myself in PE, so Sam had a natural talent for football. I was regularly bullied and had few friends, so Sam was one of the most popular kids in the class, often using her popularity to lift up victims of bullying. And only the villains of the story would ever dream of calling her Samantha.

I wrote about Sam on and off throughout my teenage years. When I tired of getting her into primary school scrapes - falsely accused of cheating on a test, befriending a much-mocked disabled girl, suspended from the football team before a crucial match - I had her step up to secondary school, move through the years, and ultimately become an adult. She married one of her childhood friends, but I wasn't that interested in her married life. It was just an excuse to explore what kind of parent she would be.

As an adult, Sam was more pragmatic and open to compromise, but still very much the same Sam. Passionate about football, a defender of the downtrodden, and willing to stand up for what she believed was right whatever the cost.

I think about Sam Deacon and Samantha Dean whenever I hear transphobes lament the "loss" of tomboys that are, in their narrative, "transed" to become trans men. And it's certainly possible that, if I'd fully understood my own gender when I was writing Sam, I'd have written her as a trans boy. She was, after all, an idealised version of me.

But the fate of most tomboys, in fiction and in life, is Samantha Dean's. The main narrative is that it's fine for little girls to play at being boyish, but when they get older they need to grow up and embrace their femininity. If they want to date boys, there's even more pressure to conform to the expected standards of girlhood. Even I, as a teenager struggling to fit in, tried hard to take an interest in makeup and fashion, searching for some magical solution that would make me accepted and desired.

In the face of these pressures, the transphobes' claim of support for tomboys seems fairly thin. They wring their hands over trans men abandoning tomboy life, but let a cis woman so much as get a pixie cut and they'll wring their hands about how she'll be using they/them pronouns next, implying a slippery slope to transition.

Their support for tomboys feels more like, if you'll excuse the pun, a transitional demand. If they succeeded in convincing a trans man to think of himself as a tomboy, they might reward him with acceptance briefly, but as soon as they believed their convincing worked, they'd start applying pressure to go the rest of the way and become Samantha Dean.

Trans people and our allies see it very differently. There are tomboys2, and some of them are trans women, although you'd never know it if all you heard from was the transphobes. There are trans men, and some of us may have thought of ourselves as tomboys before coming out. We have enough in common that we can often work in solidarity, and enough differences that sometimes we can organise separately. Nobody is "lost", nobody is being "stolen" from the community - we are all just being ourselves in all the different ways we can.

If a real Samantha Dean was genuinely happier as a beauty queen, I would wish her joy of it. It wouldn't make me happy, but as I've grown older I've learned that other people can take a path I wouldn't without either of us being wrong. But I can't help hoping that, whatever she became, she would keep space in her heart for Sam the tomboy, just as I have a soft spot for my own Sam. Even if they aren't who we ultimately became, they were still good people.