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By: Jari Bradley

Legend has it that, as a child, I hated dresses. I was just entering kindergarten and someone thought it would be fitting to adorn me in red ruffles for the first day of school. On my way past the stairs to my kindergarten classroom, a middle-aged Latina woman with curly black hair who taught fifth grade looked at me and made mention of how cute I looked. I was told that I looked the woman square in the eyes, stuck my tongue out at her, and ran off in a dash back to my class.

For me then, as it is for me now, I hated to feel confined to anything, and dresses made me feel like an imposter or a shadow of my true self. In the fifth grade I’d walk onto the courtyard with my one pant leg rolled up to my knee, a mimic of the man all the ladies loved, LL Cool J, having watched copious amounts of episodes of him on the 90s sitcom In the House. I used to walk with a limp as tribute to the likes of Willie Dynamite and Dolemite, an homage to all the Blaxploitation films watched alongside my uncle on weeknights. In my young world then, men and masculinity provided alternate forms of being while also trying to reconcile early incidents of violation. 

During the mid to late 90’s and early 2000’s, I was what many called a “tomboy,” or a boyish acting girl. It’s not every masculine identified woman/person’s narrative, but mine was certainly riddled with an early determination of expressing myself in ways I thought were only afforded to boys and men. In all areas of my life, it seemed like boys and men had the power to define themselves in ways that were denied women and girls. Having observed my only uncle and male cousins, I saw how women and girls were manipulated and overworked, and never quite taken seriously. Even the men on television represented a kind of self determination that I desperately sought to adopt.

From characters like Steve Urkel turned Stefan Urquelle from Family Matters, down to artists like a young Usher Raymond gliding across my TV screen chanting how much the next man’s woman liked to do it “his way,” while adhering to Bill Bellamy’s list of “Player Commandments” in How To Be A Player (1997). In an effort to be desired, and, in many ways, loved, I saw these examples of masculinity as gateways to access those around me who would otherwise shut me out because of my corporeal reality as a fat, Black, boyish girl. The effort to be both witty and intellectually astute were markers of what I was conditioned to associate with masculinity.

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In my child mind, boys, with the innate promise of becoming men, could dictate much easier than girls, burdened to become women, what happened to their bodies. This was before I’d learn that boys were also harmed and violated at the hands of all genders of people. What I can articulate now that I couldn’t then is that as early as kindergarten, I was navigating and refusing the power wielded over me and my body as a result of patriarchy by expressing my gender in ways that would often upend people’s expectations.  

Since then, the term “tomboy” has mostly fallen out of use to describe more masculine inclined girls or young women. Yet, being a tomboy provided me with a shield to protect my body from the desires and expectations placed on me by adults, particularly men, and children alike. In many ways femininity was something often denied larger-bodied, dark-skinned children like me, and was something that I felt put my body at risk when I was smaller. Surviving meant arming myself physically and mentally against the onslaught of sexualization that occurs to feminized bodies. I was so maladjusted to the injustices and trespasses I had undergone as a child. One of my earliest memories of dissociating from my girl body derives from my recollection of playing with the neighbor boy’s Turnin’ Turbo Dashboard while he was busy trying to get a kiss from me. I can still feel the heat that emanated from that boy’s breath on my neck. I desperately kept my eyes trained on the illuminated road and pretended like I was in the driver’s seat leaving him, his hot breath, and that hall closet for the open neon road.

Eventually, as time went on some of the tomboys I knew were also starting to find new language for themselves within queer community. Around 2007-2009, I began to notice most of us  Black tomboys began to move on to labels like “stud”, or “AG” (aggressive), and/or masculine-of-center. This discovery of newfound language catapulted me into a space that broadened my notions and understandings of masculinity as something with many different shades and codes. The early years of YouTube were also  catalyst for this shift in masculine self-identification. Through the search bar I was able to watch what would eventually be termed “vlogs” of other Black masculine identified young people within my age group who called themselves studs. These were the days where rainbow belts and Hot Topic graphic tees paired with a fresh pair of Vans reigned supreme. Days where 3x and 4x tees would be practically sold out at any local Foot Locker. 

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In these perilous days of hegemonic white patriarchy waging war against all and anything unlike itself, we are left to consider just what potential masculinity has toward liberation for all instead of a categoric few. In a world where masculinity is largely affiliated with men, the dominant iteration of manhood still being a construction of whiteness, we are left to contend with a violence brought on by the continued perpetuation of a singular vision for what masculinity is and can be. The radical politics of Black feminist, genderqueer, nonconforming, and transgender expressions of masculinity are necessary in redefining what masculinity can mean and look like, especially for those of us raised among and within Black cultural folkways.

Coming into my own awareness of being masc is a direct contribution to my experiences of having had a girlhood, which informs my masculine performance, upending hegemonic expectations of what it means to present in such a way. I work to include the experiences and feelings of my small girl self once trapped in her neighbor’s closet desperate to escape his puckered lips. I believe in her as the core to what differentiates my transmasculine leanings from that of your run of the mill “red pill bro”, or geriatric white man in a suit posturing as anything more than a relic of the times of lawful gerrymandering and public lynchings.

I have faith that the child I once was, coupled with the woman I could never be, has helped shape a kind of masculinity that seeks to liberate and not bind. May there always be a place for that child that fought relative and stranger alike to exist as the best version of themselves within me.

Jari Bradley is a Black transmasculine poet and scholar. Originally from San Francisco, they live in Houston.

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