tomgirl

plural tomgirls

1. A boy who behaves in a typically girlish manner.

   Delia says, “If you play with girls, then you are a tomgirl!”

   2003, a comment by a child, reported by William A. Corsaro in We are Friends, Right?

   1 more example

   This tactic didn't work, so several weeks later, in a variation on a theme, I reported to two girls on the playground "I'm a tomgirl," calculating that if tomboys exist, tomgirls must also, and I must be one. That didn't work either, […]

   1998, Claudine Griggs, S/He: Changing Sex and Changing Clothes, page 12

   Synonyms: janegirl

2. Synonym of tomboy (“girl who behaves in a typically boyish manner”).

   But she still wears her sweatpants in size XXXL, and hasn't lost that tomgirl touch. "A stylist kept trying to tell me to wear heels," she says. "You're not gonna be sliding and gliding in no heels."

   2007 February, Vibe, volume 15, number 2, page 107

   3 more examples

   Homosexual stirrings in children before puberty are very difficult to evaluate; most small boys with signs of effeminacy probably do not become homosexuals as adults and most tomgirls become heterosexual.

   1969, Harry Chapman, Sexual maneuvers and stratagems, page 121

   To anybody else it's pretty silly: love. Why should I feel a loss? How am I bereft? She was never mine; she was a fiction, always a golden tomgirl, barefoot, with an adolescent's slouch and a boy's taste for sports and fishing, […]

   1998, Richard Ford, The Granta Book of the American Short Story, page 308

   What Babe made me feel was something different. My secret Montana tomgirl heart burst with pride that this Texas tomgirl could hit that silly little ball farther than Snead could. Even the comments by some people in town that Babe was "kinda weird" (another code word for lesbian) didn't […]

   2006, Patricia Nell Warren, The lavender locker room: 3000 years of great athletes whose sexual orientation was different, page 175

   Synonyms: tomboy