Tiny Useful Fact #4
Boymode and Girlmode, explained.
If you’ve never heard the terms boymode and girlmode, you’re not alone. Not everyone at Gender Defiant had either. And if you are mainly around cis people, you probably won’t have occasion to use the terms.
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But it’s not important to use them, only to understand them. Because understanding boymode and girlmode builds awareness of what a trans person might be going through at school, at work, or just out walking the dog. That’s why it’s today’s Tiny Useful Fact.
Eternally drowning
Girlmode and boymode overlap with gender dysphoria, so let's flash-review that first. If the reproductive parts you were born with don’t match your gender inside, the panic, fear, depression, self-loathing you may feel, especially in public, is gender dysphoria. (Note: not all trans people have gender dysphoria or experience it the same way. That is a great Useful Fact on its own.)
Trans writer Tilly Bridges compares gender dysphoria to “being underwater, seeing everyone else around you swimming while you are eternally drowning.”
Like camouflage
Now to boymode and girlmode. If you have begun transition as a trans girl or woman and need to (or are forced to) present as a male for comfort or safety, that’s boymode. A trans boy or trans man in a situation where it’s uncomfortable or unsafe to present as male, who is wearing girl clothes/styled as a girl, is in girlmode.
Boymode and girlmode are, in a way, camouflage. They let a person safely blend in. But boymode/girlmode can be agonizing for the wearer. When you have come however far, with courage, toward living as your true self, putting the wrong-gender clothes back on can feel awful.
A few situations where a person might be in boymode or girlmode:
- A trans nonbinary child whose favorite outfit is a dress travels with their family to a different country. Their documents still have their birth name, a masculine name. On airport days, passing through security and passport control, they are in sweats, long hair tucked into a baseball cap. They are in Boymode.
- A trans boy has come out to his parents but not to extended family yet. There’s a family wedding; transphobes will be among the guests. He has gotten out his girl clothes and styled himself as a girl for the day. He is in Girlmode.
- A trans woman is for the first time wearing the clothes she always wanted to wear. The feminine outfits feel so right, but if someone called her A Man in a Dress—in other words, clocked her as trans—it would be scary and possibly dangerous. So she switches between feminine clothes and boymode every few days. As her dysphoria fades, her confidence builds, and her transition continues, she gradually drops boymode. (Indebted again to Tilly Bridges, who shared this story in her boymode/girlmode explainer.)
- A trans man early in transition works at a conservative company. If he dressed in the menswear of his dreams, he could attract scrutiny or lose his job. So at work he wears clothes somewhere between gender-neutral and feminine.
Emotional cost
“Oh,” you might be thinking, “cis people change their gender presentation too. For instance, I am a cis mom wearing menswear today.”
True. Cis people play with gender presentation all the time, pushing boundaries, borrowing styles and codes. But there’s generally no emotional cost or safety risk for us.
So if you are cis woman in menswear, you rock. You are not in boymode, though, because boymode and girlmode refer to experiences in the everyday lives of gender expansive people.
—Team GD
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Isa Lichen
