Hurrah for tomboys!

Some grow out of it, some don't. But with girls increasingly pushed towards pink and princesses, being a tomboy these days takes pluck. Stephanie Theobald pays tribute

I was nine years old when I first suspected I might be slightly odd. I was with my mother in Marks & Spencer and I asked her if I could have a pair of boy's underpants. I remember the momentary flash of horror that shot through her eyes and I couldn't completely work out what I'd said wrong. I already lived in jeans and T-shirts and was often mistaken for a boy thanks to a short crop given me by David Hammil, the only Vidal Sassoon-trained hairdresser in the whole of 1970s Cornwall. I had cowboy outfits, train sets, I wore swimming trunks to the pool on Sunday (and got dressed in the boys' changing room) and by the age of seven I'd written my autobiography stating that I would never get married, but that if I did I would wear trousers, so if anyone came to attack during the service, "I will be able to fight them off." I liked the idea of being strong, and thanks to my curly hair I was nicknamed The Gorilla by my classmates. Seven and eight were the best years of my life and every morning I looked forward to turning into an ape, pounding around the class and giving fireman's lifts to the girls who squealed the most.

I don't have children of my own, but recently it struck me that all the little girls I know are, well, a bit girly. Where, I wondered, had all the tomboys gone?

For women of my generation - late thirty and early fortysomethings - it's almost a badge of honour to say that you were a tomboy when you were a child. The fashionable books of the time - The Famous Five, Little Women, To Kill a Mockingbird - all had tomboy heroines. Girls such as George, who could row a boat "like a grown man"; Jo, who'd rather be a soldier than a seamstress; and Scout who feels "the starched walls of a pink cotton penitentiary closing in on me" every time she is made to wear a dress. For that matter, why couldn't JK Rowling have written a book called Harriet Potter? Surely it can't be the case that boys are still taken more seriously than girls ... ?

Alarmingly, when it comes to the box office, it seems that semi-sexualising girls is still the only way ahead. Take Disney's revamped Famous Five cartoon, Famous 5: On the Case. Jo, the daughter of George, seems forced to wear figure-hugging girl versions of boy clothes (no tomboy worth her salt would ever wear figure-hugging clothes). And what of poor Dora the Explorer? Nickelodeon recently redesigned the Dora doll to make her more "feminine" (read "profitable"). Instead of being equipped with tools, map and backpack, her new accessories include halter-tops, tiaras and glittery hairbrushes.

Linda Blair, a clinical psychologist, believes that the fact that little girls are so pink these days is all to do with money. "If you have to buy something for a boy and something for a girl you end up spending more," she says, adding that when she was a child, "girls used to wear hand-me-downs from their big brothers."

My friend Anne-Marie, who lives in Cannes, reminded me that in France, a tomboy is known as a garçon manqué. That's what her neighbours call her four-year-old child, Annabelle, who likes playing with tractors as well as dressing up as a princess. "It's like, if you actually move a lot, you must be like a boy," Anne-Marie said wryly. She admitted, though, that she rarely sees bona fide tomboys now (ie girls who want to pass as boys). "Maybe before, being a boy was the only way to have power - and girls could sort of feel that," she ventured. "Maybe women have more of a chance all round now."

While I could see that girls being allowed to play football at school - as they are now - might satisfy the "boy cravings" of a lot of them, I was convinced that there must be hundreds of real, live 21st-century tomboys still out there somewhere.

Yet tracking one down was no easy task. I would get promising leads from friends: "So-and-so is a real tomboy. She's this little skate chick in my son's class - all the boys think she's really cool ... " And then my friend would have a chat with the mother, only to come back with, "Sorry, but she reckoned her daughter's totally not a tomboy."

I met a couple of mothers who would speak on the condition that they and their daughters remained anonymous. One teacher from Oxford, for instance, said that her daughter moved other women who were "fed up with the whole princess thing that goes on today". Yet she admitted that part of her was disappointed with her only daughter, lamenting half-jokily how she'd "love to be able to dress her up in pretty things".

When I heard of the mother who'd decided to send her tomboy daughter to therapy, it struck me that if it was OK for us to tough around in the 1970s, then maybe our current era had medicalised tomboys and posited them as a problem. Maybe they were never OK. If you read The Famous Five carefully, you see that George's mother, Aunt Fanny, clearly has a very troubled relationship with her only daughter. She is forever calling her a "strange child", and doesn't seem to like her very much.

I began to assume that a lot of mothers were secretly embarrassed by their daughters. And then Merle came along.

I got a call one day from one of the anonymous mothers. She said that she'd met a "perfect tomboy" and that both mother, Lucy, and daughter, Merle (both their real names), would love to talk to me.

When I telephoned Lucy, she said that she and her husband were "completely relaxed" about their daughter. From the age of two, Merle had said that she wanted to be called "Marcus" after her best friend. She wanted her hair cut short, she wanted to wear boys' clothes and informed everyone that she was a boy. "She had a very good reception-class teacher," said Lucy who works in urban regeneration. "She told Merle she was a tomboy. That hadn't occurred to Merle before. The teacher would say, 'Boys line up here, girls line up here and tomboys line up here.' Now she calls herself a tomboy."

A few days later, when I arrive at their flat - an amazing sci-fi penthouse in the East End of London - the door is opened by a confident seven-year-old boy-girl with short, floppy hair, a blue hoodie, black army trousers and trainers.

I suppose it's a narcissistic thing - stumbling across a modern-day tomboy makes you think that maybe you weren't so weird after all. I enter the apartment with a swaggering spring in my step.

Lucy suggests that Merle and I go to her room to chat and here, against a backdrop of pirate ships, an Action Man knight and two Barbies ("The Barbies belong to my sisters," Merle says, referring to siblings Eve, 12, Thea, nine, and Rita, five, who don't mind being girls) I start to learn a bit about this apparently exotic child. Her favourite food is sausages and beans with Kinder Egg for dessert. She likes climbing trees ("Going to the top of trees is one of the things I like best"), she fixes bikes ("I can do flat tyres and mend the chain") and she bites her nails - as she shows me proudly.

Somehow, it seems preferable for a seven-year-old to bite her nails than to paint them pink and demand lipstick and eye shadow too. Merle confides that she's a bit worried that she might have to wear a dress for the school nativity play (which seems to involve a fashion show). She has only ever worn a dress (her sister's) once in her life, "Just for a bit." Her favourite thing is swimming trunks, which she is permitted to wear for swimming lessons at school. "Baggy ones are best, but we're not allowed them."

The longer I speak to Merle, the more odd it seems that I am interviewing her. I understand completely everything she is saying and suddenly it seems more appropriate to wonder why all those weird pink girls are being like they are.

Merle's sisters sometimes tease her about how she won't be able to wear swimming trunks when she grows breasts. "A good trick when that happens," I start to tell her, "is to walk around the pool with your hands in the air and then they kind of disappear." Merle looks intently at me as if I am about to impart the answer to a vital question. But I realise I can't come up with any happy end for the trunks story. Eleven and 12 are tricky ages in the life of a tomboy and eventually you're not going to be able to make your breasts disappear no matter how high you stretch your arms in the air.

Some people say it's easier to be a tomboy than to be a "sissy" or a little boy who displays female traits. I'd probably agree with that. While I was allowed to be a tomboy, my twin brother, Nicholas, was more of a big girl's blouse. I was aware, even then, that my mother was more troubled by his love of acting out Julie Andrews in The Sound of Music than she was by my ambition to be Steve McQueen in The Great Escape.

Still, my feeling is that things even out when you grow up. Men have a much wider place to be "sissies" in, and fashion designers and interior decorators are a more acceptable part of the social landscape than big, butch women or - heaven forefend - lesbians. And that's part of the rub, isn't it? Tomboys are sweet, but grown-up tomboys? Naturally, not all of them flower into lesbians, and as Linda Blair points out, dressing in a masculine fashion doesn't necessarily have anything to do with sexuality.

"It is absolutely within the bounds of normality for little girls to exhibit masculine traits or only masculine traits. It is very important that they shouldn't be told this is a bad thing. My own daughter didn't have a dress until she was 16.

"In primates you see playing across the sexes all the time - both sexually and non-sexually. A lot of people are afraid of having those feelings themselves or seeing it in their children. There's a lot of ignorance because we just don't talk about it enough."

I identified as a lesbian from the age of 24 until I was 37 and now I am having a relationship with a man who used to identify as gay, so I'm not sure what that makes me. At one point in this investigation, one of the anonymous mothers made the comment that, "In some ways, my daughter is very feminine - if there's a baby in the room she will pick it up and hold it so tenderly," which made me think that we should look at the idea that some traits aren't "masculine" or "feminine" so much as "human".

Luckily, complicated labels are not yet part of Merle's life. And Merle herself is an ever-changing creature. She and Marcus are still thick as thieves, although there is now a new little boy on the scene, he likes to play Hermione when they play Harry Potter at school. This is good because it means Merle can play Ron. Her new male friend is very useful, as a matter of fact. "He's always the girl one when we play Wizard of Oz."

Stephanie Theobald's new novel A Partial Indulgence is published on 2 April 2009