Letty Armour was a tomboy – a little girl who liked to climb trees, torture frogs, do daredevil tricks on her Schwinn and never, ever wear dresses. ‘That’s for girls’, she said to her mother who tried to fit her with a pretty white organza dress she had bought at Lord & Taylor.
‘Why, Letty darling, you’re a girl’, to which Letty frowned, pursed her lips, and spat, ‘No, I’m not’, which of course upset Mrs. Armour who had always been the belle of the ball, a stunning Hedy Lamar raven-haired beauty who practiced her inviting smile for hours in the bathroom mirror and was always followed by a retinue of boys wherever she went.
Prom queen, Snow Queen, Spring Queen, she had
been the most desirable, alluring, tempting young woman that Chillicothe had
ever seen; and now standing before her was this defiant butch girl only she
could pick out in a crowd of roughneck boys.
‘She’s just a tomboy, darling. She’ll grow out of it’, said Mr. Armour, a good looking man who fancied himself a boulevardier, a Clark Gable. A bit of a pompous ass, all dressed in English tweeds and Burberry, a man who thought he understood women but had no clue, so self-absorbed was he in his own persona that he was downright lucky to have reeled in a trophy fish like Betty Finch who for her part overlooked John Armour’s sexual obtuseness for the reputation of his family, Old English stock, Mayflower, John Davenport, and the Massachusetts Bay Colony, the works.
So when he gave his pronouncement, his wife gave that ‘What would you know about it’ snicker and turned to Dr. Spock, the mother’s childrearing guru of the age, for advice. In the 1938 edition, Spock wrote,
Some girls exhibit a strong
desire to be boys, but this is nothing to worry about. Endowed with the natural femaleness that gives
woman her natural litheness, inner beauty, and lovely complaisance, the tomboy
will soon realize her genetic destiny and blossom into full-bodied woman
These comments ceased to appear in the post-war editions. During the war women had been riveters, hod carriers, and bricklayers, hard hats and steel-toed shoes, all of which gave Spock and his editors pause; but in later Fifties editions when women went back to Kinder, Kirche, Kuchen and returned to frills, high heels and silk stockings, it was back in. Don’t worry, said Spock, your little tomboy will turn out just fine.
In Letty’s case it was a long haul, for even as she began puberty she strapped and corseted herself up, wore baggy jeans and shaggy hair that could pass as sideburns.
‘She’s a lesbian’ said Mr. Armour whose scant knowledge of
women certainly did not include any sexual variations, and his only passing
acquaintance with lesbians came from a Reader’s Digest article, The Femmes Fatales of Bernal Heights, a
short showpiece of lesbian life in San Francisco with a few pictures of young
women in flannel shirts and jackboots holding hands.
But the tomboy phase did pass and pass quickly. Spock had been proven right – once Letty’s hormones got cooking, and the XX chromosomes kicked in, Letty did a volte face. She pulled off her corset, wore slim-fitting jeans, let her hair grow long, and added touches of lipstick and mascara to an already stunningly beautiful face. If her mother was a Hedy Lamar lookalike, Letty was Elizabeth Taylor in National Velvet.
Now it was she who had a retinue of desirable young men following her, but she eschewed the faux idolatry of high school beauty queens. Part of her genetic inheritance was a keen and canny understanding of women’s power. In their ability to seduce, attract, and hold men through sexual appeal and paternity (only women could know for sure the fathers of their children), women were more than the equal of men. The war between the sexes, apparently one of parity, was nothing of the sort.
This is neither here nor there. We all know Ibsen’s women well – Hedda Gabler, Hilde Wangel, and Rebekka West, all defiantly purposeful, strong women who put up with no man and controlled them like a dray horse. Shakespeare’s Goneril, Regan, Tamora, Dionyza, and Volumnia and Aeschylus’ Clytemnestra were no different. Letty was certainly one of their kind, but that story is predictable and of little relevance to this one.
What is far more interesting is Letty’s sexual evolution,
her maleness and femaleness and how that distinction was resolved. The Greeks
were quite happy to accommodate hermaphrodites, those who were both male and
female in a delectable combination. They
were prized lovers for Aristotle and Aeschylus who never had to admit
homosexuality, and were able to dally with it comfortably.
Shakespeare in Sonnet 20 wrote about sexual complexity – the poet loves a man whom God created with the body of a man and the soul of a woman and thus has cover while exploring the delights of both.
The transgender advocates of today have totally missed the point. Remaking a woman into a man and vice-versa is a crude, obtuse, defiantly ignorant idea. Hermaphrodites were perfect creations, the best of worlds, the lovely and the pursuant. No man was shouting to get out, imprisoned in a woman’s body, but happy to be there, a unique highly evolved creation. And here were the butchers of the modern day, cutting off and reconfiguring, reshaping, distorting and ruining a good thing.
So God only knows what beautiful sexuality made up the young
Letty Armour; whether she had some of the hermaphrodite in her, whether she, seeing
boys’ social advantages chose to imitate them, or whether her spirit was of the
fugitive kind. The point is, hers was a
beautiful complexity, a natural born one, an innate, pure one in no need of
change, only evolution, stopping only when the time and the moment were right.
‘I liked baseball’, was her only response when her mother
asked her about her tomboy days, leaving the older woman as confused as she
always had been, especially influenced as she was by the cant and fol-de-rol of
sexuality - dyke, straight, or transgender, nothing in between, nothing
sophisticated, no subtlety or grace - but Letty always knew, suspected that she
was unique, formed specially; and although she never knew for what, she was a
happy woman.