Growing up in the Jurassic Age, I never thought of myself as a tomboy. In 1965, when I was thirteen, I was shaken to the core when I discovered what the male academic establishment thought of girls like me.

I had started menstruating and still found this a weird, interesting and messy process. I liked my new female curves more than I disliked them, and I was fascinated by the world of women’s fashion. I loved to sew and to write poems. I thought I wouldn’t mind developing into a woman if I could be a hip fashion designer like Mary Quant, though I also cherished an image of myself as a novelist like Mary McCarthy.

I picked up a copy of The Scientific American, one of the scholarly publications that flowed regularly into our house.

I flipped through it, hoping to find something I could understand. (Most of the articles seemed pitched to a fairly academic but not discipline-specific readership.)

My eyes lighted on an article, "The Problem of Masculine Girls" (or similar title). I was able to understand enough to start hyperventilating.

"Masculine Girls" were defined by the male writer (clearly an expert in some relevant field) as a social problem, which was essentially biological. "Masculine girls" were defined as those who perversely wanted to do something with their adult lives besides (or other than) marrying, raising children and keeping house. Some even wanted careers, which was clearly problematic for society as a whole. "Masculine girls" were unnaturally aggressive, especially when defending their unnatural ambitions to those who tried to reason with them. Some "masculine girls" were even sexually attracted to other girls, though not all. (And even those who weren't lesbians tended to have sexual feelings leading to masturbation, which was almost as bad.)