Interesting story, Susan. Actually, it sounds pretty familiar and some people think there were no kids like that back then that got away with expressing themselves beyond traditional gender expectations.
I was born the first week of 1955. From a small rural Ohio town, Mom and dad were high school sweethearts that married soon after my Marine Corps dad returned from the Korean war. We had a small house in town full of traditional 1950's kitsch. I remember when we got a toaster instead of making it in the oven on this little rack thing we had. Dad was a painter in a fluorescent light manufacturing plant a few towns away. Mom was an artist working with oil on canvas, stayed home with me, their only child, and was the quintessential 50's housewife. We spent a lot of time on the farms of their parents, my grandparents that were born in the late 1890's, having big family gatherings with lots of aunts, uncles and a zillion cousins. I have some great memories from this time in my life and experiences that have stuck with me throughout my years. I remember the first time I saw a color TV but that may have been in the 60's?
But not everything was quite so wonderful. I was different and unlike any of the other boys so I got a lot of special attention, some good and some not so much. If I wasn't playing house, dress up, dolls or having a tea party with my girl cousins, I was either stuck by my mother's side or in the kitchen with my grandmother. I was the archetypical mama's boy/sissy and was teased and mocked and embarrassed constantly by the men on my dad's side family trying to get me to boy up and to stop being such a girl. My dad and his brother's nickname for me was sugar tits thinking that would really help or something?
At home there was a lot of conflict. My mom and maternal grandparents were well aware of my feminine inclinations and interests and more or less catered to them and just let me be myself. My dad, on the other hand, had other ideas what his son should be like and saw me as an embarrassing disappointment that somehow reflected on his manhood and failure to make a little man out of me which created a lot of friction with my mom who just wanted to let me be me. I told them I was really a girl. I remember some of the sit down talks with my mom explaining why I couldn't be or look like them. Dad wouldn't hear it, made me stand in a corner, go to my room or got the belt and that was never good.
The final straw with my folks was a day I remember like it happened last week. I had been playing with my baby doll and had her in my arms. I walked into the living room where my dad was sitting on the end of the couch and I proclaimed I was going to grow up to be a mommy because I was really a girl. He reached out and backhanded me across the mouth knocking me to the ground saying he never wanted to hear anything like that from me ever again and my mom came totally unglued. They used words that day I'd never heard before but I knew they weren't good.
(I still have this 58 year old baby!)Her and I moved in with my grandparents right after that and my parents got divorced. Curious tidbit: my grandpa never called me by my boy name. He always called me Jenny which was my mom's nickname when she was growing up. He did it until he passed away when I was 14.
I survived the 1950's but not without a bit of emotional baggage. I started kindergarten in 1960. I've already told the story what a nightmare that was until I graduated high school in 1973 after being on HRT for a year at that point and without fanfare, completed my long overdue social transition that had been in process for years if not for always.
