"The Tom-Boy Who Was Changed Into A Real Boy," a children's poem written between 1859 and 1862 and published by McLoughlin Brothers Publishing in New York.
The poem is part of the "Aunt Oddamadood series," which appeared to primarily create entertaining yet moralistic poems for children, in which a naughty child (other examples include "Little Miss Consequence," "The Conceited Boy," "The Mischievous Fingers") is presented and shown the error of their ways, to teach children what will happen if they do not behave. With that context, the purpose of this poem appears to warning children raised as girls that, should they act like a tomboy, they will eventually be quietly sent off to sea. It is made clear both at the beginning and the end of the poem that the child's tomboyish nature is a "fault" and something the audience must be "cautioned" about.
I learned about this poem from this small collection of transgender antebellum (pre-Civil War) USAmerican children's literature, collected by historian Jen Manion. Another relevant example from that collection is "Lucy Nelson; or, the Boy-Girl," the story of a child assigned female who dislikes femininity and prefers playing with her brothers and acting like a boy. Lucy and their brothers get in trouble, but Lucy is singled out for punishment. They are forced to wear boys clothes for a month; this doesn't initially seem that bad, but it becomes clear that the real punishment is subjecting Lucy to gendered humiliation. Lucy's brother laugh at them, declare that if they dress as a boy then they will "be treated as one," leading to them being physically and verbally cruel to them. At a dinner party, the stress of the gendered humiliation they are facing for their transmasculinity reaches a breaking point. A guest's fixation and confusion on their gender leads them to shout, in tears, "I am not a boy!" to end the inquisition.
Lucy's story ends not with them simply realizing they are a girl; it is explicitly detailed that it is very difficult for them to resist their "boyish" nature and they were "in danger of lapsing," but that eventually they became an "obedient little girl," having been successfully humiliated back into appropriate (and, notably, white) daughterhood. These examples show clearly how the narrative around the "acceptance" of tomboys hides the very real disdain and cruelty directed at transmasculinized youth that has existed in Western culture for centuries. Rather than their masculinity being praised, or the masculinization of a young girl being seen as positive, these tomboys are depicted as out-of-control, insufficiently white, and further masculinization is depicted as a punishment done to tomboys, something meant to be humiliating and scary, thus coercing them back to the role of daughterwifemother.
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