Parenting & Family Quote by Catherine Bell

There’s a quiet refusal baked into Bell’s offhand “I’ve always been like that.” It’s not a manifesto; it’s a shrug with teeth. By framing her childhood as proof, she sidesteps the idea that gender expression is a phase, a stunt, or a branding choice. The line works because it treats identity as continuity, not performance: tomboy isn’t a costume she tried on, it’s the default setting she’s always operated from.

The details do a lot of cultural work. Baseball, basketball, football: a roll call of American boyhood scripts, delivered casually enough to make them sound like common sense. Then comes the loaded phrase “with the boys,” which signals both access and exclusion. She’s not just describing what she liked; she’s marking the social border she crossed, and how normalized it became for her. “And stuff” functions as a softener, a way to downplay what could be read as defiance. It suggests she’s had to tell this story enough times to keep it easy, digestible, non-threatening.

Coming from a model, the subtext gets sharper. Modeling is an industry that sells a tightly policed version of femininity; Bell’s anecdote positions her as legible in that world while resisting being reduced to it. She’s claiming range: you can be athletic, rough-edged, comfortable in male-coded spaces, and still be seen, still be hired, still be “model” material. The intent isn’t to romanticize tomboyness; it’s to normalize it without apology, while quietly critiquing why this still reads as noteworthy.