How Can I Sing Like A Girl? A Song for Anyone Who Ever Felt Wrong for Being Themselves
A reflective look at TMBG’s “How Can I Sing Like a Girl?” through bullying, gender norms, freak flags, and the freedom to be yourself.
Have you checked out the archives to catch up on all the past songs and albums that have been written about? Find them here!
The Sweatpants Incident
The fourth track on Factory Showroom is for anyone who ever felt afraid to express themselves, or who learned early that being different meant consequences.
For me, that lesson landed one afternoon on the bus ride home.
My friends and I had perfected a foolproof method of switching seats while the bus was moving. Getting up and switching seats was something that our driver, Mr. Cool, was decidedly not cool with.. The trick was to drop to the floor, scoot under the seats like little feral raccoons, and pop up in a different spot undetected.
This particular day, I was wearing an article of clothing that perfectly met two of my needs: it did not feel like denim and it was covered with images of one of my special interests. My Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle sweatpants.
“How uncool to like cartoons.”
“How weird to wear sweatpants to school.”
“How embarrassing to be excited about anything.”
Of course, getting teased and bullied felt bad, and I hated it. Just not as much as I hated letting jeans touch my skin.
While I was sliding under the seats, I made the grave error of sliding through a seat with a known bully. Upon witnessing my TMNT lower have sneak by, he grabbed the leg fabric of my pants and yanked backward.
Most unfortunate for me, I had also left for the bus stop that morning in a hurry and could not find any of the pairs if underwear that my mom had washed the night before. Just sweats would have to do. And it all worked out fine. Until I was one block away from my stop, pants-less, under a bus seat, with my body complete exposed.
The Song’s Origin Story (and also mine kind of)
How Can I Sing Like A Girl? sprang from a live performance where John Flansburgh had to climb into a falsetto to mimic the sped-up vocal from She Was a Hotel Detective. A moment of stage banter and a joke about “singing like a girl” eventually crystallized into this entire song.
But the song’s emotional origin?
That landed somewhere much deeper for me.
I grew up hearing every version of doing something “like a girl,” and the logic never made sense.
“So? Girls aren’t bad at these things.”
And honestly, most of the girls I knew were better than me at the things I was being teased about.
Didn’t like sports
Knew nothing about cars
Anti–locker room talk
Rejecting the idea that “boys will be boys”
Wrote poetry
Joined theater
Failed every sports category in Trivial Pursuit but crushed pop culture
This stayed with me my entire life. My first wife liked to point that didn’t “act like a real man.”
To her absolute credit, my second wife loved exactly that about me. That I was me and didn’t care that I don’t belong anywhere near a Home Depot.
My Brief and Very Understated Experience with the Policing of Gender
This song hits hard because it exposes something simple and devastating:
People leap at the chance to ridicule anyone they deem “less than.” Masculinity becomes this rigid, punitive performance. Feminine traits are treated as weakness. And women who do things “male” coded? Ridiculed too.
Patriarchy doesn’t elevate men; it traps them. It punishes us for softness, art, gentleness, emotional expression, or liking anything outside the narrow band of “approved” masculine interests.
Essentially, if you’re not a man’s man, you become a freak.
The chorus asks:
“How can I sing like a girl
And not be stigmatized
As if I were a girl?”
Later:
“…not be objectified
as if I were a girl?”
That’s such a deep and meaningful lyric and there’s more coming. Because the song is more than just pointing out the disparity that exists. It is being defiant. It’s a song that’s saying “I’m going to do this anyway.”
I want to raise my freak flag
Higher
And higher
I want to raise my freak flag
And never be alone
Never be alone
The shift is brilliant.
“Stigmatized” = punished for deviation. “Objectified” = punished for conformity.
It’s pointing out the trap:
Men are mocked for behaving like women, while women are punished for simply being women.
Raise That Freak Flag
And then the song pivots — from fear to defiance:
I want to raise my freak flag
Higher and higher
I want to raise my freak flag
And never be alone
By the time this song hit my ears, I had already found my people — a self-assembled tribe of freaks and bohemians. People who made art, stayed up late talking about everything, and didn’t flinch at individuality.
But hearing They Might Be Giants sing this, on an album I’d bought with my own money from a mall store, made me feel the least alone I had ever felt.
It was validation from adults who had grown up like me, made it out, and were waving their own freak flags from somewhere out there in the world.
Naming the Thing
I didn’t know the word “patriarchy” or what my role in it was back then. By the time I learned about or better understood it, I thought of this song. This song exists because of the patriarchy and because of gender norms and toxic masculinity.
When I was four, my parents bought me a Cabbage Patch Kid during the 80s craze. I remember everything about him. The clothes. The soft yarn hair.
His name on the birth certificate: Barlow Shawn.
One of my top three cartoons from as early as I can remember until about 4th grade? Not G.I. Joe.
Ok sure, there was He-Man and Voltron but also Care Bares and Rainbow Brite. And I got a Rainbow Brite doll for my birthday because I asked for one and no one told me I shouldn’t.
Those small moments, being allowed to exist without shame before I stepped foot in a classroom, shaped me more than I ever understood at the time.
And they shaped the kind of dad I am now.
I want my kids to grow up in a home where they can be whoever they want, wear whatever feels right, like whatever they like, and discover their own gender expression without anyone dimming their light.
Sing Anyway
So the question isn’t really:
“How can I sing like a girl and not be stigmatized?”
The real answer, the one the song suggests, is:
You can’t. Not in this world.
Not yet.
But you can sing anyway and find your people. And you don’t have to do it alone.
I was lucky. I found my freaks. I found art. And now I get to raise kids who don’t have to unlearn the same shame I did.
I get to let them “sing like a girl.”