From its beginning, “Boys and Girls” sets up binaries: adult and child, boy and girl. The narrator, at 11 years old, starts to cross those binaries. As she feels more pressure to stay inside the house with her mother, instead of inside the barn with her father, “the word girl,” which “had formerly seemed to [her] innocent and unburdened like the word child,” seemed to become “a definition” (Paragraph 21). Her stories shift away from empowered belief that she “might rescue people” to the need to have another person “rescuing” her (Paragraph 45). She and her younger brother, Laird, cease to watch the adult world in fear from their positions in the upstairs of the house and the barn. As they participate in more adultlike ways, they also take their positions in the girl (home) and boy (farm) spaces.

The narrator discovers gender, and its limitations, through the lives of the animals around her. The family’s work revolves around the foxes, and the narrator moves fluidly across gendered spaces to help her father take care of the foxes. She seems to enjoy the fox pelting at the beginning of the story, calling the smell “of blood and fat” and “the strong primitive odor of the fox itself […] reassuringly seasonal, like the smell of oranges and pine needles” (Paragraph 2).