Boi or grrl? Pop culture redefining gender

CHICAGO - When it comes to gender, Alex Polanco is not easily pegged. Some days, he wakes up in the morning and feels male, pulling on jeans and a T-shirt and leaving it at that. Other times, he wears makeup and one of the wigs he keeps in tidily packed boxes in his bedroom closet.

“I don’t want to call it a split personality — but sometimes, I feel like a girl. So I put on the costume, what feels comfortable,” says the 18-year-old Chicagoan, who refers to himself as “tranny boy.” The term is deliberately ambiguous, reflecting the gray area in which Polanco exists, where gender is blurred and he feels no obligation to choose female over male — or vice versa.

He often switches back and forth around friends he trusts or in urban neighborhoods where he feels free to express himself.

“I’m not trying to be permanently that person,” says Polanco, a tall, lanky teen who recently moved to northern Wisconsin with a friend to attend a community college. “I just like the opportunity to be a man or a woman, if I want.”

The concept of gender-bending is, of course, not a new phenomenon. Nineteenth century author George Sand was famous for her cigar-smoking and pants-wearing, while “female impersonators” worked their way from underground clubs in decades past to more prominent billing on the Las Vegas strip.

More recently, against a backdrop of increasing equality in the workplace, youth and pop icons have been slowly pushing the limits on gender roles — from the long-haired rock bands of the ’60s to David Bowie’s androgynous look and Madonna’s celebration of drag in the 1980s and ’90s.

Gender roles continue to bend, blur
Now, macho men get makeovers on mainstream TV and one of the most popular TV talk show hosts is a lesbian comic who feels comfortable in slacks and sneakers. And academics who specialize in gender and pop culture say today’s youth are continuing to test the boundaries of gender — challenging societal standards in the process.

“I think the fluidity of gender is the next big wave in terms of adolescent development,” says Caitlin Ryan, a clinical social worker at San Francisco State University who’s conducting a long-term sexual orientation and gender survey of youth and their families. “Gender has become part of the defining way that youth organize themselves and rebel against adults.”

While researchers have yet to quantify the trend, Ryan says that, in the last five years, she’s seen more young people coming out as transsexual — those who believe they are one gender trapped in the body of the other. She and others in her field also are seeing a noticeable number of young people who are taking it further by purposely evading gender definition.

They are “gender fluid,” expressing androgyny with wardrobe, hairstyle or makeup — sometimes going as far as calling themselves a “boi” or a “grrl.” For his part, Polanco calls his gender-bending friends “bro-sis,” a combination of “brother” and “sister.”

Pushing boundaries for play, politics
To some youth, playing with gender identity and roles is as much about fun and self-expression as anything. “There’s a kind of tongue-in-cheek aspect to it,” Ryan says, “as well as a celebration of oneself.”

But often it cuts deeper, even for some young transsexuals who’ve chosen to move from one gender to the other.

M. Spencer Green / AP Alex Polanco, right, dances with Paula Burba at a SYNERGY dance in Chicago. SYNERGY encourages its members to express their gender as they see fit.

“At the very basic level, it’s about telling society that we’re not going to adhere to your rules. At some level, it is very political and anti-mainstream society. And on a different level, it’s also very personal — trying to figure yourself out,” says T.J. Jourian, a 24-year-old graduate student at Michigan State University who specifically calls himself a “transmale” — not just male — because he doesn’t want people to place his gender into a simple box.

Born a female, Jourian does not always hide his high-pitched voice or mannerisms that many would consider more feminine. “Although I identify as a man, I have been socialized in this world as a female, and that experience plays a huge part in shaping my masculinity, my politics and my perspective in society,” Jourian says.

Andy Marra, the 20-year-old head of the board of directors for the National Center for Transgender Equality, agrees.

“People assume that gender is cut and dried — and it’s not,” says Marra, who describes her “gender identity” as female and “biological gender” as male. “But what about a gay male who’s effeminate — or for that matter, a straight male who’s effeminate or straight woman who’s butch?”

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