Boi or grrl? Pop culture redefining gender

Sex in shades of gray
Several scientists, including Craig Kinsley, met this summer at the annual International Behavioral Development Symposium in Minot, N.D., to discuss the biology of gender.

“It so complex, so unfathomable in some respects, that it is no wonder our politicians find comfort in defining a world that is populated by only ’men’ and ’women,”’ says Kinsley, a neuroscientist at the University of Richmond. “But trying to define males and females as just males and females really just misses the point.”

He says there is “clear and incontrovertible” evidence that biology — genes, hormones and the brain — is a major factor in creating a wide range of gender identities and sexual orientations.

That makes perfect sense to Polanco, who figured out that he was gay by age 16, but who also realized something was different about his gender.

He vividly remembers the first time he dressed as a woman as a younger teenager — how he wore a short skirt and tube top with a fur vest, carefully put on fishnet stockings with platform heels, and glued extensions into his own dark, curly hair.

“Wow,” he remembers saying as he stared at himself in the mirror for several minutes. “I couldn’t believe how good I looked.”

‘We were like best friends’
He now keeps a photo album of shots taken of himself both as a woman and a man. Included in it, is a a boyhood photograph taken with his mother, who died of AIDS when he was 14.

“We were like best friends,” he says, his dark eyes staring at hers in the photo. “She had long, shoulder-length hair. I look a lot like her.”

Morry Gash / AP Alex Polanco walks his dog Clide along a quiet Neenah, Wis., street near his apartment on Aug. 1, 2005.

His mother did not live long enough to learn about her son’s sexual orientation or to know that he did not always feel like a boy. He has since told the grandmother who raised him that he is gay but hasn’t shared his gender issues with her, out of fear that she won’t understand.

Ryan, at San Francisco State, says it’s a common struggle for families she’s interviewed. “The ones who are having a hard time are seeing only the gender rules and norms and how their kids are violating that,” Ryan says. “So they’re reacting out of shame, ’What will the neighbors think?”’

Still, that hasn’t stopped young people from experimenting.

Elayne Rapping, a professor of American studies at the University of Buffalo, is among those who’ve seen more students playing with gender roles — something she says her own peers in the ’60s and ’70s did with sexual orientation.

“A lot of people went back to straight lives. But that doesn’t mean that it didn’t open doors for a lot of people to come out and stay out,” says Rapping, author of “Media-tion: Forays into the Culture and Gender Wars.”

Metrosexual the new mod?
She believes this more recent experimentation also will influence acceptance in a society where gender identities are already blurring — where the term “metrosexual” has become a source of pride for straight guys with a sense of style and where tough, independent female characters regularly appear in movies and on TV.

Robert Thompson, a professor at Syracuse University who studies pop culture, has already noted the shift. “A full generation after the major reorientation of American gender roles, we are now seeing the fruits of these changes,” Thompson says.

Through it all, Polanco proceeds carefully.

Since moving to Menasha, Wis., just south of Green Bay, he has left his apartment dressed as a woman late at night while walking his terrier, Clide, but would never be so daring at the fast-food restaurant wear he works. “No way,” he says. “Not here.”

He’s more likely to let his hair down, literally, in Chicago, where he attends a monthly dance called SYNERGY, a gathering for high school and young college students who are free to express their gender however they like.

At one dance this summer, Polanco came as his male self, putting on a show on the dance floor with his friends, amid clouds from a fog machine, pulsing music and hundreds of sweaty bodies.

Outside the building, Laura Dziewior, a 17-year-old senior at a Catholic high school in Chicago, took a smoke break and pondered the question of gender.

“It’s pretty simple,” she said, shrugging. “You are what you feel.”

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