Boi or grrl? Pop culture redefining gender

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.”

Anyway, when I was in college I believed in reincarnation, and had felt as though perhaps my spirt was that of a woman born into a male body, and likewise, my girlfriend felt as though she had been a male spirit. While I no longer believe or feel that, I think that belief worked at the time because I was more sensitive than other dudes around me, and she was not very girly.

There is a part in Grant Morrison's Invisibles where the Youth Culture had pretty much decided to change their personalities from moment to moment, so that for the next hour they could be "Sexually Aggressive Artists" and the next "Neurotic Pagan with Self Esteem Issue and an Oedipus Complex" [my interpretation of the text b/c I'm too lazy to walk to the basement to get the actual example, but pretty much the same].

Keep your eyes open. I think what is described here, is a step in the Morrison direction. Once gender has been fucked with, it's only a matter of time until the base personality begins to be hacked by Generation XY/YY.