The problem with "passing". (last word).

"I could have just tumbled out of bed, my hair's a mess, and I've hardly brushed my teeth," Queer as Folk's Peter Paige said at a recent GenderPAC reception. "But when people see me on the street, they always say how much better I look in person. Yet on the set I have a hairdresser, makeup artist, and a wardrobe designer all working to make me look my best." Could it be that the people on the street are reacting less to "how much better" Paige looks in person than how much less feminine he is than his QAF character, Emmett?

I sometimes wonder how much the intersection between our aesthetics and our erotics is populated by gender--and what that says about us. For instance, it's not hard to find personal ads that read, "Straight-looking, straight-acting only" and "No butches or fatties." I'm not saying we should take our politics into the bedroom. We tried that in the women's community in the 1980s. We made love (not sex) with people we didn't find attractive (don't be looks-ist), lying side by side (no roles, please), listening to Holly Near (no men's voices) singing about the dangers of nuclear waste, having simultaneous orgasms (no power games) while avoiding fantasizing about each other (internalized symptoms of oppression) or anything connected with penetration (ditto).

There were even women who called themselves "political lesbians," who slept only with men but identified as lesbians for "political purposes." (I'm not making this up.)

For some time now, men have been moving away from the old stereotype of gayness. And women have been rediscovering the joys of lipstick lesbianism. Could this be about an unconscious return to the heterosexualization of desire? Where all you have to be is "all man" or "all woman" to be attractive? If so, are we being true to ourselves? Or are we sacrificing our true selves in order to "pass" as something we never were?

Certainly the idea isn't lost on transgendered teens, for whom passing is often not only a necessity but a litmus test of assimilation. Teens know that being gender-queer equals being weird and that being accepted means passing as 100% boy or 100% girl. And they're now learning that when they add sex to this "passing" equation, the results can be deadly.

For instance, Brandon Teena, whose death was memorialized in the movie Boys Don't Cry, was only 21 when he was killed. Brandon was sexually involved with a girl when two of her friends took him into a bathroom, forcibly revealed that he had female genitals, and then beat and raped him.

Last October, Gwen Araujo, a transgendered 17-year-old, was found dead near Newark, Calif. Araujo had been sexually involved with a local man and, according to courtroom testimony, was later beaten, strangled, and left dead in a shallow grave after that man's friends forced her to reveal that she had male genitals.

If I'd come out as gender-queer in my teens, the high school football team--of which I was briefly a member--would have reduced me to a grease stain on the locker room floor. We didn't cross gender lines in 1970 if we could help it And if we did, we certainly weren't having sex.

But kids today are crossing boundaries in profound ways and even transitioning to other sexes at younger ages. Assaults that once targeted adults now involve teenagers. Five transgendered teens have been murdered in the past two years alone, four of them teens of color.

In a recent statement for GenderPAC, Hilary Swank--who won an Oscar for her role in Boys Don't Cry--said, "The brutal murder of Gwen Araujo is yet another painful reminder that the gender hatred that also killed Brandon Teena is alive, and work remains to be done."

She's right. We need to tell kids that it's all right to be yourself. More important, we need to tell society that there's a lot of middle ground between 100% boy and 100% girl.

And maybe we even need to set an example for kids by not trying so hard to "pass" ourselves. Because in February, transgendered youth Nikki Nicholas was found dead near Detroit. She'd been beaten, shot in the head, and left in an abandoned house. Nikki was 19.