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"  In her dressing room at Conan O&amp;#039;Brien&amp;#039;s late-night show, the 6&amp;#039;8&amp;quot; women&amp;#039;s-basketball wunderkind Brittney Griner is flipping through a rolling rack of men&amp;#039;s shirts with one of her very large hands\u2014they&amp;#039;re bigger than LeBron James&amp;#039;\u2014while also keeping her eyes on the iPhone she&amp;#039;s palming in the other. What attracted the attention of Conan, and the rest of the country, is Griner&amp;#039;s absolute dominance as a college player and her selection as the WNBA&amp;#039;s number one draft pick this spring\u2014in her first pro game, for the Phoenix Mercury, she dunked twice, setting a league record\u2014not to mention the suggestion by Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban that Griner should try out for his team. Her outfit for her imminent television appearance was settled on a while ago: a blue-and-white seersucker suit with one of her signature bow ties. But backstage at Conan, she&amp;#039;s addressing another wardrobe concern: what to wear to the ESPYs, ESPN&amp;#039;s annual awards show. The event is three days away, and she needs something to wear with the gorgeous black suit that her stylist, Kellen Richards\u2014who&amp;#039;s also Ellen DeGeneres&amp;#039; fashion adviser\u2014had custom made for her. &amp;quot;With Ellen, we choose women&amp;#039;s clothes and add menswear touches,&amp;quot; says Richards&amp;#039; assistant, when asked to compare dressing the two women. &amp;quot;With Brittney, it&amp;#039;s all men&amp;#039;s. And it&amp;#039;s edgier.&amp;quot; (The last time she wore a dress, Griner tells me, was at her mother&amp;#039;s request, for her high school graduation. Never again.) Griner quickly gravitates to a burgundy sleeveless T-shirt by Robert Geller and a black Saint Laurent sweatshirt top with cutoff sleeves and a narrow silver chain sewn across the yoke. Her agent, Lindsay Kagawa Colas, pulls out a Lanvin sleeveless tee with mesh sides as a racier alternative. &amp;quot;Would you like this with no shirt underneath, with nipples out?&amp;quot; she asks matter-of-factly. &amp;quot;That would be sexy,&amp;quot; Griner replies, grinning, &amp;quot;but I don&amp;#039;t think I&amp;#039;m ready for that.&amp;quot; She retreats into the tiny bathroom to change from her low-slung jeans and Nike T-shirt\u2014the company has signed her to model its menswear, the first time a woman has had that gig\u2014into her suit for Conan. Once the stylist has fussed over her, including rolling her pants cuffs to just the right height, lest they hike up if she crosses her legs\u2014&amp;quot;I never cross my legs,&amp;quot; Griner assures her\u2014Kagawa Colas calls her over for a quick makeup session. &amp;quot;See, it looks like nothing,&amp;quot; she says as she puts the slightest smudge of foundation and undereye concealer on Griner&amp;#039;s smooth, flawless skin. At the WNBA&amp;#039;s rookie orientation, Griner says she declined to participate in a session about makeup application and how to dress. &amp;quot;I don&amp;#039;t need that shit,&amp;quot; she says without rancor, adding that the only lecture she appreciated was one on 401(k)s. (Yes, new WNBA players are taught how to apply makeup while NBA rookies learn to beware of gold-digger groupies who might prick tiny holes in condoms.) Now, peering at herself in the makeup mirror, Griner approves of her agent&amp;#039;s handiwork. &amp;quot;Looks like nothing,&amp;quot; she agrees. Brittney Griner is now the first man to play in the WNBA\u2026. Brittney Griner threw down two dunks last night. One for each of her testicles\u2026. Brittney Griner suspended for first three games next season after testing positive for a penis. This is a tiny sample of the ugly invective regularly hurled at Griner on Twitter and other social-media forums. She seems pretty unfazed by the haters, however\u2014even motivated by them. &amp;quot;Reading what people say makes me want to be me even more,&amp;quot; she told ESPN magazine&amp;#039;s Kate Fagan. In a world in which the female body is always up for critique, Griner stands as very tall testament to how much we&amp;#039;ve changed in our attitudes toward difference, but also to the distance we have yet to travel. Hers is the story of how a 22-year-old physical anomaly with the energy of the goofy skater kid she is during her off-hours\u2014leaving the arena, Griner worked her long torso through an open car window and sat on the door&amp;#039;s edge, hollering to a teammate behind us\u2014is challenging norms of both sexuality and gender. &amp;quot;Gender is who you go to bed as,&amp;quot; says one specialist in gender identity issues. &amp;quot;Sexuality is who you go to bed with.&amp;quot; The latter subject is in some ways more straightforward, easier for sports reporters and cultural observers to address\u2014and celebrate. In April, during a video interview on SportsIllustrated.com, Griner offhandedly acknowledged that she&amp;#039;s a lesbian. The low-key disclosure came in a spring and early summer marked by watershed moments in gay rights, including the Supreme Court&amp;#039;s striking down of a federal ban on gay marriage and NBA backup center Jason Collins becoming the first male pro-athlete to out himself while still an active player.  Griner&amp;#039;s sexual orientation, though, was only a secret in that she hadn&amp;#039;t declared it publicly, she tells me during lunch in July in Los Angeles, the afternoon before her appearance on Conan. While in college at Baylor, she says, her long forearms resting on the table as she picks at a plate of chicken tenders (she famously eschews vegetables), she never hid the fact that she liked girls. But early on, officials at the school, a Baptist university in Waco, Texas, saw tweets she&amp;#039;d written revealing her same-sex attraction and instructed her to keep quiet about it. Baylor policy classifies &amp;quot;homosexual acts&amp;quot; as sexual misconduct and as &amp;quot;misuses of God&amp;#039;s gifts.&amp;quot; So Griner lived with one size 17 foot in the closet, one foot out until her senior year, when, she says, laid-back as ever, &amp;quot;I was just like, Screw &amp;#039;em, I&amp;#039;m gonna say what I want. Like, what were they going to do? Tell me I can&amp;#039;t go to school here no more?&amp;quot; By that time, after all, Griner was a Baylor Bear icon, well on her way to becoming the most decorated female college-basketball player in history, with NCAA records in blocks and dunks and 3,283 points over four years. Coming out on a broader stage has allowed her to do the kind of advocacy she&amp;#039;s long set her sights on, she says, including a lovely, plainspoken spot for the It Gets Better Project. Wearing her purple-and-orange Mercury uniform, with matching star tattoos visible on each shoulder, Griner speaks into the camera: &amp;quot;I got teased: the big hands, little bit deep voice, the big feet\u2014just, you know, I got teased.&amp;quot; Which understates the verbal bullying she endured in junior high and high school: a relentless parade of incidents like, as Fagan wrote in ESPN magazine, girls groping at her flat chest before sneering, &amp;quot;What are you?&amp;quot; (Among her many tattoos is one of a phrase that gave her comfort at the time, Laugh Now, Cry Later, on her lower back, beneath an image of two skulls.) The worst times were in seventh grade, Griner says. Confiding in neither friends nor family\u2014she grew up outside of Houston, the youngest of four children of a police officer and a homemaker\u2014she&amp;#039;d retreat to her room to cry, she recalls, &amp;quot;Just thinking, like, Why am I even here? Why am I even alive?&amp;quot; Finding basketball in ninth grade gave her a purpose and a passion, she says, not that her adolescence then followed a direct path out of prejudice to bliss. Griner came out to her parents, and while her mother greeted the news with mellow aplomb\u2014she&amp;#039;d always love her girl, she said\u2014her father, Ray, declared that he wasn&amp;#039;t &amp;quot;raising any lesbian.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;My dad always told me to just be who I was, but I don&amp;#039;t think he knew exactly how I took it,&amp;quot; she says, chuckling ruefully. So contentious was her household that Brittney moved out during her senior year to live with an assistant coach for her high school team. Fortunately, her father has since come around, and the two now stay in regular contact. &amp;quot;He finally got on board that either you accept your daughter and take her for what she is and you unconditionally love her, or you&amp;#039;re not going to have her,&amp;quot; says Griner&amp;#039;s best friend from high school, Janell Roy, now a police officer in Austin. &amp;quot;I don&amp;#039;t think Ray could live with himself if he lost his daughter.&amp;quot; These days, Griner is open and easy about her lesbianism, in tune with her generation&amp;#039;s relative agnosticism about sexual preference. The morning before her appearance on Conan, she got a VIP tour of DC Comics offices in L.A.\u2014she loves all things comic book\u2014and was told she could take anything she wanted from the shelves in the &amp;quot;toy room.&amp;quot; Griner quickly opted for two largish action figures of her favorite character, Harley Quinn, the Joker&amp;#039;s sometime girlfriend who wears a skintight suit and fool&amp;#039;s cap. &amp;quot;This is gonna be great on my table,&amp;quot; she enthused. &amp;quot;But my girlfriend&amp;#039;s gonna be like, Really?&amp;quot; (Her girlfriend of six months is staying with her in WNBA housing in Phoenix for part of the summer, then will return to Baylor in the fall for her senior year.) The evening prior, during dinner of, guess what, chicken fingers and fries, Griner was scrolling through texts when she mumbled, like any harried spouse, &amp;quot;My girlfriend&amp;#039;s a lotta work, like my puppy.&amp;quot; That the WNBA isn&amp;#039;t trying to muzzle Griner\u2014and in fact is putting her front and center in its marketing campaign, to &amp;quot;tell her story,&amp;quot; as league president Laurel Richie puts it\u2014also fits into this era of dramatic progress for gay rights. The league has been on a quest to increase its modest attendance and the size of its TV audience for the entire 17 years of its existence. From the beginning, a substantial chunk of its fans have been gay women, but despite the stereotype of WNBA games as dens of licentiousness where everyone&amp;#039;s waving her freak flag, only a handful of players are out. When I reported a story about the league 10 years ago, its new, much ballyhooed TV ad campaign basically ignored gay players, not to mention the game of basketball. Here was star and sometime model Lisa Leslie in a gold-beaded gown, doing her runway walk next to a swank hotel pool; there, Sue Bird gazing sultrily into the camera, before lounging in a hammock, cradling a basketball; or Ticha Penicheiro, a leading point guard, wearing a black leather vest and stroking her yellow sports car.  Words and phrases scrolled over the images\u2014fearless, I am powerful, warrior, daughter, journey, glamorous, I am confident, strength, revolution. The result was a mash-up: girl power meets Playboy. One of the campaign&amp;#039;s creators told me at the time that the ads were designed to take into account marketing research in which female fans said they were drawn to the league more for the opportunities it afforded women than for the actual on-court action; another consideration was the fact that the ESPN audience was predominately male. Flash forward a decade, and WNBA spots\u2014for TV and the Web\u2014are a fast-paced pastiche of game highlights, the voice-over done in a bellicosely dramatic, WWF tone: &amp;quot;132 of the world&amp;#039;s best ready to go at it. It&amp;#039;s 40 minutes of fire every\u2026single\u2026game.&amp;quot; Richie says the league&amp;#039;s promotion has been influenced by current data indicating that the competition itself is the top draw for fans, as well as by a small but growing body of academic research suggesting that sex does not sell, at least insofar as athletes are used as endorsers to try to sell tickets to sports events as opposed to hawk products from watches to razors. What has been found to work, says University of Massachusetts Amherst sport management professor Janet Fink, is highlighting a player&amp;#039;s &amp;quot;expertise.&amp;quot; Sexualizing female or male athletes can actually undercut their skill in the public mind, Fink adds. &amp;quot;If you show [tennis player] Andy Roddick in his underwear, and then ask people about his athletic abilities, his scores are much lower than if you have him on the court.&amp;quot; That may seem obvious, she says, &amp;quot;but we do that with women all the time, so if you think of the longitudinal impact, it&amp;#039;s no wonder that any old guy thinks he can play the UConn women&amp;#039;s basketball team and beat them.&amp;quot; Back in the corporate offices of the WNBA, league research also shows that fans &amp;quot;share a goal of living in a world where gender equality exists in all its forms,&amp;quot; as Richie puts it. The difference between showcasing that and 2003&amp;#039;s &amp;quot;opportunities for women&amp;quot; is subtle, but the new approach can be read as specifically embracing lesbians, she acknowledges. &amp;quot;They&amp;#039;re a very significant portion of our season-ticket-holder base,&amp;quot; Richie says. When I read the avalanche of &amp;quot;she&amp;#039;s a dude&amp;quot; abuse directed at Griner on social media, I wasn&amp;#039;t surprised. A former basketball player myself, I recognized it as the usual ranting of men threatened by women&amp;#039;s athletic excellence, guys who suffer from something I like to call masculine-anxiety disorder, or MAD for short. (An old WNBA TV ad, in fact, had run afoul of the MAD contingent by showing a couple of guys who considered themselves master hoopsters stinking up a suburban driveway, followed by a quick cut to text reading &amp;quot;They&amp;#039;re Better Than You Are&amp;quot; and a few spectacular WNBA game takes. ESPN tracking data showed the ads tanked.) What surprised me, what with my familiarity with jocky women, was, off court, as I trailed Griner from appointment to appointment, how much she felt like a guy to me. Not because of the style of her clothes and the lack of makeup, and not because I thought she was &amp;quot;really&amp;quot; a man, whatever that means: Is it genitals, is it learned behaviors, it is hormones in utero and beyond? It&amp;#039;s all three, biologists and psychologists who study gender formation say. But some combination of sensory stimuli screamed boy to me. So much so that I did a cognitive double take each time I heard someone refer to her as she: Yes, yes, Brittney is a girl, I&amp;#039;d think. She is a girl. I&amp;#039;ve never experienced such a disconcerting internal tug, but Alice Domurat Dreger, a Northwestern University medical historian and the author of Hermaphrodites and the Medical Invention of Sex, tells me she&amp;#039;s had a similar experience\u2014in her case, with transgender people. Despite her familiarity gender ambiguity\u2014she also has been a director of the Intersex Society of North America\u2014she says she has to really concentrate to remember names when, for example, a transgender man introduces himself. He&amp;#039;ll say &amp;quot;Hi, I&amp;#039;m Thomas,&amp;quot; but because his name conflicts with the gender information she&amp;#039;s subconsciously gathering, it&amp;#039;s less likely to stick. &amp;quot;I don&amp;#039;t have the panic I used to have, meeting people who are androgynous,&amp;quot; Dreger says, &amp;quot;but when you meet someone whose identity is unclear, that throws your own identity into flux because the way we treat each other is very gendered.&amp;quot; (MAD, with features including a proclivity to spew crude insults via Twitter, is a corrupt response to this shakiness, perhaps.) You can&amp;#039;t just command yourself to stop feeling upended by people who don&amp;#039;t fit into a clean gender slot, even if you want to, Dreger goes on. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s our brains working through the categorization of self and other.&amp;quot;  The mixture of qualities that make a person read as male or female is somewhat mysterious. As I said, before I met Griner in person, it didn&amp;#039;t occur to me that I&amp;#039;d have the reaction I did. I knew her voice was deep\u2014I heard her interviewed on YouTube\u2014but I found her face attractive, which is really another way of saying I found it &amp;quot;feminine,&amp;quot; according to the chief of plastic and reconstructive surgery at Boston University, Jeffrey Spiegel. We judge both men and women with feminine features\u2014relatively flat foreheads as opposed to those that slope back from the nose, less-prominent jaws, fuller lips and cheeks\u2014as better looking, he says. Context also matters. When I watched Griner play her sport, she looked like just one more muscular, tall woman in baggy shorts and a jersey. Out of the gym, in street clothes, I noticed her slouchy, slow stride as I followed her to the back of the restaurant (to escape autograph-seeking fans), her flat expanse of chest and nonexistent waist and hips, and, then, of course, her height, voice, and, yes, perhaps dress\u2014somehow it all added up to male for me. There is no universal gender-recognition tipping point, in part because the matter literally is in the eye of the beholder. I&amp;#039;ve spent the past 15 years working at a fashion magazine\u2014a place teeming with girly girls (and a few girly boys, for that matter). Maybe my way of seeing would&amp;#039;ve been different when I was younger and spent hours each day playing basketball. Griner says that by this time in her life, she&amp;#039;s well aware that others perceive her as more masculine than the average woman, but she says she&amp;#039;s never had the feeling that she was born the &amp;quot;wrong&amp;quot; sex, as do people who suffer from gender-identity disorder (and who may eventually identify as transgender). Asked which of her qualities she considers especially feminine or especially masculine, she pauses. &amp;quot;Hmm, I know I get more feminine when I&amp;#039;m mad,&amp;quot; she says, &amp;quot;like I&amp;#039;ll roll my neck, like I&amp;#039;m rolling my eyes. &amp;quot;What&amp;#039;s more masculine? I don&amp;#039;t know,&amp;quot; she continues. &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m just being myself, honestly. I know society puts it, Oh, this is masculine and this is feminine. I don&amp;#039;t put myself in categories.&amp;quot; If she were a left-coast academic type\u2014instead of a woman who says, unabashedly, that though she got a general-studies degree from Baylor, she probably would have gone to trade school were it not for basketball\u2014she might call herself genderqueer. It&amp;#039;s a term used by people who proudly reject the gender binary, who may feel &amp;quot;in between,&amp;quot; as Griner sometimes refers to herself. With all the gender fluidity that is acknowledged these days\u2014as a matter of biology and culture\u2014your gender basically has become what you say it is. Just one example of the fairly widespread acceptance of this principle was the media&amp;#039;s response to government-documents leaker Pfc. Manning&amp;#039;s declaration of her (formerly his) gender as female. Though publications such as The New York Times chose to stay with he for the time being, believing the public would be confused by the sudden switch, virtually every outlet, including the Times, said its regular policy is to use the gender the subject chooses. (The Associated Press and New York Magazine went with she.) In sports, however, there is one important forum that doesn&amp;#039;t necessarily take a person&amp;#039;s word for it, and that&amp;#039;s the Olympics. The issue has been a fraught one. Starting in the 1930s, athletes could be forced to submit to genital inspection, which eventually grew into so-called nude parades. In the late &amp;#039;60s, various chromosomal tests were employed but proved pretty useless because of the prevalence of subtle genetic variations, such as the discovery in the mid-&amp;#039;80s that Spanish runner Mar\u00EDa Jos\u00E9 Mart\u00EDnez Patino had what&amp;#039;s known as complete androgen-insensitivity syndrome. She has the male Y chromosome, but her body doesn&amp;#039;t respond to testosterone at all, meaning that hormonally she&amp;#039;s more &amp;quot;female&amp;quot; than the typical woman, because women, of course, also produce testosterone, just less of it than men. (She looks entirely female; it was only by chance that she discovered her condition.) More recently, there was the sad case of Caster Semenya, a South African runner with a more masculine body type similar to Griner&amp;#039;s, who, amid a swirl of rumors, was banned from competition pending the results of various unspecified tests. Ultimately, the world running association ruled her female for purposes of competition, though its reasoning remains confidential and the experience was, by all accounts, traumatic for Semenya. Which brings us to the current approach of the International Olympic Committee\u2014the one that, unless something changes, will apply to Griner when she vies for a spot on the 2016 USA women&amp;#039;s basketball team, as is her stated plan. According to the organization&amp;#039;s &amp;quot;Female Hyperandrogenism&amp;quot; policy, top IOC officials can order testosterone testing for women whose gender is for some reason deemed debatable. (Talk about eye of the beholder.) If such an athlete&amp;#039;s functional testosterone level (Patino&amp;#039;s body, recall, couldn&amp;#039;t use the hormones she made) crosses into a &amp;quot;male range,&amp;quot; she can&amp;#039;t compete unless she takes testosterone-suppression drugs. Griner says she&amp;#039;ll be &amp;quot;fine&amp;quot; when I ask her about the IOC rules, though she also seems to say that she&amp;#039;s never had a testosterone test. She&amp;#039;d take one if asked, she tells me, tersely. And what would she do if she didn&amp;#039;t pass? &amp;quot;I don&amp;#039;t know,&amp;quot; she replies. &amp;quot;You&amp;#039;ll cross that bridge when you come to it,&amp;quot; I say, filling the awkward silence. &amp;quot;Yeah,&amp;quot; she says. She&amp;#039;s clearly had it with this line of questioning. While the IOC has defended its policy, the medical community basically agrees that there is no testosterone cutoff that makes a person definitely male or female. Moreover, many argue, why single out testosterone from the other physical advantages elite athletes tend to possess? &amp;quot;Having big hands, being tall, having lax joints, having high oxygen-carrying capacities&amp;quot;\u2014these aren&amp;#039;t disqualifying factors, says J. Michael Bostwick, a Mayo Clinic psychiatrist who has studied the issue. &amp;quot;What if we got rid of all the people with lax limbs who are swimmers, because it&amp;#039;s unfair to those of us who have tight limbs?&amp;quot; Or, as he wrote in a June 2012 medical journal article, viewers of the Olympics &amp;quot;might want to consider, in all fairness, how many world-class athletes bear any resemblance to regular Joes and Joans, either in how they look or perform.&amp;quot; More immediately for Griner, for months she&amp;#039;s been so forthcoming and gracious in fielding questions from reporters about her adolescent torment, her coming out\u2014and she seems so genuinely comfortable with the place she&amp;#039;s found in the world\u2014I feel like a bully myself inquiring about her hormone levels. &amp;quot;What I freaking love about [Griner] is she&amp;#039;s such a kid,&amp;quot; says Ann Meyers Drysdale, the vice president of the Mercury and a former basketball player herself, as well as the widow of baseball Hall of Famer Don Drysdale. &amp;quot;She&amp;#039;s light. She&amp;#039;s confident in who she is, much more confident than I was at her age.&amp;quot; Only a MAD man would want to mess with that. As of the final weeks of the WNBA season, Griner&amp;#039;s game hasn&amp;#039;t lived up to the initial hype. She suffered an injury early on and was forced to play limited minutes, and though she still averaged a solid 15 points a game, her performance has been eclipsed by that of the Chicago Sky&amp;#039;s Elena Della Donne, another of the league&amp;#039;s star rookies. Drysdale isn&amp;#039;t shocked that Griner isn&amp;#039;t killing yet, because the pro players are uniformly strong, fast, and highly skilled, unlike the spottier college teams, and, she says, &amp;quot;she&amp;#039;s been pulled in a lot of directions, [with] the media attention.&amp;quot; (As for playing in the NBA, Cuban never followed through and neither did Griner. It wasn&amp;#039;t necessarily realistic at this point, Drysdale admits, though she&amp;#039;s all for it if a woman can make the cut.) Griner says she&amp;#039;d trade all the attention to be &amp;quot;hoopin&amp;#039;,&amp;quot; to be injury-free and on the court full-time. And as the play-offs, in mid-September, drew near, her knee was on the mend and her performance was improving. When I watch the Mercury warm up before a game against the Washington Mystics, what I notice other than the team&amp;#039;s talent\u2014the game has just gotten better and better over the years\u2014is the remarkable and, actually, varied collection of bodies, of women, on display. There is veteran great Diana Taurasi, with chiseled arms, hair slicked back into a topknot, and a determined expression that gives her the look of being perpetually pissed, in the best, most gladiatorial kind of way. Another leading scorer is Dewanna Bonner, who at 6&amp;#039;4&amp;quot; is not far in height from Griner but is otherwise her physical opposite. At a mere 137 pounds, she has a narrow waist and legs like toothpicks; her muscles pop in slender arms, and her nails are painted orange to match the numbers on her purple jersey. And then there&amp;#039;s backup forward Lynetta Kizer: At 6&amp;#039;4&amp;quot; and 230 pounds, with shoulders as broad as her hips, she&amp;#039;s a &amp;quot;banger,&amp;quot; someone who can rebound and push the other team around under the basket. &amp;quot;Look at her feet!&amp;quot; exclaims a Washington Post sports reporter sitting next to me as Griner lopes into view. There are the giant orange high-tops, the planklike upper body, the impossibly long arms\u2014and the heart-shaped face that reminds me of a lioness in repose, capable of striking when necessary. The only sector of womanhood missing, come to think of it, is the hourglass-figure sorts who waitress at the sports bar the Tilted Kilt a block from the Mercury&amp;#039;s arena, where Griner says she ate nearly every night during her early days in Phoenix. The place has good chicken fingers, along with the comely Scottish lasses cum Hooters girls, who flaunt their stuff in red tartan bras with matching supershort skirts. Griner would surely welcome them, too\u2014she likes femme types. (Cheerleaders, maybe?) Her next tattoo, Griner tells me, on her inner bicep, will be an image of ultrafemme icon Marilyn Monroe. There are a whole lot of ways to be a woman. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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