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Gender bender: As a convent schoolgirl, Dianne Feinstein was a drama queen, invariably picked to play strong males leads in all-female casts because she was precociously statuesque.

From Prince Rupert in “A Waltz Dream” and Peter Standish in “Berkeley Square,” to Bassanio in “The Merchant of Venice” and King Creon in “Antigone,” the teenage DiFi trod the boards at Convent of the Sacred Heart in S.F.’s Pacific Heights, typecast as a manly man.

Stalking the state in the garb of King Creon, 17-year old Dianne Goldman pronounced a sentence of death upon the rebellious Antigone.

“This woman has learned her insolence before this, when she broke the established law,” the high school Creon declared, condemning Antigone for daring to defy his authority. “When I am alive, no woman shall rule.”

The long-ago thespian career of the Senior Senator from California came to mind as we pondered the media huzzahs she earned across the political spectrum for her recent throw down on Vladimir Putin’s masculinity:

Senate Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) said Russian President Vladimir Putin should “man up” and acknowledge his government’s complicity in the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17.

“The nexus between Russia and the separatists has been established very clearly,” Feinstein said Sunday on CNN. “The issue is: where is Putin? I would say, ‘Putin, you have to man up.’ You should talk to the world. You should say this was a mistake, if it was a mistake.”

Pow.

Everyone, from Fox News to the liberal Mike Lupica, instantly applauded her macho posing, much favoring it over the spineless, wimpy wussiness of Barack Obama and John Kerry.

Just as Dr. P.J. Hackenflack, Calbuzz Staff Psychiatrist, had recovered his breath, and had taken anew to pondering the deeply mysterious sources of Feinstein’s Freudian blurting, however, yet another DiFi androgny-themed bulletin came across his desk.

This just in, courtesy of former Montana Governor Brian Schweitzer:

This was the week that Sen. Dianne Feinstein took to the Senate floor to accuse the CIA of spying on congressional staffers investigating the agency’s treatment of terrorism suspects under the Bush administration.

Schweitzer is incredulous that Feinstein—considered by her critics to be too close to the intelligence community—was now criticizing the agency.

“She was the woman who was standing under the streetlight with her dress pulled all the way up over her knees, and now she says, ‘I’m a nun,’ when it comes to this spying!” he says. Then, he adds, quickly, “I mean, maybe that’s the wrong metaphor—but she was all in!”

Hmm.

When real men were women: Schweitzer’s comment (one of several, btw, that collectively constituted an act of public political suicide within a splendid profile by Marin Cogan of the National Journal) aptly reminds how much Dianne represents a political Rorschach test, as befits a self-proclaimed “centrist” who alternatively has confounded or catered to conservatives and liberals alike for nearly 50 years.

Happily, it also offers a chance to remember bygone days when then S.F. Mayor Feinstein was herself confounded by the entertaining gender bending of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, a political performance art troupe of transvestites habitually decked as nuns, whom Her Honor once angrily admitted “make me see red.”

Her greatest nemesis was Sister Boom Boom, aka the late Jack Fertig, who attacked her while running for supervisor in 1982 on the “Nun of the Above” ticket, papering the town with posters portraying her/himself flying over City Hall on a witches’ broom, trailing purple exhaust that read, “Surrender Dianne.”

Astonishingly, or perhaps not, Boom Boom won more than 20,000 votes.

Man up, sister.