Call Her Caitlyn

Scott Hardie | June 9, 2015
Thoughts on Bruce Jenner's transformation into Caitlyn?

Samir Mehta | June 9, 2015
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Samir Mehta | June 10, 2015
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Mike Eberhart | June 10, 2015
Comments? Don't care. Sick of seeing articles or stories about him or any of his family. You can go on the Daily Mail website and easily find at least 10 articles about any one of them. It'd be nice if they just went away.

Samir Mehta | June 10, 2015
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Scott Hardie | June 12, 2015
Right on, both of you. Great points.

I should have good will towards this news story, which should be a positive event about a trans person more or less being accepted by society at large. But it's undone and then some by the low regard that I have for the Kardashian family and their corrosive effect on our taste as society. Here's an example of how fucked up the Kardashian family circus is: Jenner really, seriously had to deny that this was a publicity stunt, because it was plausible to many that someone in that family would go to this length for attention.

I'm sick of the Kardashians' groundless ubiquity: These people have done nothing to warrant our attention, and yet I'm exposed to stories about them everywhere that I go, whether it's the grocery checkout lane or the office water cooler or virtually any website. I can't even get away from them here! :-) I don't give a shit what Kylie or Kyrie or whatever her name is just tweeted about some other celebrity. I never need to see a photograph of Kim ever again. This whole family is awful, and our ongoing participation in their media presence further erodes our endangered meritocracy: If the Kardashians can get famous without accomplishing anything, that's the goal, that's the measure of success; why work hard? (The secret irony is that they do work hard at being famous. It takes a ton of time and effort sustained for years to get where they are.)

Jenner used to be the only marginally respectable one thanks to her Olympic feats, but the family has so tainted her over the years that perhaps now we really can see Caitlyn as a wholly different person than Bruce. She can deny that she's doing this for publicity, but the fact that she issued that denial on a television camera in front of millions of viewers speaks volumes about her priorities.

For what it's worth, Samir, I think the long-ago accomplishments of Bruce Jenner mattered because of his triumph over the then-dominant Soviet athletes during the Cold War, in a way that Michael Phelps and Usain Bolt cannot matter today.

I could (and might someday) write a whole other screed about how the bureaucratic rules of Wikipedia and similar sites interfere with their mission of delivering useful and true information. I'm not the least bit surprised that they're arguing furiously over which pronoun to use and in which tense. That said, I personally favor the retroactive styling. It's super weird at first to speak of "Caitlyn winning her gold medal in 1976" when we have spent decades accustomed to Bruce having done that. During a period of transition, it feels right to use both terms. But as time goes by and we spend longer and longer with Jenner as Caitlyn, it will gradually seem weird not to refer to her as a woman, even in her masculine past. Think about it this way: When a celebrity changes her name, like when Pamela Anderson became Pamela Lee, and we get accustomed to the new name after a few years, it's normal for authortative summaries of her life to refer to her by the new name across her entire life ("Lee was born here" and "Lee went to high school there" and so on), except for an acknowledgement that she was previously known by an earlier name. It won't seem strange that an article about Caitlyn links to stories about Bruce, because with time, there will be fewer and fewer stories that call her Bruce.

Scott Hardie | June 20, 2015
I'm curious whether there are more male-to-female transitions than female-to-male. I can't seem to find the answer online, in part because there is no census of transgendered people and any statistics about them are mere estimates. But there seems to me to be a whole lot more MTF cases like Caitlyn Jenner, Chelsea Manning, Laverne Cox, Lana Wachowski, and Janet Mock than FTM cases like Chaz Bono. The question interests me because it interrogates notions about male privilege. If indeed there are many more MTF cases, is that a sign of weakness for male privilege, that these women would give up their comfortable lives as men to live a harder life as women (and trans women at that) because it means that much to them? Or is a sign of strength for male privilege, that men have more freedom to choose to live how they feel inside than women have? Societies around the world have subtle reinforcements against someone of a lesser caste infiltrating a higher one, and less so vice versa, and I'm curious whether transgenderism reinforces or belies certain notions about societal oppression of women.