14 DAY TRIAL // As you may have heard, Caitlyn Jenner, formerly known as Bruce Jenner, is featured in this month’s issue of Vanity Fair with a 22-page cover story in which she talks about her long and very difficult transition from male to female.
As expected, the issue has gone viral, sparking heated debates online on a variety of topics, from her right to affirm herself as a woman pre-gender reassignment surgery, to whether we should rewrite history and replace all mentions of Bruce in the sports annals with Caitlyn.
Should she even get to keep the medals she won as Bruce in the now-legendary 1976 Olympic Games? Should we speak of Jenner as of 2 different persons, pre-VF Bruce and post-VF Caitlyn? Would she burn in hell for daring to fundamentally alter that which God gave her at birth?
Is she now the mother or the father of her children? If she still loves women, does that make her a lesbian? What pronouns should we use when not even Jenner knows what to call himself / herself?
These are just some of the questions you can stumble upon online, be it on social media or on celebrity blogs and their comment sections.
The bottom line is that the man we once knew as Bruce Jenner struggled for over 5 decades to come to terms with the idea that he was a woman. That woman is Caitlyn, as shown in the photo attached to this article, from the VF spread.
Caitlyn doesn’t have all the answers - she might even have more questions than many of us watching her journey right now - but she knows this: she is “free” and she is finally happy with herself. She feels like she fits in, for a change.
Caitlyn finds the courage to show herself, after decades of personal struggle
I think we need to try and answer the question in the headline by thinking of Jenner first and foremost; we should try to not let our feelings about her transition color our response to her gesture of coming out.
We’ve all had our bigger or smaller personality crises in life: remember how lost you felt when you graduated high school or college, and you suddenly realized that maybe life wasn’t what you had pictured it to be. Remember that minor jolt you felt after you’d gotten comfortable at your first job and you started wondering, “Is this who I am now? Will this be me for the rest of my life?”
How about when you had your first kid, or went through a bad breakup, or had a major health scare or any other traumatic experience?
Now imagine living your entire adult life knowing that who you are on the outside is not who you really are, struggling to first understand and then accept your identity, and then going through the painful process of trying to let your loved ones know that you are different from how they have seen you for decades.
This is Jenner’s “personality crisis,” the knowledge that Bruce wasn’t “right,” followed by years of burdening secrecy, shame and guilt. Caitlyn is the solution for it.
Caitlyn is brave, has the right to be who she wants to be
Going public with such a personal story takes a lot of courage. It’s true, Jenner and all the Kardashians will make a fortune off it, but at the same time, Caitlyn is exposing herself to very harsh criticism and horrible comments, the kind she might not be able to tune out.
This is what her defenders are saying right now, even those who don’t necessarily agree with the transition or support the LGBT community openly.
All of us are free to decide the person we want to be, to choose how to live our life as long as we’re not harming anyone else in the process. Caitlyn has made sure that her family understands what she’s been through, so she did her bit to ensure no one she cares about is harmed about her completing transition.
If we are free to be true to ourselves and to act in such a way as to experience life at its fullest, why shouldn’t Caitlyn? Sure, her choice isn’t like the choice I made, say, to get a higher education or marry later in life, but that doesn’t make mine more valid than hers. Neither does it make her “wrong” and me “right.”
A personal choice is a personal choice, and we should respect hers as much as we’d like others to respect our own. This is what makes her happy, this is the life she wants, and she is free to have it.
He’ll always be Bruce, just now in women’s clothes
This is the other side of the coin with Caitlyn’s transition. Whether citing religion or nature, there are millions who simply can’t and won’t understand how a man could ever have stuff done to make him resemble a woman, and then expect the whole world to treat him as one.
At the end of the day, he is still a man inside: he’s just wearing women’s clothes and slapping on makeup, and maybe had surgery to remove or add “stuff” on his body.
Partly, I get where they come from, though I will not agree with many of the things they say. Religious writing never mentioned transpeople, and Mother Nature made man and woman, not transwoman, transman, agender or third-gender.
So Bruce Jenner saying he’s now a woman named Caitlyn Jenner goes both against religion and the natural law, which must make him an abomination. Even worse, his case is even more outrageous because he’s a public figure with a massive reach, using his platform to tell others like him that it’s ok to be this way.
A world with more tolerant people is a beautiful world
This would be my conclusion to this piece: we need to learn to be more tolerant and respectful of one another. Disagreement is always welcome because it’s what moves the world forward, but personal attacks are what pulls us backwards.
Being tolerant in Caitlyn’s case doesn’t mean applauding or praising her, just like it doesn’t mean you throwing your beliefs out the window and suddenly proclaiming that which you don’t believe to be true.
Being tolerant - and ultimately respecting her decision to be the person she wants to be - doesn’t mean that you turn a blind eye as the world takes another step towards eternal damnation. It just means you’re showing a fellow human the kind of respect you expect from others, and not trying to impose your judgment of right and wrong on others.
It makes this world a more loving and beautiful place. It makes us better people, living in more harmony. There is still enough place on this planet for all of us and all of our opinions, beliefs and gender identities, whether assigned at birth or identified later in life.