Is Caitlyn Jenner a Woman?

Are you allowed to ask?  (She looks like a man in drag.  Wide shoulders, thick neck, really not ones idea of female beauty.)

He/she is a fading celebrity who found one last surprise to keep her act going.  And it is an act.  She started as a male Olympian, moved on to films and TV, ended us with the Kardashians and then became a gal.  She was even praised for her “glamour.”  Can we say that if glamour has any meaning at all, Caitlyn Jenner is a parody?

So what?  

Well we are in a period of time when ordinary folks are expected to accept a political party’s catechism or shut up.  This is not a good way to win voters.  Both parties do this, but Republicans ask so little of voters that they are hurt far less.  Democrats on the other hand are an alliance of disparate interest groups and each one has a series of talking points that they enforce by having their spokesmen go on TV as soon as someone says something that they don’t like.  Worse than that is how academia has a hold on left wing thought and the result is to make Democratic opinion more extreme, not less.  It becomes easy for Republicans to tie Democrats to whatever nonsense comes out of Academia - and much nonsense comes our of our universities.  

So when colleges consider safe spaces to protect students from having to think, or develops complex rules for sexual consent that discount the reality of seduction, it is Democrats who suffer.  

Our elite media play a hand in this too.  Organs like the NY Times or New Yorker have taken on the newspeak that has emerged from academia - and gender presents a great example.  The “average” American really does not refer to heteronormative when he or she consider a male and female couple.  Nor is he or she afraid to use normal to describe such folks.  

Yet we even see articles in the Times and elsewhere about parents who are considering keeping sex off the birth certificate - oh, they use gender in place of sex.  Gender may be a human construct but sex is not - even if there are a few genuine intersex babies for whom the sex is ambiguous.  

And in this instance, I am using personal experience. I work in a part of the economy where identity is an issue.  I have done insurance claims where my key concern was whether the John or Jane Doe in the death certificate was our John or Jane Doe.  So let’s examine Caitlyn Jenner, formerly Bruce.  Let’s imagine that she died in an airplane crash where many bodies were burned.  For Caitlyn’s remains, the examiner would likely look at the bones and conclude male (with larger attachment points for muscles).  If soft tissue remained, the coroner might find evidence of a castration and of fake breasts.  The amount of the body’s subcutaneous fat might suggest a woman as well.  

I also remember a disability claim, years ago at a different company from where I now work, where after our telephone interview of the client, we felt obliged have a field investigator interview the claimant - and a key question was about the client’s sex.  

Yet in major media, especially high quality top notch media, it seems a sin to suggest that sex is real (as height and weight are).  And an attention grabber like Caitlyn is presented as a serious person, and transgender women as real women.  But the experience of womanhood includes a number of experiences that no “real” man has access to.  Women give birth, can feed the baby with their own milk, and undergo a monthly battle to expel an egg and then release a new one.  Then fertility ends and women still undergo a battle with hormones - it varies by the woman of course.  For male/female couples during fertile years, the woman is continuously worried about pregnancy.  For the man, he is part of the worry (or a brute).  None of this attaches to transgender women.  

For transgender men, there are fewer issues, but they are notably smaller than average men.  Though the passage to adulthood is less fraught for a boy than for a girl, it still involves the sudden emergence of strength, also male anger.  And in most societies, we expect the young men to defend the tribe - even at the risk of death.  In our society, even in middle class families, it remains the men who shovel the snow, go downstairs to check on a noise, and change a  flat tire.  Trans men did not grow up being part of this.  And their small size suggests that they rarely are called to do what a “big” man can do. 

This does not alter letting trans folks live whatever life they need to.  But avoiding “sex” by substituting “gender” is not a solution.  Nor is gender theory really ready for prime time.  Truth to tell, we barely know much at all about the mind.  We may use algorithms to replace the mind in software, but no one who studies the brain believes that algorithms are a complete explanation for how the brain works.  We don’t even know how memories are stored.  (If you think I may be going outside of what I know here, think of this - we have memories and can recall many things in detail; what is remarkable is that we can adjust our memories.  For example, I learned that there were 9 planets, Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto.  I learned this as a child and could repeat it in my sleep.  Yet as soon as Pluto was taken off the list, I adjusted.  It was immediate and now eight planets live in my memory, along with the former nine.  My memory of dinosaurs similarly changed as they were re-imagined as warm blooded relatives of birds rather than cold blooded relatives of lizards.  

The origins of personality are far less clear, and within persona is the even more difficult matter of how one relates to others in terms of sexual desires.  I understand that a man can imagine that he had the wrong body, but that seems only at an extreme along a continuum that includes boys who grow up loving music and art, and on the far other side, aggressive athletes and warriors.  

Funny too is how trans men and trans women conform to stereotypes.  So the trans men all seem to be body builders with beards and the trans women all use makeup and effect the soft speech we consider feminine.  For myself and my wife, she uses no makeup and I hate competitive sports.  

Of course the attack on trans men and women is also nonsense.  We have had what amounts to cross-dressing for millennia and the world of religion is full of folks who eschew standard sex roles.  The Shakers were an example of a utopian movement where standard sex roles were at least muted by celibacy.  The Shakers may be extinct by this date.  In 2017, there were two remaining Shakers.  

So we should allow almost any behavior as long as it is not done to harm others.  

For average voters, if they wander into the world of elites, they will encounter peculiar new language, and odd concepts that they have not thought much about, and really don’t care much about either.  So from safe spaces in college to trans gender issues, to even black lives matter - much of what is in the left’s catechism is remote to an average person’s life.  So they really don’t have a fixed view on a confederate statue put up 100 years ago.  They don’t even understand the level of police oppression that led to Black Lives Matter.  I still remember when, some 19 years ago, when a black guy fled the police after picking up his girl friend who was off shift at a local hospital.  The man followed by the police as he was seen driving erratically and then chased by cops from several towns.  They all paid toward the final settlement after they shot him.  At the time I had read much less on the subject and thought to myself, why did he flee.  Even now I don’t know.  

To my few readers, please don’t try to instruct me about what is right or wrong about anything I have written, I don’t really believe debate is much use.  Better are good informed articles that can help improve understanding.  

But please also understand that this is a warning to Democrats - don’t piss off the voters.  Gerrymandering and a genuine disadvantage from the way populations are distributed puts Dems at risk.  So what Dems don’t need to a chorus of harpies screaming.  

PS: re the black guy who was killed, he was Stanton Crew of Morristown.  I understand about police oppression, but since the police chase started in Dover (which does not harrass minorities) it still remains hard to understand what went wrong.