Caitlyn Jenner
So there I was in 2015, sitting in Bart’s Pub across a table from my dear friend Bruce and, without prodding, he offered a high hosanna to one of the most ballyhooed people on our Big Blue Orb.
“Caitlyn Jenner rocks,” Bruce said.
At the time, Jenner had recently appeared as a newly minted, very air-brushed transgender female on the cover of Vanity Fair, and her soon-to-be-doomed self-opus, I Am Cait, was a recent arrival to our flatscreens, airing on E! Channel.
I winced and scoffed.
“Nobody will be talking about Caitlyn Jenner two years from now,” I told Bruce.
Sure enough, the Homage to Herself became a ratings Hindenburg, with I Am Cait plummeting from 2.7 million sets of eyeballs at the outset to less than 500,000 by the time someone at E! Channel had the good sense to mercifully pull the plug on the 10-months, two-seasons run.
There was no mystery why viewers tuned her out: The High Priestess in the Cult of Cait was utterly unlikable.
Although vowing to “reshape the landscape” and “change the world,” Kitty Cait was a rude, abrasive, aggressive, interruptive, cruel and power-addictive attention hog. She had the warm-and-fuzzy qualities of a desert cactus plant, and was hopelessly ill-informed on transgender reality.
Kitty Cait spent the majority of her time flouncing about the United States—”Road trip, girls!”—with her faithful flock of fawning followers, and when she and the Trans Troop weren’t toodling around on dirt bikes, drinking wine, roller skating, drinking wine, swimming, drinking more wine, and kissing Boy George’s ring finger, Kitty Cait could be found cooing over Candis Cayne or in a clothes closet the size of Manhattan, fretting over what to wear for a sleepover at Candis’ abode. Or she might have been bragging about the cost of her store-bought, trophy tits.
“What a responsibility I have towards this community. Am I going to do everything right? Am I going to say the right things? Do I project the right image? My mind is just spinning with thoughts. I just hope I get it right…I hope I get it right…ya,” the transgender diva said with much theatrical emphasis in Episode 1, Season 1.
In another episode, she insisted on using her dead name, Bruce, in order to curry favor with a fancy-schmancy Los Angeles golf club. So, she was a she unless being a she prevented her from sharing oxygen with the beautiful people, in which case she would revert to being good, ol’ Bruce Jenner, Olympic champion. Such a pesky inconvenience.
All the while, I would watch and cringe, wondering to myself, “Do people think all transgender women are such total ditzes and mean-spirited bitches?”
But, like her self-opus, Jenner vanished from our consciousness, unless we happened to glance at the cover of one of the trash/gossip mags in the supermarket checkout line and learn that another of the Jenner/Kardashian brood had abandoned her.
Alas, Caitlyn is back, like a fresh batch of hemorrhoids, and she wants to govern all the good people of California.
One presumes that includes transgender girls, although Governor Wannabe doesn’t want to see them running, jumping, throwing, skipping rope or playing rock-scissors-paper with “real” females. Under a Caitlyn Jenner administration, trans girls in the Golden State would be expected to stay in their own special lane, which would reduce them to non-female lesser-thans.
We know this to be true because a TMZ snoop caught up with Governor Wannabe during a Saturday morning coffee run, and he probed her brain pan for nuggets of insight.
“This is a question of fairness, that’s why I oppose biological boys who are trans competing in girls sports in school,” Jenner said while shooing her black lab into the back seat of an SUV. “It just isn’t fair, and we have to protect girls sports in our schools.”
The temptation is to suggest that if transgender girls are still “biological boys” then it surely follows that the transgender Caitlyn Jenner is still the biological Bruce Jenner, no matter how pricey the store-bought boobs, the extensive face-sculpting and whatever other slicing and dicing has been performed on the former Olympic champion’s body.
But we don’t want to go there because it would be insulting, improper and incorrect.
Suffice to say, Jenner’s take on transgender girls in sports is deeply disturbing, demeaning and hurtful, but not at all surprising given her odious behavior and dreadful talking points on I Am Cait.
I suppose it might win her some votes and friends among Republicans in the California gubernatorial race—Piers Morgan has already given her sound bite his official okie-dokie—but stepping on the little people is one sad way of going about your business.
I’d say Jenner has betrayed the transgender community, except I don’t believe she has ever truly been part of it.
