Jenner's Gender War on Pronouns
But now I wonder: Will Caitlyn Jenner's fame do for the gender rights cause what, for example, Rock Hudson's and Magic Johnson's revelations of their HIV infections did for the fight against AIDS?
A lot already has changed. The trans-rights movement, not to be confused with the gay and lesbian rights movement, is growing in power and appeal. Time headlined its cover featuring actress and former man Laverne Cox last year with the headline "The Transgender Tipping Point" -- without a question mark.
Sen. Lindsey Graham, now a presidential hopeful from South Carolina, seemed to get that message when he invited Jenner, a reputed Republican, to vote for him as he pitched for a more inclusive GOP.
Still trans people endure enough discrimination to look like the final frontier in the civil rights revolution. In most states, it is still legal to fire someone for being transgender. Surveys by the National Center for Transgender Equality and the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force still find huge levels of violence and persecution against transgender people -- including 41 per cent of respondents who said that they had attempted suicide.
And as writer Michelle Goldberg reported last year in a The New Yorker piece titled "What Is A Woman?" transgender folks also are attacked by radical feminists on the left as being either inauthentic women, in the cases like Jenner's, or sellout women, in the cases of trans-men, who allegedly caved in to male supremacy.
Can't we all get along? Jenner has added fuel to that radical feminist backlash by announcing that she is leaving her male genitalia intact. A large number of trans-women do, surveys show. That's their right, but it doesn't make my pronoun problem any easier.
========
(E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@tribune.com.)
(c) 2015 CLARENCE PAGE DISTRIBUTED BY TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES, INC.
