Monday, September 7, 2015

Is There a Kinsey Scale of Being Transgender

'I don't want to worry about locker rooms': Uncomfortable Caitlyn Jenner applies to golf club as 'Bruce' in latest clip from 'I Am Cait'
From: kenneth in the (212)
 We're a half-dozen episodes into "I Am Cait" and after watching this latest preview I can't help but ask -- knowing that it will blow up in my face -- this question: Are we sure there isn't something halfway between transvestite and transgender, because Caitlyn sure doesn't think or behave like any transgender person I've ever known or read about. First she tells Diane Sawyer she doesn't feel like she was born in the wrong body. Then she tells her ex-wife that she may not have had to transition "at all" if she (Kris Jenner) had just been willing to acknowledge "this" (pointing to herself in women's clothing). Now she's still going by Bruce at her golf club and doesn't want to use the women's locker room? Granted, she's not like any other trans person in the world -- she's a 65-year-old internationally famous multimillionaire. But dressing up and make-up seems to be the only part of "being" a woman that matters to her, which I find odd. I don't think she's pretending anything -- no one would subject themselves to the kind of scrutiny if they weren't going through some sort of gender crisis. And clearly this is something that has haunted her for decades. But it does have me wondering if maybe there's a Kinsey Scale of being transgender ... with boys who wanted to cut their own penises off at age 4 (and girls who wanted to hide/remove their breasts, etc.) feeling "trapped" in the wrong body for as long as they can remember as "tens" and people like Alexis Arquette (and Cait) as "ones." I'm not saying one way of being trans is right and one is wrong, or that one makes you more of a man or woman than the other. (Even Candis Cayne didn't reach her gender identity in the "traditional" path.) But what I am saying is maybe the lesson to be learned from Caitlyn Jenner is it's time we recognize that being trans comes in as many varieties as being anything else, and it might not be as binary as we thought. I poked a trans friend of mine -- Andrea James -- about the subject after a FB friend sort of hinted at what I'm thinking:


Thoughts?

No comments:

Post a Comment