The Federalist

Zitat

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When I look at the glamorous pictures of Bruce Jenner dolled up as Caitlyn, with his flowing locks, long lashes, plump lips, and full breasts, I have to laugh. Not at him, but at the irony of it. What Jenner seems to have achieved with a lot of money, cosmetic surgeons, and talented makeup artists, I wanted desperately as a young girl and had to suffer through years of natural—and sometimes humiliating—development to attain.

Such are the trials of growing up as a girl, of longing to be a beautiful woman. My hair was only part of it. I was a tomboy, flat-chested and skinny. I thought of that as I listened to commentators go on and on about Jenner’s perfect breasts. “How sexy, how perky, how lovely,” they gushed. How nice for Bruce not to suffer the indignities of developing real breasts. Some girls develop early, others develop late. There’s the teasing, the awkwardness, the silliness. We endure it. It’s all part of a girl becoming a woman.

Not every girl has such an embarrassing story, but each one remembers. They know what it’s like to grow up and become a woman, and those experiences are integral to shaping their feminine identity—and an identity that is rooted in their nature, in their genes, not in their fantasies. It’s something no transgender man can ever know. He might become an imitation of woman with artificial breasts and hormone injections, but he will never be a girl who became a woman—and that is all the difference in the world.

Bruce Jenner will never know what it’s like to wait expectantly for that first period.

Jenner won’t have to endure such humiliations. He’ll never know what it’s like to be a girl, to bravely face the realities, not the fantasies, of nature. He won’t know the joys, either. The comfort of a girl resting in her father’s strong arms. The sweetness a woman feels when her husband makes love to her and they create life together. The soft movements of a child as she or he grows inside her womb. The peace she feels as she feeds her baby at her breast, having given life and now sustaining it.

The celebration of Jenner “becoming a woman” is a fantasy. It’s artificial. It’s make-believe. It’s not authentic at all. It’s a mirage. Jenner has always fantasized that he’s a woman, dreaming of the possibilities of becoming what he imagines himself to be. But possibilities in life are only fantasies when they aren’t rooted in something real. You can’t become a woman without being a girl, complete with XX chromosomes that determine our sex. The man posing as a woman on the cover of Vanity Fair is a delusional mockery of every woman who knows what it’s like to be a girl with all the pains, humiliations, and joys of actually growing up and becoming a woman—and each one of us, in different ways, has faced it bravely through every stage.

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That is so well said!

"The man posing as a woman on the cover of Vanity Fair is a delusional mockery of every woman who knows what it’s like to be a girl with all the pains, humiliations, and joys of actually growing up and becoming a woman..."

Excellent piece. Thanks for adding, Conservagramma. Even as a boy I can empathize with the author and you ladies as boys, too, go through their own, if different, struggles to find out what it is to be a man.

Superb article, beautifully stated.

I am posting it all over the place. If people don't like it, too damn bad. They can still stay in their dreamworld.

Quote: algernonpj wrote in post #3

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@conservgramma
IMHO Burce / Caitlyn reminds me of drag queen in 'La Cage au Folles'

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I would add that he will never know the dread of waiting out testing results upon learning your unborn baby has a genetic defect, the fear of yearly mammograms and their biopsy result when they show an abnormality, amniocentisis and the unforgettable POP of the huge needle, and the heartbreak of miscarriage or worse, stillbirth.

Sorry he deludes himself but still, it is what it is. Or in this case, what it ISN'T.