The new Caitlyn Jenner

Parent Cafe
961

"what is dying, for the mother of the trans son, is her vision and dream of a daughter. Even though the mother adores her child and utterly supports the transition, she still may grieve for the daughter she no longer has.

This is exactly it. And it’s because the person - their physical presentation, etc.- and even their name, which you gave them for a reason - is changing.

And before we get all trivial here, this is not like “oh, I envisioned my daughter would be a mother, and she decided not to have children, or she is a lesbian and they’ve decided not to have children.” The person herself did not change.|

My friend is being asked to call her daughter X by a new name Y. She’s doing so, and if she makes a mistake and slips up and uses X, she gets yelled at. It’s very difficult on her, even though she’s supportive. I think her feelings of loss are entirely appropriate and understandable. She’s now the mother of two sons, when for the last 25 years she’s been the mother of a son and daughter.

962

Never seen the show (show?) but he showed up in my newsfeed courtesy of Big Red Cotton so I watched a little segment just a couple weeks ago. Yes . . . the bounce sub-genre could be one for the “do those lyrics bother you” thread but the explanation was interesting and made sense to me.

Now, back to your regularly scheduled programming . . .

963

@pizzagirl:
I think you friend’s child needs to be a little more understanding of people around them, if people have known you a long time there are going to be slips. There is a difference between someone who deliberately uses the old name or gender pronoun (like calling a M to F “he” deliberately), and someone who slips. If a parent has known the child for many years as X, it is a bit childish to get their nose bent out of joint if the parent slips once in a while, especially at the beginning. I understand only too well wanting to be accepted and treated as the person you are, but I think folks also have to realize that they at that point have been transitioning for a while, and it takes people a while to adjust.

I think that it is okay to describe the process as grieving, in many ways it is, but when people say things like a parent is dead because the transitioned, or a child, it is too much like the people who have a child they aren’t happy with things they have done in their life, and yell “you are dead to me, I no longer have a child”, and it is a word that is quite loaded with things that go beyond real dying, it is saying in a sense because someone has transitioned, they no longer are alive to you (or rather, that is what can be inferred, whether intentional or not). Grieving is a lot more than about death alone, you can grieve the end of a friendship, a marriage, you can grieve the end of a job you liked, you can grieve the end of being young, of being single, it is a very special type of emotion, that allows us to deal with change. I can understand the partner of a trans person who grieves for the old relationship, the nature of the relationship changes when one transitions, and the other person has to adapt, but that doesn’t mean they see the other person as dead, either.

964

We don’t have the vocabulary or the accumulation of experiences (or even observations) to perfectly discuss this. There is no one reality, nor one perfect response- except, perhaps, to try to be open-minded.

Yes, grieving is a natural response to many changes. It’s not only associated with death. It’s easy to say some life transitions are “like death.” But that doesn’t make it the appropriate comparison, the appropriate phrase. I think people use it because they haven’t found other ways to express the loss. Any good lit on grieving talks about the tremendous confusion, the range of emotions, the ups and downs, the exhaustion that comes from all that.

If one party won’t accept, eg, some name confusion or a slip, gets angry, that’s a different issue, a different challenge, in the ongoing interactions. It’s no more “right” or productive than any line in the sand.

None of this is simple. We’d do the world a favor if we realized that.

965

I come back to this closing comment from the original posted article:

“Now Kris Jenner and her children have joined the club: those who have lost husbands, wives, fathers, mothers, sisters and brothers in a way that can only compare to death but isn’t. All we can do is manage the pain, ignore the wide-eyed stares and inconsiderate comments, and hope for grace and serenity. We are forced to applaud with so many others what it takes to come out as trans, to live an authentic life. But only we know the courage it takes to redraw what gets erased.”

This comment to me seems more based in how OTHERS might view the news that their loved one is trans . . . in image and perception rather than fact. The author says that everyone else was celebrating the transition while she was left grieving. But if the world were really so congratulatory then why these “wide-eyed stares”? In the experience of a friend whose ex is trans the world was not applauding. The transition was very much on the down low and he was just “out of the picture.” It was very hard for her to be a single parent, but it wasn’t as if the world were throwing a parade for her ex. If they had been it likely would have been easier as he might have been more openly involved in their lives as a parent. If families and the world at large are more accepting, it seems to me, then nothing much need be lost outside of the conjugal relationship.

966

George Takei posted this on fb:

https://www.distractify.com/soldier-defends-jenner-1254090874.html?ts_pid=2&ts_pid=2

Sorry, I can’t manage to copy and paste the soldier’s defense of Jenner. The site is all graphic and bit beyond me. It’s a satisfying rebuttal to read though.

967

does this work, donna? http://www.facebook.com/Delilah/photos/a.420491190336.193818.276802375336/10152632913535337/?type=1

the **** is facebook

it is a snoopy cartoon and says" My entire life can be described in one sentence: It didn’t go as planned, and that’s ok."

968

“We are forced to applaud with so many others what it takes to come out as trans, to live an authentic life. But only we know the courage it takes to redraw what gets erased.”

I think this is projecting something that isn’t true for most trans folks. Sure, Caitlyn Jenner is getting how proud and brave she is, in some ways it has become a literal cause celebre, but it is different when it is a celebrity then it is an ordinary person. It makes it sound like being transgender, you will be an object of support and validation, and people will support you and then look at those around you and say “why can’t you get with the program?”. It doesn’t work like that, everyone’s experience is different, and quite frankly a lot of people would look at the family and those around a trans person as victims and the trans person as a perpetrator of sorts, and it has nothing to do with liberal or conservative, religious or not, a lot of the reaction towards this is to make a victim of those around the trans person, of something tragically being forced on them and so forth, rather than realizing that it is something that in a perfect world wouldn’t happen, but the world is not perfect, and that with some exceptions, someone making the decision to transition, to do this, would probably rather do anything in the world than hurt those around them, especially loved ones like spouse and children, but that in the end hurting themselves wouldn’t do their loved ones any good either, because they might likely face either literal death, as in suicide, or watch someone spin themselves into the ground with drugs or alcohol or depression. I think a lot of people must think this is something that just flies up out of nowhere, that someone just says “I am this, so I am transitioning” and flits through the process.

Part of the problem with Caitlyn’s journey is that the public perception seems to be that 6 months ago when still living as Bruce, she started showing signs of change (ie the Adam’s apple, long hair, body changes), then she suddenly announces she is going to transition, and then has 10 hours of plastic surgery and voila, ‘instant’ Caitlyn (and this is not a criticism of her, it is really a criticism of the media exploiting her story). She has talked about the many years of agonizing, knowing something was wrong, etc, but what people see is the People magazine arc of the story which makes it seem (again, their bad, not hers) that this is something that suddenly jumped out of thin air, and it doesn’t.

969

Still doesn’t make it easy on anyone. I think that, separate from the “like a death” issue, we have to recognize there can be pain all around. As humans, we seek balance. The big transitions all require a re-balancing. And, that’s both public and private. It takes time. We tend to think it’s as simple as accepting and moving forward. None of this is.

970

Yes, jym, it works if you substitute “facebook.” Thanks.

971

For doG’s sake, isn’t the woman entitled to her feelings, just as her spouse is? Apparently not IRL and not here either, according to many.

972

I’m not sure if I am not expressing myself right, but I’m feeling that if my belief is gender fluidity = everyone has masculine and feminine traits to some extent, the response is how dare you attack someone who believes in binary and mutually exclusive genders, be they tg or not.

As an atheist, can it be non-judgemental and okay for me to say I don’t understand why so many people commit to a religion? Or is that inherently some kind of hate speech? I feel the issues are similarly polarizing.

And am I alone in thinking that non-reconstructive plastic surgery (beyond breast augmentation/removal and below the belt changes) is something that I can choose to disagree with, unrelated to being tg or not? And that I would have considered Ms. Jenner a much more significant hero without the glamour and clear money spin?

Some of this conversation smacks of “you’ll never know what it is like”, again as others mentioned it is not a grieving or suffering contest. Note that I hate the book Wonder in regards to how " it spreads awareness" and my kids are forced to read about another “different person” who is both sanctified and “just like you or me”.

Like my son happened to mention to me, this kid at school is annoying and rude, so he doesn’t like him. The kid happens to be gay, but as my son said, he doesn’t like him because he is annoying and rude, not because he is gay. Does Ms. Jenner being tg mean that I must like her and all her choices (vis a vis her extensive plastic surgery and the way she dresses and is photographed) because if I don’t like her, I am saying i just don’t like tg people?

Having been discriminated against in the past is no reason to assume all discussions that disagree with your point of view are hate speech. Again, maybe I’m not voicing my feelings in the right way.

973

^I get what you are saying, rhandco. It seems to have become part of our PC culture that if you say anything negative whatsoever about someone in a “protected class” than you are a bigot, etc.

That said, you might point out to your S that sometimes a kid is annoying and rude as a defense mechanism against the perceived or expected animosity of others. I would relate a personal story about this exact thing, but it would be totally not PC.

974

@rhandco:

I wasn’t calling you a bigot or denying your right to question things or say you don’t understand something, this isn’t about being PC or anything like that (and if it seems like I was, I apologize). You comments on gender fluidity have validity for some people, and most people are a mix of gender characteristics and so forth, there is no doubt in my mind.Your statement on religion has an interesting parallel. It is one thing as an atheist if you say to people of faith “to be honest, being an atheist, I cannot really understand what having faith does for you, what it means”, it would be another if you took the approach of Richard Dawkins and ridiculed those with faith, arguing it is stupid, the bastion of ignorance and so forth, which is designed to be denigrating, not giving an opinion (any more than the faithful who claim atheists are immoral and so forth are just as bad, if not worse, since their faith tells them not to do such things).

That said, a lot of trans people have heard things like you said about gender fluidity and it has been used a weapon, a cudgel, to deny that trans folks are real. It is everything from the 1970’s feminist crowd, including Gloria Steinham, who accused trans folks of being men in dresses and were ‘recreating patriarchal modes of expression for women, enforcing them’ and other drivel like that, or people ,well meaning or not, who said “well, you believe you are a man or a woman, so why do you have to transition? Why can’t you just accept that and live your life as you are?”…some of that is as a gender conforming person, they don’t see gender or feel it, the only thing about gender they recognize is how they express it, and they therefore tend to put gender into that context (thus, if someone is F to M, they will say "well, I wear jeans and a shirt, so can you, so why do you want to go through all that and transition, You don’t have to). It is dismissing what someone feels about themself, whether deliberate or not, turning it into a game of dressup, rather than who they are (put it this way, the woman who says “well, I can put on pants and shirt”, if they woke up one morning with a hairy chest, a man’s genitals, would probably not be thinking “gee, I am a woman, so it doesn’t matter”…but they can’t even imagine that).

Put it this way, criticizing Caitlyn Jenner for what you consider to be extensive plastic surgery, or for being too over the top a la the Kardashians, is fair play, but it will be fair play if you feel that way about women in general or plastic surgery in general. There are a lot of trans folks criticizing her being so over the top, so you wouldn’t be alone, there is a difference between criticizing what someone does and who they are. The bigots are those who dismiss what trans people are, the so called religious who claim that the bible tells it all and therefore they have the right to denigrate her, and the like, or claim the right to make someone’s life a living hell because they don’t understand or don’t want to understand, and I didn’t see that in any posts on here.

As far as what the spouse wrote, I don’t think anyone is denying her her emotions, she has to be hurting, she has to be angry and scared and a ton of other emotions. My problem with what she wrote is she is making it seem like she is the victim everyone ignores while cheering on her spouse (presumably using the public wave of support for Caitlyn Jenner as proof of this supposed support), when the reality is that her ex spouse is probably getting dumped on for daring to go forward with her life and is facing a ton of pain, what she is doing is projecting on what happened to Caitlyn Jenner as reality, when it isn’t, if she really thinks her spouse is glowing in a flood of adulation while she is ignored, I think she needs a little bit of a reality check.

975

Yes, Kris Jenner is entitled to her feelings, but certainly she knew that Bruce was cross dressing for a long time, knew that he had “gender issues” and knew that he had taken and was taking preliminary transition steps. This wasn’t out of the blue for her. I am not a Kardashian watcher so I don’t have a good grasp of her personality, but it sounds like she is used to being the business manager and queen bee and Bruce was very much in the background. This takes a little air out of her balloon on a public level along with kind of being an empty-nester this year (I read that the youngest bought a house?!) I’m not sure I get how this is worse than a garden variety divorce. At least Caitlyn didn’t leave her for her secretary or best friend or the babysitter. Unlike Bruce’s previous 2 divorces, Caitlyn remains available (maybe more than ever) to her kids both biological and step kids.

976

Having met DonnaL before I knew she was a trans woman, I can say she’s a completely convincing very attractive woman. Truly no surgery necessary. :slight_smile:

977

And you know this how? Do you know their mutual friends and relations? This is her reality: the people she knows seem to be split between A) those who are cheering on and supporting the spouse and expect her to do the same with no acknowledgement that she is feeling a lot of pain and feeling that her marriage and her reality has been erased, and B) those who are wide-eyed with curiousity in an apparently kind of prurient way.

This does nothing to minimize the amount of pain and discomfort her ex went through and still faces.

I think that SHE is the one who is providing the reality check here.

Remember, this was her husband, not a person she was already long divorced from.

978

From what I understand, they had already decided to divorce before he told her was transitioning.

Allegedly it had nothing to do with the dissolution of their marriage, at least from her end.

979

This may be of interest:
http://www.cnn.com/2015/07/19/living/cnnphotos-transgender-gender-variant-over-50/index.html

I like the term “gender variant” as a departure from gender absolutism…

980

@consolation:
I don’t know the woman personally, I only read the piece she wrote, and in reading it it seemed to me like she was using the story of Caitlyn Jenner to get support for herself (the article didn’t say much about her own story, she doesn’t say things like “people around me supported my ex spouse and not myself”, she wasn’t specific).

I wrote what I did based on experience, that when something like this happens most people are a lot more supportive of the spouse then the trans person, usually friends and family side a lot more with the non trans spouse, and it is the basis for what I wrote. Even with all the light being shined on transgender people, with transparent and the other tv programs and of course Caitlyn, what I have seen out there is that relatively few people cheer on the trans person versus their spouse, and most of the support for the trans person comes from other transgender folk.