Try as I might, it seems I cannot escape the Bruce/Caitlyn Jenner saga. When the story first broke, I pondered it for a little while, realized that I didn’t much care, said to myself “I hope he/she is happier now,” and looked for other things to read. The story, however, has spilled over into the cultural wars, with Caitlyn becoming a proxy for all sorts of disputes and disagreements, both internecine and across the conservative/liberal divide. The latter are easy to figure out, but it’s the former that are more interesting.
While the response from those who lean liberal has been generally quite positive, some feminists have opined that Caitlyn Jenner embodies big setbacks to their movement. One argument put forth suggests that living a lifetime as a man before re-identifying as a woman means one can never actually understand what it’s meant to be of the subjugated and subordinated gender, and thus a celebration of selected womanhood is misplaced and overstated. Some who believe that our gender differences are almost entirely experiential (a belief I don’t share), and who thus want to eliminate the societal distinction, consider this identity shift to be contrary to their cause. Some are lauding Caitlyn as brave, others not so much (to put it mildly). I won’t recap the entirety of liberal eating their own that has come across my news feeds and social media, other than to observe that all of this subordinates the fact that Caitlyn Jenner is an individual to the fact that Caitlyn Jenner is trans-gender.
All too often in our modern society, we and those around us are categorized by various demographic traits. Age range, race, ethnicity, ethnic origins, generational status, religious beliefs, political issue beliefs, height, weight, sex, gender, marital status, familial status, income status, work/career categorization… the list is long and ever-growing. While in and of themselves, categorical identifiers are neutral i.e. neither benign nor malevolent, the corollary action – partitioning us off into groups according to these categories – is not. When you’re lumped into a group, others will tend to make assumptions about you based on the most common known proclivities of that group. If you’re black or Jewish, many will assume you vote Democratic no matter what. If you’re from the South, you’re a bible thumper. If you’re Irish, you drink too much. If you’re Asian, you’re good at math but a lousy driver. If you’re a sports fan from Philadelphia, you cheer when someone on the other team gets hurt.
Recognition of and respect for the fact that you’re an individual tends get less consideration. The possibility that you have individual beliefs, preferences and predilections that might run counter to your group’s may get ignored, and if your individual beliefs don’t match those your group has or is expected to have, you may very well be labeled a traitor to that group.
Bruce/Caitlyn Jenner professed to being a Republican, with the predictable criticism and backlash. A black politician or pundit who espouses conservative or libertarian ideas may be dubbed an Uncle Tom. A woman who is anti-abortion draws deep suspicion from feminists. Liberal pundits are shocked by the fact that many latinos oppose immigration amnesty. In this we find not only the subordination of the individual to his or her group but also a discounting of the individuals beliefs and even his right to have those beliefs. Some argue that a black person who doesn’t embrace traditional causes like affirmative action, or a gay person who doesn’t “come out” and march lock-step with the beliefs that gays are expected to have, are not paying their dues for the efforts of those who preceded them. We could rationalize this argument – after all, if Rosa Parks didn’t put herself at risk, many others would have suffered from the discrimination of Jim Crow – but only if we ourselves subordinate the individual to the identity group.
It’s sad to contemplate the morphing of a society predicated on individual rights into one where respect for the individual is crowded out by identity politics. Certainly, a big portion of our ongoing fascination that is the Bruce/Caitlyn transformation is the spectacle of it all this is why reality TV, Paris Hilton and the Kardashians are big money makers, but that spectacle has spilled over into the political blogosphere and the culture wars, where people presumably take things a bit more seriously.
The late Christopher Hitchens once noted:
For years, I declined to fill in the form for my Senate press credential that asked me to state my ‘race,’ unless I was permitted to put ‘human.’ The form had to be completed under penalty of perjury, so I could not in conscience put ‘white,’ which is not even a color let alone a ‘race,’ and I sternly declined to put ‘Caucasian,’ which is an exploded term from a discredited ethnology. Surely the essential and unarguable core of King’s campaign was the insistence that pigmentation was a false measure: a false measure of mankind (yes, mankind) and an inheritance from a time of great ignorance and stupidity and cruelty, when one drop of blood could make you ‘black.
The sentiment therein can and should be applied to all categories if we are ever, as a society, to move past dividing and judging people based on various checkmarks on a list. As for Caitlyn Jenner? As I noted earlier, I hope she has found inner peace and happiness. It can be so elusive, so difficult to achieve, that we should applaud it wherever and whenever it occurs.
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I’m reading your article 5 years after you wrote it, but just wanted to say I liked it. Thanks.
Thank you. It’s unfortunate that it’s still relevant, and that, if anything, we are going in the wrong direction.