Keeping up with the changes
His or her story, Jenner deserves to tell it
Over the weekend, Bruce Jenner was involved in a four-vehicle car crash that killed one person. The accident was widely covered — Jenner is, among other things, the de facto Kardashian patriarch — but there’s been one underlying theme to the coverage that has nothing to do with the incident itself. Nearly every news story about the accident made a passing reference to the fact that Jenner may or may not be currently in the process of transitioning into a woman.
For anyone who’s been to a grocery store in the past month, Jenner’s rumoured transgenderism is old news: conjecture recent cosmetic surgical procedures has been running rampant since last year. He, like every other member of the E!-tastic Kardashian/Jenner clan, has had work done, and it is work that’s resulted in his assuming a more traditionally feminine appearance.
It’s one thing to make fun of or comment on any one Kardashian’s vanity — it’s frivolity writ large, so exaggerated that Kim recently spoofed it in a T-Mobile commercial during the Super Bowl. But Jenner’s physical transformation, if it’s related to his gender identity, does not possess any such frivolity and may in fact be imperative. His process, if there is a process in progress, is a much more difficult, gradual, revelatory and therapeutic one than applying bronzer for contouring. It has little to do with vanity. If Jenner is becoming a woman, he is undergoing the process of adapting, adopting and developing a physicality in which he will finally feel comfortable.
But the unrelenting is-he, isn’t-he conjecture surrounding Jenner has essentially co-opted his right to define his transition. His narrative has been stolen. And the fact that the language surrounding issues of gender identity has evolved doesn’t mean the consistent headlines essentially outing Jenner are in any way progressive.
In January 2014, Grantland came under fire for publishing a piece in which it outed — truthfully and not through conjecture — inventor Essay Anne Vanderbilt as a trans woman. Vanderbilt committed suicide before the piece’s publication. In an open letter published shortly thereafter, Grantland editor Bill Simmons admitted that the decision to publish information about Vanderbilt’s gender identity “speaks to our collective ignorance about the issues facing the transgender community in general.”
So what makes Jenner different? Is it OK to poke and prod, to continue the process of leering at and othering him because he’s on a reality show? Because it is difficult to consider the idea that Jenner would be nuanced? Or is it simply because — even though the transgender community is having what trans woman and activist Janet Mock recently called “a major cultural moment” — we are still fearful of an aspect of humanity that we do not understand?
Jenner is rumoured to be revealing his transition in an upcoming interview with Diane Sawyer, so the conversation about Jenner’s transition may soon begin in earnest, when Jenner begins it. And even then, there will be those who cannot be fair or kind of understanding — but they can at least be held to the standard of being correct.