The price of Caitlyn Jenner

The following is an excerpt from a commentary this week in the New York Times by Rhonda Garelick:

A new goddess has emerged like Botticelli’s Venus rising from the sea. Caitlyn Jenner gazes out from Annie Leibovitz’s July Vanity Fair cover, bare save for a satin bodysuit. Her auburn curls tumble over alabaster shoulders. Can she really be the avatar of personal freedom and self-expression the media claims her to be?

Caitlyn Jenner’s transition is more than a private matter. It is a commercial spectacle on an enormous scale, revealing some disturbing truths about what we value and admire in women.

Ms. Jenner is 65 years old, but Caitlyn “codes” many decades younger. Her features are tiny and doll-like, her skin lineless. Even her new chosen first name feels bizarrely girlish, conjuring more a college student, or maybe a sixth Kardashian sister, than a grandmother.

We have known for months that Bruce Jenner was becoming a woman, and we rejoice if this brings her happiness. But were we prepared for this woman?

What does it mean that Ms Jenner’s newly revealed “true self” (in her own words) comes packaged like a 30-something starlet along the lines of her famous daughters and stepdaughters? She is even likened to “an elegant starlet” in Vanity Fair.

As Vanity Fair’s Caitlyn, Ms. Jenner has morphed into a consumable commodity — a strangely static, oddly youthful and elaborately adorned body that is, rather than does. This seems less the liberation of a true self than a reminder of the straitjacket requirements of desirable womanhood.

While the fanfare around the emergence of Caitlyn may advance our acceptance of transgender individuals, it does so, in this case, at a price: the perpetuation, even celebration, of narrow and dehumanizing strictures of womanhood. True liberation of gender’s vast spectrum should ask more of us than that we simply exchange one uncomfortable, oppressive identity for another.