Caitlyn Jenner …

I don’t care. 

Between the reality TV freak-show parade of hillbillies, dumbasses, and assorted losers, and the breathless gushing of the media over whatever the Kardashians and Kanye West and their ilk are up to, Bruce Jenner’s transformation is just another blip. 

Good for him.  Or her.  Or whatever. 

This is part of an orchestrated campaign that’s been running for about a year now. For some reason, the media got fixated on transgender people a while back like they’re something new. 

You’ve seen a steady stream of articles in local and national newspapers and online about the difficulties transgender people face in our society.  There was the story of a politician whose child was transgendered. There was the ruckus in some school districts about whether transgender kids should be allowed to shower with and use the same bathrooms as the sex they identified with, rather than the sex they were born with. 

Some districts decided that their bathrooms should all be unisex; I don’t know what they decided about showering.  

The plight of the transgendered then fed into the media’s obsession – and I do believe that is the right word – with bullying. Kids who are different in any way often get bullied by other kids.  Again, for some strange reason, the media perceives this as something new.   

Please do not misunderstand me on the problems transgender people face. Or about bullying for that matter.  There are very real issues the people who feel transgendered face every day and my heart goes out to them. There have always been those – regardless of whether their sexual orientation is straight,  gay, or bi – who  felt emotionally and intellectually more like women than men, and more like men than women, in spite  of the genitalia they were born with.  They’ve had to put up with a lot of knuckleheads and prejudice from both sexes.  I don’t envy them at all.    

From what I’ve read, transgender has less to do with genitalia than mindset.  It also apparently has little to do with sexual orientation. 

Bruce/Caitlyn Jenner has made a big deal of this, claiming that he – or now she, as she prefers – is not gay by any means.  She remains sexually attracted to women, not men.  So while she’s had a lot of work done to convert her appearance into the woman she feels she’s always been deep inside, I don’t think she’s made the big leap to surgical gender reassignment.   

Confused?  Why of course you are. That’s the point the media is driving at. 

Well, after wallowing in the shock factor they hoped to have by presenting a former All-American Male Olympic Hero who decided to become a woman, at least in appearance.

Don’t be deceived by the media’s faked compassion about the bravery of Jenner to appear on Vogue’s cover as a woman.  As one media critic said, Jenner did break new ground with Vogue – it was the first time in anybody’s memory, perhaps ever, that Vogue put a woman over 60 on its cover.    

Vogue put Jenner on the cover to sell magazines, plain and simple. It sold a helluva a lot of magazines.  They weren’t making a statement or promoting what Jenner did, or even trying to engender sympathy for transgender people.  It was just business.

Now I am sure Jenner feels like she made a statement. I’m sure she feels relief that it’s all out in the open now, but, in truth, the pending transformation hasn’t been a big secret. The media has been dragging this story around for so long not because it’s something that’s never happened before, or particularly important, but it’s the weird intersection of the train wreck of the Kardashians and the shock factor of seeing Bruce Jenner as a woman.   

Reality TV meets the bearded lady in the circus sideshow, in other words.

So excuse me if I don’t care. 

Look, the plight of the transgendered is very real.  I’m sure it’s extraordinarily difficult to deal with … and I have enormous sympathy for the folks who have to live their lives in what they truly believe is the wrong body. I can’t imagine the Hell it must be like at times. Especially when they are children trying to figure a lot of other stuff out at the same time.        

But let’s also be realistic.  Only about 0.3% of U.S. adults are considered transgendered.  That’s three-tenths of one-percent of adults.  Assuming the 0.3% number is valid, in a group of 100,000 American adults there could be 300 people who might think they are transgendered.

I’m happy Jenner is happy. I’m happy Vogue made a lot of money on Jenner’s transformation. But to think this is somehow a turning point in history is ridiculous. It wouldn’t even be talked about if it were someone much less famous than Jenner.   

And to make a big deal about Jenner’s “bravery”  is as superficial as the hair, clothes and makeup that helped make Jenner appear 30 years younger than she is. 

Jenner was already a publicity whore by virtue of being a part of the Kardashian freak show. This just steps it up a notch. She’s probably negotiating a swimsuit issue as we speak, or maybe she’ll follow Kim’s example and leak a sex video.

I won’t be interested in seeing either. 

Let’s all move on.