Bruce/Caitlyn Jenner And Media Manipulation

The Jenner media campaign has been quite impressive. Having signed a contract with the Creative Arts Agency (CAA), Jenner has been in the public eye almost non-stop since the beginning of April.

For several weeks we heard of a coming, groundbreaking Diane Sawyer interview with Jenner—a tell-all to end all tell-alls. The promotion was unparalleled for a two-hour network TV special that didn’t involve war, politics, national security, an election, a sports figure, or a celebrity currently touring, performing, or producing (although his involvement with the Kardashians has kept him in a spotlight of sorts).

At least two and a half weeks before the interview, promo spots turned up all over the place. News anchors discussed the coming show. Speculation abounded regarding the big secret Jenner would reveal.

At last the day came, and to few people’s surprise, the “secret” Bruce revealed was that he believes himself to be a woman.

So that was done.

Or was it?

Not really.

Next was the a two-part special titled Keeping Up with the Kardashians: About Bruce which aired in May and received network news coverage. Then in June, Bruce revealed his female identity, choosing the name Caitlyn and changing to the use of female pronouns in relation to herself.

A scant two days later came the Vanity Fair cover revealing sixty-five year-old Caitlyn Jenner posed in a woman’s undergarment (and looking like anything but a sixty-five year old). Of course the nightly news led with the story. The next night there was more Jenner news—she revealed the first trailer of her highly-anticipated docu-series I Am Cait. Somewhere in there the news also came out that she’s been announced as the Arthur Ashe Courage Award recipient for this year’s ESPYS and which will be presented in July.

Last night, I believe it was, the news broke that perhaps Caitlyn Jenner would not receive the same treatment in her country club now that she’s a woman, implying that men are given perks women don’t enjoy. So apparently, the transgender cause is going to be hooked to the feminist cause.

Don’t expect the Jenner news to simmer down any time soon. Expect a book deal soon, and watch for product endorsements.

Before all the hoopla started, and while still answering to Bruce, she made it clear, through a source that she “wants this to be taken seriously so that [his situation] can have the most positive impact on society’s perception of the transgender community.”

As one pop culture site reported

The 65-year-old has been very open about how she hopes exposing her journey to the public will help other transgender people feel less alone, and to lower the high rate of suicide attempts within the population.

In other words, selling Caitlyn Jenner to the public is by design—a very good design, apparently, since newscasters on all the network shows I’ve seen have only positive things to say about “such courage.”

So many thoughts go through my head in regard to this on-going story. I’d even call it a tragedy. Jenner has suffered, apparently for decades, with gender identity disorder (GID) or gender dysphoria. According to Wikipedia this is

the formal diagnosis used by psychologists and physicians to describe people who experience significant dysphoria (discontent) with the sex and gender they were assigned at birth. (emphasis mine)

In one of the clips for the docu-series, I believe, someone says to Caitlyn, “I miss Bruce,” and she answers, “Bruce hasn’t gone anywhere.”

Apparently not, since reportedly the outward changes have not included “sex reassignment surgery.” Caitlyn has benefited from hormones that Bruce took as far back as the 1980s, as well as facial plastic surgery (and breast implants?), but not an actual reconstruction of genitalia.

But she feels like a woman.

So which is true—the physiology that is the kind of stuff science usually requires (male genitalia, a Y chromosome, male muscular structure, and so on) or how she feels? Why is the biology wrong and the emotions right?

Are emotions oh-so-reliable that we can’t question a person’s choice when they announce they feel this way or that? At one point Bruce felt enough like a man to play football on a men’s team, compete for a spot on the men’s Olympic team, win a gold medal in the men’s decathlon, marry a woman—well, actually three different women—and father children.

To this day, Caitlyn says she’s never been attracted to a man (which doesn’t sound like the women I know), and considers herself asexual.

In truth, our culture, with the kinds of media orchestrated focus on gender issues, is redefining, not just marriage, but what it means to be a man or a woman. How can a man act as God intends him to act or how can a woman act as God intends her to act, when we’re scrambling to figure out whether we agree with the gender “we were assigned” at birth?

In contrast, God was not ambiguous about gender:

God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them. God blessed them; and God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply. (Gen. 1:27-28a)

Something else this whole spectacle has made me think: this transgender movement seems to depend on having money. What would Caitlyn be without her hormone therapy and cosmetic surgery? How many transgender people live in developing countries where they don’t have the luxury to reconsider the gender “assigned to them” at birth? Where they can’t afford to get drugs that change their chemical make up? Where there is no subsequent “evidence” that suggests GID has physical and not merely psychological causes? If this were true, where are the transgender people in the poorer countries of the world? Where are the transgender Huaorani or the transgender K’iche’? Maybe they exist but simply don’t have the spotlight Catilyn Jenner has.

But I suspect our western culture has a greater percentage of discontented people when it comes to gender. If you think about it, how would Bruce Jenner have known what it feels like to be a woman—so much so that he believes he actually is a woman inside? He has no basis of comparison. He knows what it feels like to be a man, but he only knew what it felt like to be a cross-dresser, not an actual woman. He still doesn’t know since he has kept that part of his anatomy that women don’t share with men.

Is there any more evidence we need to validate the truth claims of the Bible regarding our increasing propensity to call right, wrong; up, down; good, evil? God made men and women and called them good. Our sinful society says, the “assigned gender” might not be the real one. On whose authority? Who gets to say? Well, apparently Bruce/Caitlyn—or any other person who wants to say what God made isn’t good, and they’d like to remake it as they see fit.