Provocative piece in The New York Time’s Sunday Review by journalist, filmmaker and former women’s studies professor Elinor Burkett, who, while sympathetic to transgendered women like Caitlyn Jenner, doesn’t want them to co-opt her experience of womanhood.
“…As much as I recognize and endorse the right of men to throw off the mantle of maleness, they cannot stake their claim to dignity as transgender people by trampling on mine as a woman,” Burkett writes in “What Makes A Woman?”
For her, the answer to that question takes a lot more than the nail polish Jenner referred to in her interview with Diane Sawyer on ABC’s “20/20.”
The essay earned Burkett the sobriquet “crotchety” and brought me back to the days of my youth when feminists were often considered humorless battle-axes who despised Marilyn Monroe. ...
Read more
Read MoreMuch of what has been written and said about Bruce Jenner coming out as a transgendered woman has been derisive and ignorant, the two qualities usually going hand-in-hand. Watching his interview with Diane Sawyer on ABC’s “20/20,” I could only feel sadness. It must be terrible to spend your whole life thinking it’s wrong to be yourself.
The self is much under siege nowadays, no doubt as a backlash to our cult of narcissism. The self must be sacrificed to the good of others – critics say. Never mind that others can become a kind of tyranny that crushes the individual spirit.
I’m no libertarian, but you cannot sacrifice what you do not possess. Self-sacrifice implies a self to sacrifice. I thought the single most illuminating moment in the interview was the one in which Jenner said that stepdaughter Kim Kardashian reached out to him in support after her husband, Kanye West, told her that unless you’re happy in yourself it doesn’t matter how wonderful your wife and child are. ...
Read more
Read MoreHow great was it to see Jared Leto – who left Hollywood to front a band – win the Best Supporting Oscar for his role as a transgender prostitute in “Dallas Buyers Club”? (Actually, the win was sort of a no-brainer. Hollywood loves to reward actors who transform themselves and stories that have their hearts in the right place.)
Leto seems to have his in the right place, too. Of course, there was plenty of Internet snark about his acceptance speech, in which he told the “dreamers” in Ukraine and Venezuela that we were thinking of them. (Apparently, actors aren’t allowed to be human.) I came late to his speech, but I’m glad I caught the end: "This is for the 36 million people out there who have lost the battle to AIDS.” He concluded, “To those of you who have felt injustice because of who you love and who you are, I stand here with you and for you.”’
As he left the stage, host Ellen DeGeneres shook her head and said, “Beautiful.”’
Read more...
Read More