So, Yur a Chick Now...

Peggy Drexler at CNN, writing about Caitlyn Jenner’s big, splashy Vanity Fair debut relayed a friend’s comment:

"Sadly, this is probably the only way that (VF editor) Graydon Carter would ever agree to put a woman in her sixties on the cover of Vanity Fair."

Uh, yup. Welcome to post middle age womanhood Caitlyn. We're only fabulous, apparently, if we're youthfully gorgeous. Granted, if you cure cancer AND look model beautiful too, you may get another cover. Or, hey, run for president. Hell’s every other damn Republican seems to have joined the race, why not you too?

I don’t understand, can’t wrap my brain around how she can be a Republican. How can she support and vote for candidates who see her as an abomination and embarrassment.

Mind you, there are folks on the “right” who are heralding her VF cover, her formal announcement. Amanda Muñoz at Hot Air feels there are important lessons to be taken from all this:

Lesson number one being that conservatives are all shapes and sizes, and the movement is changing (for the better) whether or not the party keeps pace – or even realizes it, for that matter.

Um, Amanda, your party's changing alrighty but most def NOT in a good way. With the ascendance of the Tea Party—the natural child of Gingrich's contract on America—Republicans have fully donned the mantle of humanity-free, greedheaded, delusional, corporate destructiveness.

Rand Paul had no comment on Ms. Jenner.

Huckabee said he wished he “could've identified as female in high school gym.” Yeah, that's a real knee-slapper you fossilized miscreant.

That toad brained, Jesus abuser should really, truly, honestly just sit the fuck down and shut up. You're not even vaguely amusing, you stupid pile of rat excrement. Oily slime sluices off him like french fries emerging from a McDonald’s deep fryer.

Though Mister Frothy Slimy Lube Mix/Santorum made sure to point out that “we have to look at it in a way that is compassionate and respectful of everybody,” he made sure to add that his anti LGBT condemnations and policy plans (should he EVER be elected again—Bast spare us!) still hold solid.

Of course.

Back in my pressroom management days, I worked with a black man and a gay man who were both solidly Republican. I could never understand how they could possibly be right wing. They were each argumentative sorts too. Loved nothing better than a big dust up over politics. No thank you.

Michael Dillon

Betty Cowell

Christine Jorgenson is thought of as the first person to have the surgery to make her body match her spirit and soul.

George Jorgensen, a quiet New Yorker, shocked a nation by returning from a trip to Denmark transformed into the glamorous Christine

Before Christine though, there was Laurence Michael Dillon and Roberta Cowell.

"Betty" Cowell was the first known person in Britain, and among the first in the world, to undergo pioneering gender-reassignment surgery, in 1948, before more famous cases such as April Ashley and Christine Jorgensen. Before the war, as Bob, she (Cowell herself joked in her autobiography that one of the trickiest parts of undergoing gender reassignment was knowing which pronoun to use) had been a racing driver, competing at Brooklands in Surrey and in the Belgian Grand Prix. Later, Cowell became a fighter pilot, flying Tiger Moths and Spitfires. When her plane was shot down, she was captured and interned in Stalag Luft I.

Wow, fascinating!

One commonality amongst these folks is wealth. They all came from financially comfortable childhood homes—parents who were doctors (Jenner’s father was a tree surgeon). I wonder what life's like for someone who, like them, was born with the wrong kit but no big bucks to have the edits made. I'd like to read their stories.