Caitlyn Jenner benefits from status other transgenders don't enjoy

I’m not sure how to take this whole Bruce Jenner, now Caitlyn Jenner, thing.

I won’t recap how a former 1976 Olympic male decathlon gold medallist became a 2015 female talk show and magazine personality. You’d truly have to have returned from a desert island to not know the story.

I never gave the transgender/gender change subject much thought until last fall when the Cheney school board considered changes to its non-discrimination policy. The new language recommended by the Washington State School Directors Association proposed inclusive approaches for transgender students such as confidential health and education information, sports and physical education and access to restroom and locker room facilities.

There was plenty of public outcry about the policy at the board’s Nov. 12 meeting, especially the restroom and locker room provisions. Eventually, the board tabled the changes, and could bring them up at a later date.

Originally I had intended to do a story about the issue. I know something about gender issues as I have a brother who is gay and several gay friends, but virtually nothing about transgender individuals.

So, I contacted someone I knew had answers — my friend and Eastern Washington University Pride Center Director Sandra Williams. She said my story timing was “interesting” as that week, Nov. 17-21, was national Gender Awareness Week, and the Pride Center was hosting daily activities.

The only event my schedule allowed was Thursday’s “International Transgender Day of Remembrance,” with an hour-long program at Showalter Hall memorializing individuals killed as a result of anti-transgender violence, and bringing attention to the continued violence endured by the transgender community.

It was a sobering experience.

Before the program began, Williams and several students handed out small slips of paper with information, and picture if available, about a murdered transgender individual.

The program started with each individual’s name and picture projected onto a large screen at the front of the lower level lecture hall, and if that was the person whose paper you possessed, you were to rise and read it aloud.

Mine was second, and although we returned the pieces to Sandy, it wasn’t hard to remember which one it was after checking the Transgender Day of Remembrance website. I stood and read into the silent room: “Rosa Ribut (Jon Sayh Ribut), 35 years old, cause of death: blunt force trauma, location of death: Edmonton, Alberta, Canada; date of death: Nov. 23, 2013.”

In all about 20 names were read, and afterwards a discussion followed. And while the discussion was good, it was the names and manner of death that carried the point.

Blunt force trauma. Stabbed and/or shot multiple times. Dismembered. Burned alive. Dead and dying individuals dumped somewhere. Beaten and then stoned to death. Shot, stabbed and dragged.

Many of these murders were in other countries, a number in Brazil, but several in the U.S. Most victims were in their 20s and 30s, but several were in their 50s. One was 8 years old, murdered by his father because he wouldn’t cut his hair, liked women’s clothes and liked to dance.

Most all of the murders were done close, facing the victim — blows to the face and head, stab and gunshot wounds to the chest, throats sadistically slashed.

This is deeply personal violence. As you read or listened to the killings, the perpetrators anger and rage was easily evident, likely and unfortunately stoked to an offended inferno by religious faith and fervor.

True, these are extreme cases, but they are extremes that carry influence over those who stay in the shadows, fearful of revealing to an unsympathetic and mostly intolerant world their true nature.

When you view the Jenner case in the light of what really happens to transgender individuals, it becomes a mockery, an insult and a monument to our ignorance. It’s about celebrity, not celebration.

Will Jenner’s case be a watershed in our understanding of gender identification, doing for transgender individuals what the “coming out of the closet” by other celebrities did for gays? Will we began to be more understanding and accepting?

I hope so, but I fear likely not, at least not for a while.

Reality is much more grim.

John McCallum can be reached at [email protected].