We’ve come a long way to accepting transgender transitions because of the recent representation in social, entertainment and print media.
After years of feeling hidden behind a mask, Caitlyn Jenner has shed it in front the world in a wash of glitz and glamour in the most recent cover for Vanity Fair magazine.
The July cover was kept highly secret for months until its debut. Buzz Bissinger, a Pulitzer prize-winning journalist, wrote the concurrent article, spending hundreds of hours with Jenner throughout her transition.
It has been predicted that Jenner’s cover will easily surpass the magazine’s average of 193,000 sold covers over the last six months of 2014, and is likely to be included among its best sellers.
Vanity Fair handled this story with elegance and grace, treating the subject of the story with respect and a certain delicacy by discussing Jenner’s thoughts about moving forward from her debut to how she is being received by family while learning from women who have gone through the similar transitions.
Jenner is quoted to have compared her two-day shoot with Annie Liebovitz to winning the gold medal for decathlon at the 1976 Olympics.
“That was a good day, but the last couple of days were better. This shoot was about my life and who I am as a person,” Jenner said in the article. “It’s not about the fanfare, it’s not about people cheering in the stadium, it’s not about going down the street and everybody giving you ‘That a boy, Bruce,’ pat on the back, okay. This is about your life.”
Interviews like Jenner’s with Vanity Fair and Diane Sawyer and Laverne Cox’s with Time Magazine are important for anyone who may be experiencing or is considering reassignment surgery.
Someone seeing them on the cover of such high publications is given the hope and the freedom to be themselves, even if it may not be how they were born. These high-profile celebrities have opened the door for so many people to not fear change, but to embrace it.
Awareness of transgender people has been around for the past 60 years, beginning with Christine Jorgensen, a trans-woman who was the first person to be widely known in the United States for having sex reassignment surgery.
Representation of transgender people has also been visible in television and film for a decade with TV shows like “All My Children” and films like “Transamerica.” This sudden coverage started almost a decade ago with the public coming-out of two high-profile figures: City Manager of Largo, Florida Steve Stanton and Los Angeles Times sportswriter Mike Penner.
Presenting transgender feelings and stories with popular publications has opened the door to discuss transitioning and what that may mean for the person wanting to transition. It also shows cisgender people how to acknowledge sensitivity when someone they know is transitioning and no longer wishes to identify as strictly male or strictly female.
It is important to remain sensitive and open-minded, to call someone by their preferred name and preferred pronouns and not to pry about how they were born, because it is not who they are anymore.
So today, call her Caitlyn, and let her bravery to pose on the cover of a magazine shed some light on the strength of the transgender community.