Is There Some Quota?

My daughter now shares a name (complete with peculiar spelling: Caitlyn) with the most famous transgender person in the world.  Over the past few days the interweb has been bristling with the Vanity Fair cover featuring Caitlyn Jenner, who was formerly Bruce Jenner.  I'm going to leave the theological implications of transgender people alone for the moment (maybe forever, because I'm sure I'm not qualified to speak about them), and talk about the reaction.

For the most part, I feel like our society has been less mean-spirited about this particular thing than one might have expected.  There are trolls to be sure, but for the most part people have sort of noted how courageous it is for her to have gone through this process in the public eye.  Bruce Jenner was a fairly common face in my childhood, being a successful Olympic athlete, to this day probably one of just a handful of track and field people that I would recognize on the street (at least before the changes).  Lately he was more infamous as part of the Kardashian side show than any thing else, but fame and infamy have sort of blended together in the internet age.  Now Caitlyn Jenner has become something altogether different.  She is a sign of a very significant shift in society with regards to LGBT people.  She is not a pioneer, but she is a figurehead, a recognizable public example of something that is shrouded in pain, shame and misunderstanding.

No matter what your opinion about transgender people is, you have to acknowledge that this moment is significant.  But it is still fraught with fear and misunderstanding for many.

One of the more common ones, is a basic logical fallacy called false equivocation.  People put up angry or semi-angry posts about some really brave person, usually a soldier or a firefighter, and say that they should be honored by society more so than Caitlyn Jenner.  But that assumes that we don't honor the courage of soldiers and such, but we do, maybe not as much as they deserve, but we do that all the time, we have days off and parades and fireworks.  Up until now though, we have done very little for people who are transgender, in fact, we mostly do rather the opposite.

Except for a few unfortunate incidents in the Vietnam era, our veterans and soldiers are treated with respect and honor.  We could certainly do more in terms of tangible support, but I certainly don't feel that they're disrespected by the masses, except maybe in the deluded minds of paranoid patriots. The pacifists I know do not despise soldiers, even if they do object to the very concept of violence and war.  Which is an important standard to apply in this case too.

Even if you don't understand what makes someone transgender, even if the whole idea gives you a little bit of the shivers, that shouldn't stop you from respecting the courage of a human being who had to face the conviction that they were trapped in the wrong body, and do it in the public eye.

That courage does not detract from the courage of a Marine wounded in combat or a cop who stopped a crime in progress or a firefighter who rescued a baby from a burning building.  They are all in fact brave.  I'm always in favor of paying attention to those moments when human beings live up to our potential instead of down to the lowest common denominator.  Let's honor people who do brave things, period.

I think that, in a society that values freedom, it should do all those people who sacrifice for that freedom proud to see our society living up to our own standards of tolerance and understanding, because we're not always so good at that.