02 June 2015

Bruce Jenner's Mental Transformation

Vanity Fair
Former Olympian Bruce Jenner graces the July Vanity Fair cover and he wants everyone to call him Caitlyn Jenner.

Famed photographer Annie Leibovitz (the woman behind Kim Kardashian and Kanye West's Vogue cover) shot the first portraits of Caitlyn earlier this month at his Malibu home. And since it was shot by Leibovitz, it is expected that extensive editing was made to make the pictures appealing.

However, many find it distasteful. Online discussions were peppered with negative comments about the decision of Jenner to undergo an operation when nothing is wrong in the first place. In short, to many netizens, Jenner is just a man playing dress up in a really expensive costume.

Biology just doesn't work the way some people wish it did. Jenner's chromosomes are those of a man, all the hormone injections, surgical augmentations, and psychological tricks in the world won't change that (although who knows in the future if this will be possible).

Nevertheless it is an insult to the intelligence of anyone with a basic biology background to insist that this person is now a biological female. Unfortunately, not everyone is aware of this very obvious fact, especially Jenner.

"If I was lying on my deathbed and I had kept this secret and never ever did anything about it, I would be lying there saying, 'You just blew your entire life,'" Jenner, 65, tells the magazine.

Apparently, Jenner is overwhelming relying on his emotion rather than rational thought. If a person had surgery to look like a dolphin would everyone him like one? And no, this example isn't that different.

As a biological organism human beings are not able to spontaneously switch sexes like some amphibian and insect species. There are grey areas (chimerism etc.) that do exist but they are rare, and Jenner is not one of these.

At his age, the man is probably suffering from mental illness. Everyone should feel sorry for him, but this shouldn't be encouraged or publicized as being normal adult behavior when it is clearly the product of mental illness. This is like accepting the invisible friends that lots of schizophrenic persons relate to as being real simply because they insist that they are.