June 05--I'm all for Caitlyn Jenner living her truth, as I believe the saying goes.
Not only for her sake but for the sake of those who've been, perhaps, too slow to get their minds around transgenderism. It's real, not a whim or fetish, and those who experience it deserve understanding, compassion and, of course, equal treatment under the law.
You don't have to "get" it. I, for one, have a hard time imagining what it feels like to be a woman living in a man's body as I have no conscious feeling of being a man living in a man's body.
You just have to get right with it. Do your best to use everyone's pronouns of choice and don't grumble or sneer.
That said, I think Caitlyn was the wrong name for her to adopt.
Bruce Jenner, former Olympic superstar, was born in 1949.
Every woman or girl you know named Caitlyn was almost certainly born after 1980 -- it reached its peak of popularity in 2000 when it was the 118th most popular name for baby girls, according to Social Security Administration data, and the similar "Kaitlyn" hit No. 30.
When she was born, Jenner's parents chose Bruce, the 26th most popular name for boys in 1949. The 26th most popular name for girls that year was Joyce. As long as Jenner is course-correcting, Joyce, Linda, Mary, Barbara, Susan, Nancy, Diane, Margaret or others in the top 25 would have been more generationally correct choices.
Also, I can't help but feel as though Jenner's been less than candid with us as she plays the publicity game. During a two-hour ABC-TV interview with Diane Sawyer that aired April 24, Jenner wanted to be known as Bruce and expressed a preference for masculine pronouns.
Magazine deadlines and cover-photo schedules being what they are, it seems highly unlikely that the idea for and story behind Vanity Fair's blockbuster "Call Me Caitlyn" cover that came out Monday hatched after that interview.
Jenner seems to be rolling out her transformation in ways to maximize attention for "I Am Cait," the eight-part reality show that debuts next month on the E! network. She's hardly alone in carefully commodifying her struggles, but I can't help feeling a bit played.
Go Cavs!
There are good reasons to root for the Golden State Warriors, who are up 1-0 over the Cleveland Cavaliers in the best-of-seven NBA Finals. The Warriors are a great passing team; they feature the league's astonishing MVP, Stephen Curry; they are coached by former Bull Steve Kerr; and they haven't won a championship in 40 years. The Cavaliers feature LeBron James, one of the most dominant players in history, yet a whiner.
But think of the fans! Think of Cleveland! Not only have the Cavaliers never won the NBA championship in their 45-year history, but no team from the city has won a major sports title since 1964, when the Browns upset the Baltimore Colts in the pre-Super Bowl NFL Championship Game.
Meanwhile, sports fans in the San Francisco Bay Area, where the Warriors play their home games, have enjoyed 14 titles -- seven Super Bowl victories and seven World Series victories. Plus they live in the Bay Area, where my eldest son is and which I can enviously attest is as close as the U.S. comes to a metropolitan paradise.
So I'm pity-rooting for Cleveland, if not James and the Cavaliers, and urge all Midwesterners with hearts larger than caraway seeds to do the same.
Really, Willie?
So Chicago businessman Willie Wilson formally announced Monday that he's running for president of the United States. The declaration came just three weeks after Wilson formed an exploratory committee to assess his chances, and I'm dying to know what the members of that committee told him after their cursory look at the lay of the land:
Yes, you may have finished third in Chicago's recent mayoral race with an anemic 10.7 percent of the vote, and you may have offered a set of naive and fundamentally unserious policy prescriptions, but you do have millions of dollars to spend on a campaign, so ... on to Iowa!
Wednesday he was in Davenport, stumping for support in the caucuses early next year and promising, "I'm going to run as a regular human being."
This doesn't look like simple vanity to me, it looks like exploitation.
On the download: The Mincing Rascals
Tribune Editorial Board member Kristen McQueary and I have differing views on the battle between Republican Gov. Bruce Rauner and the Democrats who control the Illinois General Assembly, though we manage to express them in more civilized fashion than our solons in the Springfield sandbox.
Our contrasting opinions are given a vigorous airing in this week's episode of "The Mincing Rascals," a WGN-plus podcast featuring newsman Steve Bertrand and talk-show host John Williams. It's a weekly chat/wrangle about the top stories in the news, and takes its name from the strange insult lobbed last year by the Global Times, a media outlet in China close to the ruling Communist Party: "Regarding the issue of network security, the U.S. is such a mincing rascal that we must stop developing any illusions about it."
Subscribe via iTunes and leave a comment telling Kristen how very wrong she is.
Re: Tweets
For the first time, the winner of the Change of Subject Tweet of the Week online poll is a sentence fragment: "A man reading a thesaurus saunters into a tavern ..." by ?@IgotsSmarts.
My only quibble with this half-liner is that it's been a decade or more since I've seen anyone actually holding a printed thesaurus -- a dictionary of synonyms and antonyms used by writers groping for just the right word. Online versions and versions embedded into composition programs have made bound copies obsolete, outmoded, anachronistic, passe.
Get a heads up when the next Tweet of the Week poll posts by subscribing to the free Change of Subject email newsletter. Go to chicagotribune.com/newsletters or write me at ericzorn@gmail.com to be added to the list.
Post comments on this column at chicagotribune.com/zorn or pepper me with 140-character zingers on Twitter, @EricZorn
