• NYTimes
• RNS Calling her by her name
• Dreher transabled
• TMZ
• Jessica Lang look alike
• Salon: deserves respect
• Matt Walsh: An Insult to Women
• The Civil Rights Transgender Fight
• For God So Loved Caitlyn Jenner
• WSJ on Trangender surgery isn’t the solution
• TGC
• The Christian Debate on Transgender Identity: Atlantic
• Caitlyn Jenner Calls the Question on Christian Anthropology Ryan Bell
• Damon Linker: Why Social Conservatives are freaking out over Cailtyn Jenner
• Douthat: the Liberalism of Adult Autonomy contra Linker
• NYTimes: The Price of Jenner Heroism HT. Dreher
• John Stewart welcomes Caitlyn Jenner to the sexist media shit show. Mother Jones
• Speculator: Icon and Cultural Fundamentalism
• Serbia as hub for trangender surgery 2012
• WSJ on John Hopkins no longer performing transgender surgeries
• Leithart First Things “How To Preach About Bruce”
• Weekly Standard Transgender Triumph
• Why the conservatives keep losing
• Why we care about Caitlyn and not Hillary
• Bronwyn Lea
• The Caitlyn Jenner of Catholicism
• The “Call Me” Trans Cover Phenom
• NYTimes: What Makes a woman?
• Linker: Jenner has played us all for suckers
• Will Wilkinson The Economist on Harold Bloom and Republican Candidates take on Caitlyn
• Douthat’s take on Bloom and Caitlyn
• Dreher on Wilkinson’s piece
• Father Robert Barron on Gnosticism
• Caitlyn Jenner imagines her father looking down from heaven

Quotes

Linker:

If you’re committed to an overarching (religious or philosophical) vision of human flourishing that precludes gender reassignment surgery, then an expression of disapproval and perhaps even disgust at the Vanity Fair cover would seem to be in order. But if you’ve left behind any such comprehensive morality of ends in favor of a morality of rights, then it’s hard to see what’s wrong with Jenner’s actions, or with the magazine in promoting them publicly on its cover. No one is harmed as a result, and the harm Bruce Jenner felt as a woman trapped in a man’s body has (one hopes) been alleviated by undergoing the surgical transformation into Caitlyn.

But of course many people who uphold a morality of rights go further than merely cheering on Caitlyn Jenner’s coming out as a woman. They want to protect her from the emotional harm of being judged, disapproved of, and treated as an object of disgust by those who persist in upholding a morality of ends. That’s where the gap between the two moralities becomes a chasm, since the morality of rights judges the very act of making a moral judgment in terms of a morality of ends to be harmful — and therefore an act of cruelty, injustice, and even evil.

Douthat

Similarly, there is still a general (though not universal) consensus that people who wish to amputate or otherwise re-forge part of their body are doing something dangerous and harmful, not just expressing their right to self-determination. But in the specific case of gender reassignment surgery, what once might have been seen as a harm, an act akin to mutilation, even within a rights-based moral framework is now accepted or extolled because it represents what the deepest, truest version of Bruce/Caitlyn Jenner wants. And that shift, like the shift on suicide, suggests that the defining characteristic of the advancing progressive view is not just a broad frame of rights and harms, but a particular stress on autonomy, the truth of the self, as the test for what constitutes a harm and when a right can legitimately be exercised.

Or to take another example, which Linker waves at but doesn’t really grapple with: The question of public vows and their permanence and meaning. A moral theory could be rights-based while also allowing for genuinely binding personal commitments, which would allow others to make a permanent rights-based or harm-based claim on you. A wife would be said to have a permanent right to her husband’s affections and support, for instance, because he had so vowed upon their wedding day. But while today’s liberal moral consensus does allow for a limited version of such claims, as Linker notes, around the specific question of adultery, that claim is emphatically not permanent or binding: Instead, it is strictly limited (and is still widely accepted, arguably, precisely because it is strictly limited) to sexual liaisons, presumably undertaken secretly (I’d actually be very curious to see a Gallup poll on open marriages), by a spouse who intends to remain within the marriage. If that same spouse wishes to simply leave outright, to be unbound again, to break her vow entirely, then the judgment diminishes and the only really “tricky” issue is the kids (about which more below). If you feel driven to cheat, a moral code that condemns adultery but not divorce implies, it’s better to just leave. The individual’s self-actualization can be constrained by vows and promises, but only provisionally; in the end, autonomy is still the trump.

But again, with the advance of social liberalism the balance between the rights of the child and the freedom of the parent has tipped in important ways toward adult autonomy, toward a view that children cannot reasonably make certain claims at the expense of their parents’ self-actualization and personal happiness. (With, of course, the self-justifying corollary that the kids will ultimately be better off if their parents have their own way.)

So once again, the common thread across these issues is not simply a broad morality of rights and harms and consent. It’s a particular definition of which rights matter most, which harms are meaningful and which are trumps, and whose consent is required to justify a particular decision. The current definitions advanced by social liberalism do not make individual autonomy the measure of all things; they do not simply instantiate a will to power or self-fulfillment. But they do treat adult autonomy as a morally-elevated good, and rate other possible rights and harm claims considerably lower as a consequence.

Losing Ground

Caitlyn Jenner’s benefit is concentrated — personalized (to Jenner). But the potential damage (maybe to our grand children’s generation?) is disperse and (in the minds of many) hypothetical. There’s also the problem of what’s called hyperbolic discounting — which means that consequences that won’t occur until a later time are granted less weight than immediate ones. (Note to social conservatives: Nobody really believes that two gay people getting married will in any way harm your marriage.)

Linker suckers

That’s exactly what Jenner is giving us — and she’s doing it masterfully, playing off America’s addiction to what Tocqueville called the “perpetual utterance of self-applause.” We love to feel good about ourselves. Conservatives satisfy the craving with gratuitous demonstrations of military prowess and unapologetic expressions of American exceptionalism. Liberals get it from grandiloquent displays of affirmation for the outsider — an affirmation that just so happens to demonstrate the affirming liberal’s own moral superiority.

Gays and lesbians have been the outsiders of choice for a couple of decades. But now, as they finally merge with the mainstream, the transgendered look to be the next marginalized group in line for liberal protection from harm and defense against judgment and exclusion. And here comes Caitlyn, right on cue, ready and eager to pose as a pin-up poster girl for the cause. That her image will also serve to advance her career in exhibitionist television isn’t so much a coincidence as the essence of what we’ve all experienced this week: the thoroughgoing commodification of one person’s struggle with gender identity.

Caitlyn’s Father

“I think eventually he would have come around. He would have never understood, he didn’t know anything – gay, trans, all that other stuff,” Jenner told the audience. “But I’m sure he’s looking down from heaven right now and saying, ‘Well, you’re doing a good job.’ “