Caitlyn Jenner is back, like a fresh batch of hemorrhoids

So there I was in 2015, sitting in Bart’s Pub across a table from my dear friend Bruce and, without prodding, he offered a high hosanna to one of the most ballyhooed people on our Big Blue Orb.

“Caitlyn Jenner rocks,” Bruce said.

At the time, Jenner had recently appeared as a newly minted, very air-brushed transgender female on the cover of Vanity Fair, and her soon-to-be-doomed self-opus, I Am Cait, was a recent arrival to our flatscreens, airing on E! Channel.

I winced and scoffed.

“Nobody will be talking about Caitlyn Jenner two years from now,” I told Bruce.

Sure enough, the Homage to Herself became a ratings Hindenburg, with I Am Cait plummeting from 2.7 million sets of eyeballs at the outset to less than 500,000 by the time someone at E! Channel had the good sense to mercifully pull the plug on the 10-months, two-seasons run.

There was no mystery why viewers tuned her out: The High Priestess in the Cult of Cait was utterly unlikable.

Although vowing to “reshape the landscape” and “change the world,” Kitty Cait was a rude, abrasive, aggressive, interruptive, cruel and power-addictive attention hog. She had the warm-and-fuzzy qualities of a desert cactus plant, and was hopelessly ill-informed on transgender reality.

Kitty Cait spent the majority of her time flouncing about the United States—Road trip, girls!—with her faithful flock of fawning followers, and when she and the Trans Troop weren’t toodling around on dirt bikes, drinking wine, roller skating, drinking wine, swimming, drinking more wine, and kissing Boy George’s ring finger, Kitty Cait could be found cooing over Candis Cayne or in a clothes closet the size of Manhattan, fretting over what to wear for a sleepover at Candis’ abode. Or she might have been bragging about the cost of her store-bought, trophy tits.

“What a responsibility I have towards this community. Am I going to do everything right? Am I going to say the right things? Do I project the right image? My mind is just spinning with thoughts. I just hope I get it right…I hope I get it right…ya,” the transgender diva said with much theatrical emphasis in Episode 1, Season 1.

In another episode, she insisted on using her dead name, Bruce, in order to curry favor with a fancy-schmancy Los Angeles golf club. So, she was a she unless being a she prevented her from sharing oxygen with the beautiful people, in which case she would revert to being good, ol’ Bruce Jenner, Olympic champion. Such a pesky inconvenience.

All the while, I would watch and cringe, wondering to myself, “Do people think all transgender women are such total ditzes and mean-spirited bitches?”

But, like her self-opus, Jenner vanished from our consciousness, unless we happened to glance at the cover of one of the trash/gossip mags in the supermarket checkout line and learn that another of the Jenner/Kardashian brood had abandoned her.

Alas, Caitlyn is back, like a fresh batch of hemorrhoids, and she wants to govern all the good people of California.

One presumes that includes transgender girls, although Governor Wannabe doesn’t want to see them running, jumping, throwing, skipping rope or playing rock-scissors-paper with “real” females. Under a Caitlyn Jenner administration, trans girls in the Golden State would be expected to stay in their own special lane, which would reduce them to non-female lesser-thans.

We know this to be true because a TMZ snoop caught up with Governor Wannabe during a Saturday morning coffee run, and he probed her brain pan for nuggets of insight.

“This is a question of fairness, that’s why I oppose biological boys who are trans competing in girls sports in school,” Jenner said while shooing her black lab into the back seat of an SUV. “It just isn’t fair, and we have to protect girls sports in our schools.”

The temptation is to suggest that if transgender girls are still “biological boys” then it surely follows that the transgender Caitlyn Jenner is still the biological Bruce Jenner, no matter how pricey the store-bought boobs, the extensive face-sculpting and whatever other slicing and dicing has been performed on the former Olympic champion’s body.

But we don’t want to go there because it would be insulting, improper and incorrect.

Suffice to say, Jenner’s take on transgender girls in sports is deeply disturbing, demeaning and hurtful, but not at all surprising given her odious behavior and dreadful talking points on I Am Cait.

I suppose it might win her some votes and friends among Republicans in the California gubernatorial race—Piers Morgan has already given her sound bite his official okie-dokie—but stepping on the little people is one sad way of going about your business.

I’d say Jenner has betrayed the transgender community, except I don’t believe she has ever truly been part of it.

I Am Cait: There was something important to say, but Caitlyn Jenner was too busy playing dress up to say it

The good news is, Caitlyn Jenner cranked up the volume on the transgender conversation.

patti dawn swansson

The bad news is, Caitlyn Jenner cranked up the volume on the transgender conversation.

I mean, before Jenner’s televised chin wag with Diane Sawyer, her Vanity Fair cover shot and her cable TV homage to herself, I Am Cait, the rest of the world basically ignored us. Few knew we even existed. And now? They see us as circus bears riding a bike and won’t let us use the washroom.

Well done, girly.

But, hey, that’s what Kitty Cait promised, isn’t it? She vowed to use her white privilege, power and influence to “reshape the landscape of how transgender people are viewed and treated.” So, unless a girl has to take a pee in, say, Charlotte, N.C., or Medicine Hat, Alta., it’s mission accomplished.

Right about now, you might be thinking that you’re in for a bit of Caitlyn Jenner bashing. You’re right. And I’m not typing with a pair of kid gloves on.

I’m rather pleased that E! network has pulled the plug on I Am Cait after a two-season run, because it was a toxic, insulting misrepresentation of the transgender life. Kitty Cait doesn’t have a clue how I feel, nor the other 1-1.5 million trans individuals in North America who, unlike the High Priestess in the Cult of Cait, do not stir every morning from a bed in a $3.5 million Malibu mansion. A park bench, perhaps. But a mansion, no.

I don’t begrudge Kitty Cait her wherewithal, estimated at $100 million and largely built on the back of Bruce, her former Olympic decathlon champion self. It’s the flaunting of her good fortune that rankles. It’s her single-minded focus on glam gowns and suitable shades of lipstick while the rest of us are preoccupied with unique challenges completely foreign to her. You know, like wondering what public toilet we cannot pee in.

No doubt that unrelatability is among the reasons viewers abandoned I Am Cait. I mean, if she can’t find common ground with every-day transgender folk, how is it possible that a connection with cis folk can exist?

Thus, few will miss I Am Cait and its narcissistic, vacuous star because few were watching.

Jenner’s premiere attracted 2.7 million pairs of eyeballs in 2015, and 2 million viewers had bolted by the time Season 2 arrived on our flatscreens. It got worse. One episode drew an audience of 480,000, which, in the world of television ratings, means you are being seen by, well, nobody.

So what happened? Well, it’s like the old Moscow Circus: People were curious to see a bear ride a bike, skip a rope or ice skate. And that’s what Caitlyn Jenner was to so many people—a novelty act. She was the bear riding the bike, the only difference being the bear wasn’t allowed to speak while Kitty Cait coughed up enough hair balls to knit a new designer outfit.

Kitty Cait and part of her trans posse (drinking wine, of course).

I confess that I limited my intake of the second go-round of I Am Cait earlier this year.  It’s my understanding through conversation and research, however, that it was every bit the cringe-worthy train wreck that was her first-year frolic with her trans posse of paid BFFs in 2015, which I gave a test drive based on the naive notion that she might actually deliver something of substance on behalf of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and, most important, transgender collective. Alas, Kitty Cait spent the majority of her time flouncing about the United States—“Road trip, girls!”—with her faithful flock of fawning followers, and when she and her trans gal pals weren’t toodling around on dirt bikes, drinking wine, roller skating, drinking wine, swimming, drinking more wine, and kissing Boy George’s ring finger, Cait could be found cooing over Candis Cayne or in a clothes closet the size of Manhattan, fretting over what to wear for a sleepover at Candis’s abode. Or she might have been bragging about the cost of her store-bought, trophy tits.

At different times, Kitty Cait was rude, abrasive, aggressive, interruptive, cruel, power addictive and hopelessly ill-informed on transgender reality. She displayed an insatiable hunger for attention. Her likability quotient was the only thing lower than her ratings.

In one episode, she insisted on using her dead name, Bruce, in order to curry favor with a fancy-schmancy golf club. That’s where she lost me. Totally.

All the while, I would watch and shudder, wondering to myself, “Do people think all transgender women are such total ditzes and mean-spirited bitches?”

On occasion, the High Priestess and her Caitlettes would engage in meaningful dialogue about transgender life, whereby one of them spilled on the horrors of being mocked, maligned and ridiculed by doctors, lawyers, butchers, bakers and candlestick makers. Kitty Cait then would invariably punctuate those true stories of trans torment by gasping, “That actually happened to you? Really?”

Those moments of earnest, revealing and sometimes emotional chit-chat were, I assume, designed to inform and educate. Unfortunately, they were as fleeting as Jenner’s attention span, because there always seemed to be a new garment (usually a gift from a world-renowned seamstress) she simply had to drape over her 6-feet-2 frame.

Whatever message I Am Cait proposed to deliver was lost in multiple layers of designer gowns, lip gloss and a centrepiece whose mind, vis-a-vis transgender issues, is a vacant lot and whose mouth is a landmine.

It didn’t have to be that way.

 

Every day is Thanksgiving Day for me, thanks to my beautiful friends

We don’t celebrate Thanksgiving like our friends in the United States, where, as is evident with many things south of our shared border, there oft exists the brashness and bombast of Donald Trump in full harrumph.

patti dawn swansson

Turkey day stateside is punctuated by the pomp of parades in many of the nation’s most-populated burgs, with large bands of brass and baton-flinging, energetic youth marching through downtown arteries lined with happy faces and the wide-eyed wonder of cherubs. The Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade in Manhattan, televised nationally, would be the most notable of these numerous processions, which sometimes are conducted under the guise of a Santa Claus parade.

Given that U.S. Thanksgiving falls on the fourth Thursday of each November, it signals the commencement of the holdiday season leading to Christmas and New Year’s, hence the platform for loud salute.

In Canada, however, we tend to do Thanksgiving on the down low. It is more of a brief, relaxing and refreshing pause between the summer just past and the winter that lies in front of us. We roast our turkeys and, at the same time (for 99 per cent of residents in our vast, snow-bound land), we gird our loins for that very winter, which we know shall be harsh and present different challenges in different parts of the nation.

It is still early autumn here as we celebrate Thanksgiving in what most of us are convinced is the finest country on Mother Earth. It is my favorite time of the year. Cool, crisp, clean and colorful. And a time, I believe, for soft reflection and, for certain, thanks for our bounty.

For me, that means friends.

I do not know where I would be today if not for my dear ones. I truly do not know if I would be here at all. Friends have been my strength. In many ways, my salvation. They are, therefore I am.

This is a constant awareness of mine. It isn’t just a Thanksgiving Day thing. Rarely do I permit one day to give way to the next without offering silent acknowledgement that it is my friends—in reality, my family—who have provided me with the fortitude to forge on. They do so with their acceptance, their kindness, their caring and their love. That is my strength.

Indeed, I emphasized that very notion just last week while on retreat in my hometown of Winnipeg.

“I really respect you for what you’ve done,” a friend said during a 25^th anniversary celebration at the Toad In the Hole Pub in Osborne Village. “It must haven taken a lot of guts. I admire your courage. It takes a lot of courage just to live your life as you.”

“I’ll tell you what, Michael” I responded. “I don’t think of myself as courageous, but, yes, it does take a certain level of courage to come out and live as a transgender female. That’s inner courage. But that only gets you started. The real courage, the courage that allows you to carry on, is the outer courage that you receive from friends. That’s the courage you really need, the outer courage.”

That’s why every day is Thanksgiving Day for me.

I won’t have a turkey dinner today (eat a pizza, save a gobbler) and I’ll most likely spend it alone, but I am blessed with some of the finest trimmings in life. Their names are Cullen and Brian and Sean and Bruce and Terry and Helina and Attila and Beverley and Davey and Shannon and Stan and Robert and Michael and Paul and Vernon and Jude and Paul and Judy and Lucy and Nancy and Gordon and Bill and Mick and Emily and Kitty and Kevin and so many others, like the gang at the Toad and Bart’s in Victoria.

You’re beautiful. All of you. Thank you.