An Open Letter To The P-G's Jennifer Graham On Caitlyn Jenner's ESPY Award

Hey, Jennie;

It's Dayvoe over at 2PJ.  Did you catch the ESPYs last night?  ABC News had a good story on the last part.


If you didn't catch it, it's really worth a watch.

If didn't see the speech in real time, Time has a transcript.

And if you don't have time to read the whole thing, here are some highlights:

All across this country, right now, all across the world, at this very moment, there are young people coming to terms with being transgender. They’re learning that they are different and they are trying to figure out how to handle that, on top of every other problem that a teenager has.

They’re getting bullied, they’re getting beaten up, they’re getting murdered and they’re committing suicide.

And then she (yes, SHE) offered up some data:

Just last month, the body of 17-year-old Mercedes Williamson, a transgender young woman of color, was found in a field in Mississippi stabbed to death. I also want to tell you about Sam Taub, a 15-year-old transgender young man from Bloomfield, Michigan. In early April, Sam took his own life. Now, Sam’s story haunts me in particular because his death came just a few days before ABC aired my interview with Diane Sawyer. Every time something like this happens, people wonder, ‘Could it have been different, if spotlighting this issue with more attention could have changed the way things happen?’ We’ll never know.

A few paragraphs later, Caitlyn said:

But this transition has been harder on me than anything I could imagine. And that’s the case for so many others besides me. For that reason alone, trans people deserve something vital. They deserve your respect. And from that respect comes a more compassionate community, a more empathetic society and a better world for all of us.

And then later:

It’s not just about one person, it’s about thousands of people. It’s not just about me, it’s about all of us accepting one another. We are all different. That’s not a bad thing, that’s a good thing.

Why am I pointing all this out?

Because about six weeks ago, you wrote this in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette:

Actually, it’s not fine for many Americans, who view gender dysphoria as a psychiatric disorder, not a laudable lifestyle choice. To them, the Annie Leibovitz depiction of a beguiling Caitlyn in a corset, legs coyly crossed, arms tucked behind her as if bound, is a Photoshopped finger in the face. Worse, they — unlike Mr. Jenner — are forbidden authenticity of response. Faced with the omnipresent image of a person who is female from the waist up, male from the belly button down, they are ridiculed as bigots if they suggest, in the quietest of voices, that such a person would have headlined the tragic freak shows in carnivals of old.

And:

It’s still “mister,” despite the fiction presented by Vanity Fair and its breathless cheerleaders, because until below-the-belt surgery is done, Mr. Jenner is still male, albeit a male with great hair and breast implants. The truth, obscured by the noisy hosannas, is that the image is no more — or less — a lie than any other magazine cover. It comes, however, with a sinister bonus: the suggestion that anyone who is sexually conflicted can, and should, be awarded a radical rearrangement of their privates (even at taxpayer expense) and be awarded all the rights and privileges of their desired gender, to include bathroom privileges, without anyone protesting that the bearded lady has no clothes.

It’s issues like these, not a wild-eyed bent for injustice, that makes conservatives wince as Mr. Jenner joins Chaz Bono and Laverne Cox in the don’t-call-them-freaks parade.

So Jennie, given what you wrote and what Caitlyn Jenner said, don't you think you have another column to write?  One that, oh I dunno, at the very least walks back some of your freakshow rhetoric?  Perhaps even a mea culpa of some sort?

If you do that, if you can get that column published, then you'll be on the right side of history - at least on this issue.

But if you don't, if you never write it, you'll simply always be wrong.

Yours,

Dayvoe