In Search Of A Transgender Pronoun

"To live is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed often." So said John Henry Newman, the Victorian-era Anglican priest who became a Roman Catholic cardinal. A trans-Christian, you might say.

I take his words to heart as I try to change myself with respect to people who are changing more than their vestments.

We live in a time when gender is fluid. Mount Holyoke College, the alma mater of Emily Dickinson and Gov. Ella Grasso, recently canceled its annual production of Eve Ensler's "The Vagina Monologues" because it's not fair to women who don't have vaginas. Mount Holyoke is one of several all-women schools to begin admitting women who don't have vaginas, which is to say people who skew male, anatomically, but identify as women.

Another way of thinking about them is: male-to-female transgendered people who have not had "the lower surgery," a term I picked up watching "Transparent," the excellent Amazon TV series in which Jeffrey Tambor plays such a person. Tambor won a Golden Globe for his work, over the groans of a trans community inflamed by television's failure to cast a transgendered actor in the role.

It's not the same, I said in one discussion, as casting a white actor as Othello. Oh yes it is, I was told. I'm usually wrong in these discussions.

I'm trying to learn.

In 2013, Bradley Manning's attorney sent a press release to the Today Show announcing Manning's intention to become a woman named Chelsea and asking that the news media refer to Manning with a female pronoun.

I balked, just a little. First of all, I refuse to do anything just because Savannah Guthrie says I have to. Also, in the case of a public figure, the job of the press is to be skeptical. Ronald Reagan claimed to be a born-again Christian. I always regarded that as unproven and subject to verification, but Reagan had more to go on. He was at least anatomically a born-again Christian.

You see what I mean? We can't accept every claim that public figures make about themselves. Dennis Rodman may claim he's Jewish, and Chris Christie might announce that he's nice. We have to check this stuff out.

With everybody else, we can be cool. Let people make their transitions, even if that means denying the reality of their assigned genitals. So what? There's way too much fussing about who uses which restroom. What is it you go in there to do, anyway? Assert your sexual identity or make pee-pee?

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In Search Of A Transgender Pronoun