Washington Post conservative columnist Kathleen Parker is one of the few voices in media not celebrating Olympic gold medalist and reality TV star Bruce Jenner’s transition into a woman.
When Vanity Fair published its latest cover photo on Monday featuring Jenner, who now goes by Caitlyn, in full hair and makeup and dressed in a white corset, many journalists and TV personalities lauded the moment as a mark of progress for transgender people.
“Trans[gender] bodies come in many shapes, sizes and forms,” CNN’s Marc Lamont Hill wrote on Twitter. “We must learn to accept, love and normalize all of them.”
MSNBC’s Janet Mock, who is also a transgender woman, wrote on Twitter that people should “celebrate Caitlyn and use her moment to uplift trans[gender] folks facing insurmountable economic barriers for affirming healthcare.”
“You feel a connection [to Jenner],” said journalist Buzz Bissinger, who interviewed Jenner for the Vanity Fair article, to NPR. “You feel an immediate connection. You feel a reaching out. You see an openness because she’s free.”
Writing in the Washington Post on Tuesday, Kathleen Parker said it was all too much.
“What concerns me here is the cultural, primarily media, treatment of the Jenner case in particular — and the assumption that we all need to be a part of this,” Parker wrote. She asked if Jenner, who is mostly known to younger people for his role as the patriarch of the Kardashians, “is Jenner really the best face for such a profound experience, no offense to her plastic surgeon?”
Of Jenner’s “gussied up” image on the cover of Vanity Fair, Parker said it “seems a mockery of [Jenner’s] new womanhood, as well as the human dignity her public outing purportedly is intended to inspire.”
