Jenner pin-up masks transgender battles

Three and-a-half years ago, Royal Bank of Scotland featured a transgender executive on the cover of its employee magazine. 

Under the headline “I’m the same person,” Emma Cusdin recounted a difficult journey; from deciding she wanted to change her gender, to “coming out” to her partner, friends, and colleagues, to ultimately undergoing reassignment surgery.

RBS World, as the magazine was then known, is a long way from Vanity Fair. Ms Cusdin does not have an Olympic gold medal, a reality television show or a family brand worth tens of millions of dollars. But her story was no less powerful than Caitlyn Jenner’s, nor any less important at the time to breaking down gender stereotypes. 

And it was a lot closer to the everyday reality experienced by the estimated 700,000 transgender Americans.

There is no question that Ms Jenner’s very public transition, from Bruce Jenner, decathlon champion and former star of the pop culture television programme Keeping up with the Kardashians, to the glamorous pin-up revealed on the cover of Vanity Fair will chip away at the ignorance and prejudice that has long plagued the trans community.

The image of Ms Jenner in a satin corset, taken by famed photographer Annie Leibovitz, became a social media sensation when it was posted online on Monday.

Her new Twitter account, @Caitlyn_Jenner, attracted 1m followers in just four hours, beating the time it took even President Barack Obama to reach that milestone.

While some in the media have hailed a “transgender tipping point” in recent years as lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender rights continue to advance dramatically, particularly on same-sex marriage, many in the community still felt left behind.

As the highest-profile American to come out as transgender, and as a figure that has remained in the public eye for decades, Ms Jenner has personalised the struggle in a way few others could do. Jeffrey Tambor, who plays a transgender parent on the Amazon hit series Transparent, called her story “miraculous.”

“If I was lying on my deathbed and I had kept this secret and never did anything about it, I would be lying there saying: ‘You just blew your entire life’,” Ms Jenner tells Vanity Fair.

It is, of course, tempting to be cynical about Ms Jenner’s motives. The carefully orchestrated publicity push surrounding her transition, from a primetime interview with Diane Sawyer to Monday’s bombshell cover drop, has been part of the buzz-building for a new reality show that will document her life as a woman. 

And as Ms Jenner herself admits, she has never been shy about profiting from the Kardashians’ international celebrity. “I’m not doing it for money,” she says. ”I’m doing it to help my soul and help other people. If I can make a dollar, I certainly am not stupid.” 

Off set and beyond Ms Leibovitz’s soft focus lens, however, the lives of many transgender people are still far from pretty. 

According to a survey from National Center for Transgender Equality, a media monitoring group, they remain four times more likely to live in poverty, and twice as likely to be unemployed.

More than 40 per cent of transgender people reported attempting suicide, compared with less than 2 per cent of the general population. A full 90 per cent of transgender people say they have experienced harassment and discrimination at work. 

It is a community that must still wage a daily battle to get access to appropriate healthcare. The kind of feminisation facial surgery Ms Jenner underwent, for example, is almost universally excluded from insurance coverage — many plans still have a blanket ban on transgender-related procedures. 

And as more transgender children express the desire to transition, at younger ages, families across the country search, often fruitlessly, for acceptance and support in their schools, their churches and communities. 

Ms Jenner’s Vanity Fair cover may indeed be a watershed for the transgender community. Her new Facebook page has already attracted an outpouring of public support and more than 500,000 “likes”. But it should not obscure the fact that for so many transgender people, just one like could still make a huge difference.