As the dust settles from the Democrats’ surprisingly fierce primary skirmish and the party reorients towards unity following the Convention, another undercurrent of cultural transformation is taking shape in 2016 that could be said to have been as much as six hundred years in the making.
It was 1405 when Christine de Pizan penned the first essay questioning men’s rule over women. Known for centuries as the “woman” question, the presumption that women were biologically and morally inferior to men formed the basis for customs and laws denying women the right to education, property ownership, access to the professions, independence or the “franchise”—namely the right to vote — forcing women to remain under the control and rely on the largess of fathers and husbands, presumably for their own benefit within society.
In a perennial movement that has come finally to be known as “feminism,” women have agitated for and slowly chipped away at these laws and taboos that have limited and prevented the full expression of female potential. Western women have mostly gained the right to receive an equal education, to hold property in their own name, to determine whether and when to bear children, to hold any job and to receive fair wages for their work. Since 1916, when Jeannette Rankin of Montana was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, women have held political offices, and—soon after, in 1920, with the passage of the 19th Amendment—women finally earned the right to vote.
Yet full gender “equality” and “representation” has remained surprisingly elusive. In 2016, American women comprise nearly 51% of US population, earn nearly 60% of advanced degrees yet run less than 5% of Fortune 500 companies. They also win less than 20% of Congressional seats. Increases in this number have come almost exclusively from the ranks of Democrats, as the number of women elected by Republicans remains under 10% compared to 33% elected by Democrats. This discrepancy reveals that the strong patriarchal inclination that was a hallmark of strict conservative values—reflecting the lingering belief that men have authority than women—remains largely in effect among Republicans but has greatly lessened among progressive-minded people. In this context and given the enormous political stakes, no woman has ever been selected by a major U.S. political party to run as its nominee for the office of president. Until this year . . . .
As of Thursday, Hillary Rodham Clinton accepted the nomination of the Democratic Party to run for president. President Obama eloquently transferred the “baton” to Clinton claiming “I can say with confidence that there has never been a man or woman more qualified than Hillary Clinton to serve as president of the United States of America.” But this was probably true even eight years ago when she lost the 2008 Democratic primary to Obama. So what, besides for serving as Secretary of State for four years in the Obama Administration has changed in the interim? Why are Democrats finally able to put forth a female candidate now, when for 240 years, neither party has ever done so?
It is tempting to think that, by successfully electing their first black nominee to the office, Democrats have gained confidence that they can prevail with a non-traditional candidate despite the very harsh racially-laced conservative backlash against Obama in the Republican party. Similarly, it is tempting to think that reality TV star Donald Trump’s total lack of political gravitas, loose canon of a mouth and irreverence for traditional Republican values makes any other candidate compelling, even a woman named Hillary Clinton. While these are certainly factors, I will suggest that the feminist movement has begun a final transformation. We now don’t just want to allow the full expression of female potential. We want people to define their own human potential on terms not limited by traditional notions of masculinity or femininity. For this, we can look to Donald Trump’s reality TV competition, namely reality TV personality, Caitlyn Jenner, formerly known as Bruce Jenner, who may actually have more to do with the underlying cultural changes that are front and center for Democrats and their choice than either Obama or the Donald himself.
A little background is in order. For those of you who are not reality TV fans, back in 2004, Donald Trump began to make a name for himself as a reality TV actor in a show called The Apprentice. The premise was that a team of people were apprenticed to one of Donald’s companies and competed in order to win a guaranteed $250,000 job in the company. Each episode gave them a series of business tasks to complete. Donald played the tough boss and capriciously but quite entertainingly winnowed out those he deemed losers. One by one, contestants were fired by the Donald until only one was left, who would then be given a $250,000 job for that company. (It turns out, the “actual jobs” were just as fictional as the drama and season winners became mere “spokesmen” for one or more of Donald’s businesses.)
Amazingly, The Apprentice attracted as many as 28 million viewers at its height and was top billed by NBC for several seasons before it began to lose its luster. Donald’s tough-love persona was crafted by NBC’s master reality TV producers and a star was born or rather a unstoppable monster released. Donald proceeded to bring in all of his family into the series, spin-off new series with them as stars and ensure that each member individually built themselves a TV following. Things began to fall apart for The Apprentice and its spin-offs when Donald, eyeing a future in politics, started his “birther” campaign against Obama, strategically crafted for the purpose of shifting his reality TV stardom into political support. Meanwhile, much of the reality TV-loving audience was shifting over to "Keeping up with the Kardashians," a reality TV series launched in 2007 about the Kardashian family. Despite horrid review, this show’s popularity grew considerably after Bruce Jenner, a former Olympian Gold medal winner and one of the most famous all-American heroes married Kris Kardashian.
Keeping up with the Kardashians and its buxom celebrity stars remained largely inanely entertaining and hardly noteworthy until April 2015 when something rather amazing happened. Just a week or so after Hillary announced her candidacy for president, Bruce Jenner “came out” as a trans woman in an interview with Diane Sawyer. More than 20 million viewers watched, making that 20/20 interview with Jenner the “highest-ever rated newsmagazine telecast,” and dragging Americans—fascinated and entranced by Caitlyn Jenner’s courage, honesty and need to dramatically redefine what was already an historic self—vicariously into the “trans” age.
Flash forward a year. When my daughter came home in May 2016 after her freshman year at college, we heard about a number of college friends who had adopted neutral names and insisted on being called “they,” rather than “he” or “she.” Friends and professors alike were tasked with changing their grammar and mindset, while the administration changed bathroom signage, online registration forms and embraced a whole new category of “other” within the student body. These demands and abandoned pronouns challenged everyone to think differently, disassociate traditional notions of gender identity, reassess the should’s and shouldn’ts that accompany labels and free themselves to accept the uniqueness of each individual. It was actual hard work.
It turns out that discrimination or, at least, facile prejudging based on gender, is widespread. When identical resumes are sent out with clearly identifiable male or female names, employers typically have a higher regard for the male candidate, see him as better qualified and worth offering a higher salary. In other words, just bearing a female name incurs a penalty, if only by way of mental associations. The effects of that mindset, however, are tangible, economic and remain pervasive in our culture. The same results have been found with resumes bearing clearly racially-identifiable names—the white candidate gets the presumed advantage. My daughter’s college, a rather progressive liberal arts school, in stepping up to acknowledge and accept challenges by students seeking to rid themselves of such discrimination, may be a harbinger of a major cultural transition forming, if yet to fully arrive on the Main Street of American communities.
It's been more than a year since she shocked America with her announcement, yet Caitlyn Jenner is still charming TV audiences with her heart-felt gender dysphoria and struggles to adjust to being a woman. Much of Trump’s popularity and artifice is due to the great job NBC did building him a brash and bullet-proof persona, a huge audience and training him to appeal to viewers’ more base impulses. The Apprentice has been repeatedly revealed to be designed specifically to market and promote Trump businesses, bringing in revenue in the process and Trump appears to be successfully bringing that same model to his reality presidential campaign. Keeping up with the Kardashians continues to attract millions of viewers and is the longest-running reality TV series.
Caitlyn Jenner may be the most well-known trans personality but she is far from the only one. Many Americans have now had a chance to think about gender as a facet of identity that is rather more ephemeral and, in many cases, is quite an inaccurate reflection of the specific person being considered. Gender can now be seen largely as a label that facilitates discrimination. Too often it associates an array of characteristics that are downright limiting to the individual. Caitlyn’s life tells us that we should not think we know the measure of person based solely on assumptions or expectations. There is a need to look further into who a person is to get their measure, and that there is far more to this being human thing than what a simple gender label provides.
In this trans mindset, those looking at Hillary’s long list of accomplishments may not find her life maps with that of a typical women. Yes, she identifies as a woman but at virtually every phase of her life, she defied the standard expectations. She first rose to prominence for publicly refusing the limiting roles of "wife" or “First Lady” and, in the process, infuriated many conservatives. While the murmur of approbation is never easy, Hillary endured a fire-hose of condemnation, being adamantly herself while in the public spotlight. Undaunted, she continued to pursue her passions, defining for herself her own professional activities and personal choices. Hillary’s decision to forgive Bill Clinton for his affair with Monica Lewinski was not applauded for the love or forgiveness shown. Hillary opting to keep her family together was condemned by conservatives. Later, her decision to run for the Senate seat from New York State after leaving the White House spectacularly offended those with conservative gender expectations—including women, who accused her of having ambitions of her own, of all inappropriate things. If that wasn’t self-assertive enough, her choice to launch a campaign for the Democratic nomination in 2008 and then to do it again in 2016 simply trumped all other crimes against conservative notions of “female” behavior. In fact, Hillary’s choices look a lot like those of people who identify as men—who manage not to be condemned for the same actions. Yet, because of her gender, Republicans see her as so criminal, they are literally and figurative ready to “lock her up,” and spent much of the recent Republican convention chanting this phrase.
As Hillary herself said in Beijing in 1995 "Women's rights are Human Rights and Human Rights are Women's rights, once and for all." Really, it all boils down to human rights and freedom. Women’s 600-year long fight for equality and the freedom to pursue one's own full human potential is, at its essence, a philosophy that has lifted all boats. It has helped bring about greater racial equality, greater freedoms for lesbians and gays, including marriage equality and most recently, greater equality and acceptance for transgender individuals. The trans age demands from us an acceptance of yet another type of freedom: the freedom to not be reduced to a prefabricated set of appropriate gender characteristics. Many people, even Olympic heroes, just don’t easily fit within those confines.
Conservatives don’t want women and minorities to be free: they want them to stay in their places and leave the field open for white men, regardless of how truly unworthy they may be. Long ago, they recognized Hillary as an actual and symbolic threat, being a person who defied their public approbation and lived boldly on her own terms. As a successor to Obama and in stark contrast to Trump, Hillary is finally getting a closer and clearer-eyed look from the public for what she has achieved politically and what she still strives to achieve for Americans. In return, Americans owe Hillary the respect to judge her based on her accomplishments, not on how well she conformed her life to fulfilling traditional expectations for women. If it turns out that Hillary makes history as the first person elected to the position of president who identifies as a woman, it may well be thanks in part to Caitlyn Jenner, whose public transition from man to woman, taught Americans to appreciate an individual for the unique human being they are, regardless of one's gender expectations.