The potential for this discussion to go horribly, horribly wrong is painfully high, so let me start by saying that I mean no one any offense, have enjoyed the company of transgendered people in the past, will enjoy the company of transgendered people in the future, and have zero interest in preventing anyone from seeking and finding their bliss. I met Bruce Jenner a couple times and he was an awesome dude. I'll bet Caitlin Jenner is an awesome lady.

But we're talking about media here. We're talking about a giant irresponsible vampire squid made up entirely of people who didn't want to get a real job. And the media has the job of talking to "the people" and "the people..."

Well, the people. Give this quaint little bulletin board three pages as they discover that one of the Big Brother contestants this year is transgender. But don't give it more than, oh, five. Nobody needs that much stupid in their life.

Combine that with the fact that we're still getting all sorts of mixed messages:

The pro-transgender advocates do not want to know, said McHugh, that studies show between 70% and 80% of children who express transgender feelings “spontaneously lose those feelings” over time. Also, for those who had sexual reassignment surgery, most said they were “satisfied” with the operation “but their subsequent psycho-social adjustments were no better than those who didn’t have the surgery.”

“And so at Hopkins we stopped doing sex-reassignment surgery, since producing a ‘satisfied’ but still troubled patient seemed an inadequate reason for surgically amputating normal organs,” said Dr. McHugh.

Remember when Philadelphia came out? and gave the AIDS message 1984 needed so badly... in 1993? In a way it was embarassing but holy fuck - as someone who grew up with GRID and arcade machines that could kill you with gay plague it was one hell of a moment to see Antonio Banderas and Tom Hanks play lovers to a Bruce Springsteen soundtrack. And I think we wouldn't have had that much earlier than '91 come hell or high water. Johns Hopkins? Johns Hopkins was the gold standard for gender reassignment surgery when I was growing up. They stopped doing it 20 years ago.

Backlash is a thing. The idiots of the world are not cool with Caitlin Jenner, despite the fact that Walter became Wendy more than 40 years ago. We're at that awkward stage where people are still wondering stupidly about the plumbing - that "how do lesbians have sex" phase of the conversation. The media is going to "grapple" about how to talk about transgender people.

The last thing anyone should do is scold someone trying to please multiple audiences. The end result will be silence.