Taking stock of Caitlyn Jenner's story

I took a seat at the only empty bar stool at a popular Center City neighborhood dive one evening and I found myself sitting next to a beautiful transsexual (this was 20 years ago, before transgender became the preferred term). I timidly worked up the nerve to talk to her.

She was gorgeous. Reminded me of Rachel Harlow (formerly Richard Finocchio), Philadelphia's first celebrity transsexual. Harlow ran a place by that name in the 1970s, when disco ruled the nightclubs and Bruce Jenner ruled the Olympics.

The woman sitting next to me wore her blond hair short and sticking straight up in front. Her face was delicate, soft yet chiseled, feminine yet . . . something about the jaw.

I had seen her at the bar with her friends of both sexes several times. I didn't know her name or anything else about her. Since that one encounter two decades ago, the only thing I've heard since was that she married a plumber and was a stay-at-home mom raising his children in a house with a yard in a New Jersey suburb.

As I remember, painfully, our bar-stool conversation was awkward and brief. "Where did you grow up?" I asked. "Sumter, South Carolina," she answered. "Hmm. If you don't mind me asking, what religion were you raised in?" I asked, not quite believing those words were actually coming out of my mouth.

"Methodist," she answered. "Methodist," I repeated, before segueing seamlessly into my next stupid question. "I was raised Catholic. And I don't know a single thing about Methodists. Can you give me an example of what Methodists believe that Catholics don't?" (I was nervous, OK?) She replied, "Well, for one thing, Jesus had brothers and sisters."

I'm not sure what, if anything else, she said after that because mentally I had slapped my hands over my ears, shut my eyes tight, and started shouting, "La, la, la, la, la!" at the top of my lungs.

Some things you're just never ready to hear for the first time out loud.

Philadelphia Catholics, especially those educated in archdiocesan schools when the majority of classroom teachers were members of religious orders, were taught everything about the miraculous virgin birth of Jesus except what the word virginity meant. To this day, I'm apt to respond "unsullied" if asked to define the V word.

Unless you shared that educational experience, you have to strain to imagine the seismic shift beneath the firm ground of sexual innocence/ignorance many baby-boom-era and older Philadelphians have endured. We saw the "free love" movement of the '60s and the sexual-abuse betrayal by priests in the '90s, and now we are watching sexual reassignment procedures become almost routine.

With that history in mind, I polled some of my Catholic school veteran friends, both liberal and conservative, about the Bruce Jenner coming-out spectacle.

"You know what this is?" said "Irish Jack," a West Catholic grad and retired police sergeant who owns a West Philly saloon. "This is another attempt by the liberal media to marginalize normal people."

Irish Jack likes his news neat and straight from Fox News.

Sharon, a graduate of Sacred Heart Parish School in Camden, now a lawyer and suburban mom, shared a disturbing observation during her daughter's graduation ceremonies from ultraliberal Sarah Lawrence College recently.

"So many of her classmates had different-gendered names when they were called up to receive their diplomas than the names they had when they started college," Sharon said, comparing gender dysphoria to the outbreak of once-rare food allergies and newly diagnosed psychological disorders that more and more schoolkids seem prone to these days.

Is it in the environment or the culture?

To me, the blatant Melvillean reference in the "Call Me Caitlyn" headline accompanying Jenner's Vanity Fair cover photo was just the latest high-heeled shoe to drop in the transparently manipulative media orchestration of Bruce Jenner's years-long is-he-or-isn't-she reality show.

First, months of rumors, followed by angry denials or sullen seclusion, and gender-coin-toss reports about Jenner in print and broadcast tabloids to whet the public's appetite.

Then the two-hour exclusive interview on ABC with Diane Sawyer, where Jenner revealed the shocking headline: "GOP gains famous rich white woman supporter."

All leading inexorably to Vanity Fair's courageous editorial decision to publish a sexy swimsuit photo of a 65-year-old cover girl with the merest hint of a five-o'clock shadow.

And the 24/7 gossip media's response was to immediately change their stylebooks to dub the father of six forever more as a "she."

And so she is. But given the exploitive way Caitlyn's coming-out has been carefully manipulated for maximum return to the Kardashian family empire's cash coffers, changing the personal pronoun used to refer to Jenner doesn't make her a lady.