You Don’t Always Get What You See
Calpernia Adams (above) is a Navy veteran with an interesting but increasingly common story. If you looked at her photograph long enough, you may have suspected that Adams wasn’t always a she. If so, you’d be correct. She’s a transgender girl (t-girl) who underwent a sex change operation during her early 20s.
Adams, who is now 36, will be the star of an upcoming reality TV show on ABC, “Transamerican Love Story,” that features eight bachelors in their 20s and 30s who live together under one roof and court Adams until all but one of them has been eliminated. Remember when “The Bachelor” seemed like a stretch?
If this isn’t a sign of the times, I don’t know what is. But being a t-girl isn’t what struck me about Adams. Her story prompted me to revisit why a lot of people, and not just transgenders, are dissatisfied with who they are. Let’s not kid ourselves; it isn’t just the ones who have surgery who fall into this category. There are plenty of people who lack the means or the courage to have surgery but are nonetheless miserable about being them. Why?
I can understand a Star Jones, or an Al Roker having gastric bypass surgery. If you’re morbidly obese, as they were, losing weight isn’t about vanity. It’s about staying alive.
But I don’t believe that the majority of people who go under the knife for nose jobs, face lifts, botox and collagen injections, breast and glutinal enhancements, and liposuction are in danger of dying otherwise.
It isn’t my place to tell anyone what to do with her body, but if someone told me that having surgery to “correct” my nose, for example, carried the risk of me dying, I’d be somewhere doing the Humpty Hump.
Part of me thinks that society, with its inordinate emphasis on all things superficial, is at least partly to blame for the urge people feel to transform themselves in some way, or in several ways at once in some cases. It’s magnanimous to say that looks don’t matter, but we’re sighted beings who’ve been conditioned to make judgments about people based precisely on their appearance. Yes, looks do matter.
But as with many things, society has gone overboard. If a person doesn’t look the way we think he should look, we hold that against them. In a dating context that’s not the worst thing in the world. We like who we like. But when it’s been shown that people who are labeled as fat are less likely to be hired for a job than those who aren’t, and that dark skinned black defendants receive longer jail sentences than relatively fair skinned black defendants, we need to check ourselves.
While superficiality is the order of the day, what ever happened to old-fashioned self-esteem? Just yesterday I commented on A Blog About Getting There that a woman who isn’t drop-dead gorgeous but works with what she has and exudes confidence is as sexy as any woman could be. Contrary to the video-ho doctrine, having fake T&A isn’t necessary in order for any woman to be fine. Some would say that I hold the minority view among men and it may be that I do. But what would a woman who felt good about her natural self care what any man thought of her?
Women aren’t the only ones who are being held hostage by the way they think other people see them physically. Quiet as kept, men go through changes to look like someone they aren’t so they can feel better about themselves, also. And no, not all of the ones who do are gay, on the DL or *sigh* metrosexual. Some of them are as straight as they come but are still scarred from being passed over when they were younger for not being (insert physical quality here) enough.
It would be easy for me to end this by saying that people should be satisfied with who they are, but it isn’t nearly that simple, is it?
On the Web: http://abcnews.go.com/Entertainment/story?id=3933443&page=1