I can’t tell if he/she means that personally or culturally, i.e., “the new feminine-looking me is normal to me” or “the new feminine-looking me should be normal to you.” Big difference. At one point Jenner says, “Isn’t it great that, maybe someday, [I’ll] be normal and blend into society?”, so take that however you like. Either way, “I’m the new normal” is exactly but exactly the soundbite the media wants for its “trans is mainstream” narrative push, which technically began a year ago but never enjoyed a spokesperson as prominent as this. Jenner would win more skeptics over by claiming he/she is unconcerned with being seen as “normal,” only with being happy, as that would make no claims on what American cultural norms should be. But that wouldn’t make LGBT activists happy. It’s normalcy or bust. And Jenner needs defenders, as well as an audience for the new E! reality show about the big transition. Solution: Play to your base.

Meanwhile, Ian Tuttle and Jonathan Last are having fun with a wrinkle in progressive orthodoxy on transgenderism. If your gender is rightly classified by how you feel psychologically, not how you’re built biologically, how should we treat Jenner’s Olympic decathlon win? By lefty logic, if he felt like a woman when he won the gold, he was a woman — in which case he was competing in the wrong event, as absurd as that may seem. If he was a woman at the time, presumably the records he set should be regarded as women’s records even though they were achieved by someone with a male physiology. If you think this is a ludicrous point, note that it doesn’t originate with Tuttle and Last: They both got the idea from Wikipedia, where a few fanatic SJWs are busily trying to rewrite the Olympic record books. Actual quote from the discussion section of the entry on the women’s 400 meters, via Last:

Caitlyn Jenner ran a 47.51 at the 1976 Olympics, a best of all time for women in the event. At the time, she went by the name Bruce. I feel it would be extremely transphobic to erase her identity and belittle her accomplishments by failing to mention this time. Although the IAAF has not, and likely will not, ratify Caitlyn’s time as a world record, it deserves mention here as an all-time woman’s best.

When Last checked the entry last night, Jenner was mentioned as “the fastest woman’s performer of all time, running a time of 47.51 in 1976 while competing under the name Bruce Jenner.” That line had been removed when I looked this morning but the Wikipedia wars are doubtless just getting started. Ben Shapiro makes a nice point too about the now famous Vanity Fair cover, which is supposed to be a tribute to Jenner for defying traditional gender norms but ended up being … pretty traditional:

The photo is deliberately constructed to play off traditional notions of female beauty. The photo is a deliberate takeoff on the cheesecake photos of the 1950s. It’s intended not just to make Jenner into a woman, but a sexy woman ready to engage — hence the use of lingerie, even though Jenner has already said he doesn’t know whether he will choose to have sex with men or women or both or neither (another bizarrely accepted notion from the same folks who say that sexual orientation is inborn and never chosen). The picture does not depict the new Jenner in all his gender-fluid glory – it doesn’t show Jenner’s male crotch-bulge, or Jenner’s broad Olympic-winning physique (Jenner’s arms are conveniently placed behind the back, minimizing the arms and shoulders of the former gold medal-winner).

It turns out that when a pro-transgenderism magazine wants to convey femininity and femaleness, it falls back on all the same gender stereotypes Jenner is supposedly overcoming. It turns out, in fact, that in order for Jenner’s story to make any sort of sense – in order for a transition from gender to gender to be meaningful – there must be a Point A (male) and there must be a Point B (female). But that would require definition of Point A and Point B, any objective criteria of which would make transition from one to the other impossible.

The answer to that, I suppose, is that the public isn’t ready to accept a gender-fluid cover-girlboy; the culture’s still “transitioning” too, so for the meantime, Jenner needs to get dolled up to make people more comfortable with his new appearance. That’s the “new normal,” with the even newer “normal” of fluid gender presumably yet to come.