Bruce Jenner's Courage

February 5, 2015   NICHOLAS KRISTOF

When I was a growing up, yearning with my pals to be a track star, one of our heroes was Bruce Jenner. He won a gold medal at the 1976 Olympics in the decathlon, and he adorned our Wheaties boxes. We all wanted to be Bruce Jenner.

I haven't thought much about him in years. But Jenner is in the news again, widely reported to be preparing to come out as a transgender woman.

At first, there were snickers, but, lately, the tone has been respectful. And news reports say Jenner is planning to chronicle the transition in a program for E! television channel and in an interview with Diane Sawyer for ABC News. All this, and comments by family members, suggest that Jenner is willing to be a role model and help educate the world on transgender issues.

Radar Online quoted his mother, Esther Jenner, as confirming the news and saying she was prouder of him now than when he won his gold medal. His stepdaughter, Kim Kardashian, told ''Entertainment Tonight'' that it was Jenner's story to tell but added: ''I think he'll share whenever the time is right.''

Good for Jenner. All this is probably harder than the training for the Olympic decathlon -- but more important, because transgender people face hate crimes and discrimination at an astonishing rate.

Remember Matthew Shepard, the 21-year-old gay university student in Wyoming who in 1998 was tied to a fence, badly beaten and left to die? That was seen as the ultimate hate crime and now seems to belong to a different era.

Yet, just so far this year, at least three transgender people have been reported murdered in the United States. The Human Rights Campaign issued a report the other day listing 13 transgender women murdered in 2014: They were shot, strangled, burned and beaten.

''Violence is something that is disproportionately affecting transgender people -- and for specific reasons,'' says Elizabeth Halloran of the Human Rights Campaign. ''Inability to access employment, housing and safety-net services, as well as family rejection, all conspire to create a reality that makes transgender people -- especially transgender people of color, transgender women and transgender people living poverty -- more vulnerable to violence.''

Vincent Paolo Villano of the National Center for Transgender Equality said that there has been progress in laws protecting transgender Americans, but that public attitudes remain a problem.

Sex and gender are such befuddling mysteries even for those of us who are in the mainstream that you'd think we'd be wary of being judgmental. Yet much of society clings to a view that gender is completely binary, when, in fact, there's overwhelming evidence of a continuum.

And considering the violence and discrimination that transgender people endure, no one would go through this except for the most profound of motivations: to be authentic to one's inner self.

A 2011 survey by the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force found that 57 percent of transgender people interviewed reported significant family rejection. Partly because of widespread job discrimination, they were often impoverished, and almost one-fifth had been homeless. And 41 percent reported having attempted suicide.

''Gender needs to be taught about in schools,'' Leelah Alcorn, a transgender 17-year-old who had been sent to conversion therapy by her parents, wrote in a suicide note when she killed herself last year. ''Fix society. Please.''

Gays and lesbians began to gain civil rights when Americans realized that their brothers, cousins, daughters were gay. Numbers are elusive, but research at the University of California at Los Angeles suggests that while 3.5 percent of American adults identify as gay, only 0.3 percent are transgender.

Jay Brown, a transgender man who has written an excellent online guide to how the public can support those transitioning, notes that as 65 percent of Americans say they have a family member or close friend who is gay, compared with only 9 percent who have such a connection to someone who is transgender.

Yet there are signs of a real opening, with TV shows dealing with transgender issues, Vice President Joe Biden referring to transgender discrimination as ''the civil rights issue of our time,'' and President Obama mentioning transgender people in his State of the Union address last month.

That's the context in which Jenner is now stepping forward. If the aim is to educate us, bravo!

Cynics might say that the television plans are more about self-promotion than leadership. All I know is that Jenner seems to be preparing for a bold public mission involving something intensely personal, in a way that should open minds and hearts. So, in my book, Bruce Jenner is now a gold medalist again. Come on, Wheaties. It's time to put Jenner back on the box!

'American Sniper' Moral

February 5, 2015   GAIL COLLINS

Things we can learn from ''American Sniper'':

You know the movie, right? It has not only been nominated for the Best Picture Oscar; it could wind up selling more tickets than the other seven nominees combined. Plus, it's triggered a left-right controversy that makes the old dust-up over ''Duck Dynasty'' seem like a tiny cultural blip.

''American Sniper'' tells the story of Chris Kyle, a real-life Iraq war veteran and sharpshooter. The film is certainly powerful, and it celebrates our Iraq veterans. But it also eulogizes the killing of Iraq insurgents, including children, and critics feel it ought to be put in the context of an invasion that didn't need to happen in the first place.

There's been less conversation about the final scene in the movie, which shows the hero walking through his family home, where the kids are romping. He's carrying a handgun, which he points at his wife Taya, playfully telling her to ''drop them drawers.'' Taya says she can see he's finally getting over his war traumas and back to his old fun-loving self.

This is, by virtually any standard, insane behavior. Mike Huckabee, a big ''American Sniper'' fan, recently published a book called ''God, Guns, Grits and Gravy,'' which is so wildly opposed to any weapon regulation that Huckabee opens his chapter on modern education by complaining that public schools are anti-gun. Yet he also presents a list of universally accepted gun safety rules, many of which boil down to don't point it at anybody as a joke.

''Yeah, but if you want to complain about the casual treatment of guns in movies, you don't have to look very hard on any Friday night,'' said Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut. Murphy hasn't seen the movie, but he's one of Congress's leading advocates of gun-control regulation. It's not the world's most rewarding job. In recent years, his colleagues have not only refused to pass an extremely modest bill on background checks, they've failed to ban the sale of guns to people on the terrorism watch list.

''American Sniper'' is on one, supremely obvious level, a celebration of gun culture. But it's also a cautionary tale. The real Chris Kyle was shot to death while the script was being written. He had volunteered to help a troubled veteran, Eddie Ray Routh, who had a history of violent behavior and was an apparent victim of post-traumatic stress. Kyle felt the best way to get him to relax was to take him to a shooting range. While they were there, Routh turned his gun on Kyle, and one of Kyle's friends, killing them both.

''American Sniper'' could actually be seen, at least in the final scene, as a good-gun, bad-gun message. The real Chris Kyle did enjoy walking around the house, twirling a pistol. His wife said that as the clouds lifted after his Iraq service, he would playfully point a gun at the television and pretend to shoot down the bad guys.

Jason Hall, who wrote the movie screenplay, said the scene was meant to both show Kyle in recovery and presage the violence that was about to occur off-screen.

''There's a tension in the scene that builds toward the ending,'' he said in a phone interview.

The American gun lobby has pushed its cause so far that it, too, may be falling off a cliff. Texas, where Chris Kyle's alleged murderer is going on trial next week, has always had a gun-friendly culture, so much so that visitors can bring concealed handguns into the State Capitol. Some people definitely do not think this goes far enough, and, on opening day of the Legislature last month, they demanded new laws making it legal to carry handguns in the open, preferably without a license.

One particularly bouncy group, Open Carry Tarrant County, flooded the office of Representative Poncho Nevárez, a non-supportive Democrat. A video of the ensuing scene showed Nevárez, looking extremely wary, asking the demonstrators to leave his office, while one of them yelled back: ''I'm asking you to leave my state.'' When Nevárez tried to close his door, one of the protesters stuck his foot in it. This was all happening, remember, in a building where carrying concealed weapons is perfectly fine.

When it was all over, some legislators in both parties wore ''I'm Poncho'' badges in solidarity with Nevárez, who was assigned a security detail after he and his family received threats.

The leader of Open Carry Tarrant County, Kory Watkins, then posted another video in which he claimed that the resistant lawmakers were forgetting their duty was ''to protect the Constitution. And let me remind you: Going against the Constitution is treason. And treason is punishable by death.''

Meanwhile, in the Texas Capitol, enthusiasm for watering down the gun laws seems to be dwindling. That could qualify as a happy ending.