The interesting part of this story is not that a famous person changed their gender. It is that gender issues have become a topic of national debate. We as a country is asking the question of just how free do we want our society. We are exercising our ability to extend compassion to people that we don't understand, that we can safely ostracise. Many are failing at this, and fall back on old instincts to attack the outcast, but each time we do this compassion building exercise we build our societies ability to show compassion.
That is the real event occurring.
It doesn't feel like it's about freedom at all though. It's more like wanting america to not only allow it, which it seems to have for my whole lifetime anyway, but to be exuberant about it. I'll never be exuberant about it. It feels kind of stupid to me, to be honest. All the crying about "I just want to be who I really am and you're not letting me" seems like so much useless whining. I don't get to be who I really am either. I don't even know who I really am in that sense.
I am who I have become and any changes I'd like to make don't involve elective cosmetic surgery, so clearly there is something in Caitlyn that is completely outside my experience. The fixation on having to be one gender or the other is what I don't understand. To feel as though you aren't happy unless the world sees you as a member of the opposite sex is not comprehensible to me. Personally I have no particular attachment to my sex.
As far as appearance goes, being attractive as any sex would trump everything for me. The most sensible action I could take then is to optimize my appearance as a male because I already have male features that would detract from a female's attractiveness. In rare instances the opposite may be true though. There are certainly effeminate males out there who would look better as women, but then you have to think about the rest of it. Gender reassignment surgery can't be good for the quality of your orgasms for instance. That's important to me too, and keeping my male genitalia is going to severely limit my options in terms of mates, which was the whole reason I placed such importance on attractiveness to start with. I'm left with the original conclusion that working with what I have is my best option. Assuming everyone else is going through the same thought process and STILL wanting to go through with gender reassignment, there must be something about them that is truly alien to me. I can't understand it, so I can't empathize with them. All I'm left with is "would not bang".
I guess there's a generalized sense of "someone wants something that's eating them up inside, but is afraid to do anything about it for social reasons", but that's not concrete enough to inspire any compassion in me.