An aging man makes a last grab at the brass ring of glamour once earned, now dissipated. Razzle-dazzle aside, it is a melancholy spectacle. Caitlyn Jenner himself is more an object of compassion than of interest. What is interesting, and still clamors for attention, is the piety with which the punditi and everyone else rushed to assign feminine pronouns to him.

To emphasize the dependence of truth on well-ordered language, cultural critic Karl Kraus once quipped that every correctly placed comma is decisive. How much more consequential, then, are the words used to describe the pseudoreality of Caitlin Jenner. Implicit in the prevailing derailment of usage is a pervasive mood of assent to the veracity of simulation.

Imbedded in the temper of our time is a growing submission to the sovereignty of facsimiles over realities. Hooked to the drip feed of virtual reality, we ingest fantasies of a world remade in the image of our own imaginings. The truth of things is less compelling than our willed experience of them. Credulity beckons.

When Caitlyn menstruates that will be time enough to apply feminine pronouns to him. There is little chance, though, of ever having to make good on that concession. At sixty-five, Caitlyn — were he a real woman — would be post-menopausal by now. But he is not real; he is counterfeit. No amount of surgery and hormone therapy annuls the Y chromosome carried by every cell in his body. Even if he were to delete the male genitals he has kept so far, that implacable chromosome remains. The man can play Let’s Pretend for the rest of his life, but his genes won the game in his mother’s womb.

That prompts two approaches to the refashioned Jenner. One is to see him as a man willing to mutilate himself in an extreme act of performance art. (In the 1970s heyday of the genre, self-wounding was integral to the act.) The second is to gawk at an expensively crafted, carefully maintained freak. Instead of Anne Jones, Barnum & Bailey’s Bearded Lady, we moderns have Caitlyn Jenner, pop culture’s Breasted Gent.

Read the article “ANALYSIS: How Do You Solve a Problem like Bruce Jenner?” on thefederalist.com.