No desire to be June Cleaver

I was reading Philadelphia’s popular free daily newspaper the Metro the other day and suddenly realized I’d been had. It was the same feeling I had when my now-deceased uncle-by-marriage made off with the family business fortune and I looked back on all the innocent-looking steps that had led up to it: the hat-in-hand courting days, the cloying obsequiousness toward my grandfather, the unsettling feeling I developed around him as he became more entrenched in the daily operations of the furniture store.

The front page of Monday’s Metro featured an alluring 22-year-old, posing on the campus of the University of Pennsylvania, and dressed to kill—in a Proverbs 7 way of killing:

“… for many a victim has she laid low, and all her slain are a mighty throng. Her house is the way to Sheol, going down to the chambers of death” (Proverbs 7:26-27, ESV).

The article, titled “Meet Jara: Ivy League transgender sex worker,” admiringly quoted Jara Krys (formerly known as Christian Jaramillo before he began identifying a woman and was able to convince the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania to issue him a new ID) about his “sex work” and himself as a Penn student and “entrepreneur.” “But do not call Krys … a prostitute,” wrote reporter Ernest Owens. Confused, I looked up “prostitute,” and sure enough it said, “a person, typically a woman, who engages in sexual activity for payment.” This is an exact description of what Krys does, day or night, as you prefer, for $500 an hour or $2,000 for a full night.

“I take full control of my body, my sexuality and my business,” said Krys, making a virtue of vice. “Receiving a Wharton education has taught me how to better market and operate my brand,” continued the 21st century Ivy League poster child, giving the credit to his school.

I had to Google “Is prostitution legal?” because I thought I was losing touch with reality. It is not, just so you know, except in some forms in Nevada. Yet Krys unabashedly boasts a clientele of “typically married, white, male local business owners who are between 40 and 50.” Don’t cops still do busts on that kind of thing?

But now I get to the part that made me feel “had”: It is becoming clear, in these very early celebrated cases, that transgendered persons, whom we dare not gainsay to have long suffered under the burden of male bodies encasing female identities, have not been yearning since playground days to be modest and maternal 1950s television type moms like on Leave it to Beaver or The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet. They have no desire to be June Cleaver or Harriet Nelson—they desire to be Mae West.

There was not even a discrete waiting period between Bruce Jenner’s post-op hospital stay and his trot over to Vanity Fair.And the hairs on Christian Jaramillo’s legs had hardly been waxed before he was setting up shop on the quad for his sex trade entrepreneurship. Transsexuality has gone straight to perversity without passing through pretended wholesomeness of any kind. It’s Uncle John déjà vu all over again. And as for the University of Pennsylvania, shame on you. And your climbing ivy too.