As coverage of Bruce Jenner's alleged transition reaches a feverpitch, spreading from pop culture magazines and tabloids to the front page of the New York Times, Oregon transgender activists say they have only one thought:



Leave the former Olympian alone.



Jenner has not come out as transgender, local advocates say, and the daily tick of media speculation does more harm than good for the hundreds of thousands of transgender people just trying to survive. The attention being paid to what Jenner is or isn't doing distracts from real challenges facing transgender people -- including high rates of violence, unemployment and depression.



"The general consensus among a lot of us is that people are turning it into a circus full of gossip," said Rebekah Katherine Brewis, executive director of PDX Trans* Pride, a grassroots advocacy group. "Not many people appreciate the speculative nature of their gender transition. It's a major intrusion of privacy."



Other celebrities have been here: Paparazzi followed Sonny and Cher's child Chaz Bono through a 2008 - 2010 gender transition. Fox News played a clip of Aerosmith's "Dude Looks Like a Lady" while showing pictures of Chelsea (formerly Bradley) Manning, the U.S. Army private sent to prison for her role in the WikiLeaks case.



The same kind of sensationalized coverage has followed transgender people since the 1950s, said Miriam Abelson, a Portland State University professor in the Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies department.



Sixty years before Jenner's face graced the cover of almost every magazine sold at your local grocery store checkout, the nation obsessed over the gender transition of a young soldier, Abelson said. Jenner was a toddler when Swedish doctors performed an orchiectomy on Christine Jorgenson. The procedure to remove Jorgenson's testicles was illegal in the United States at the time.



"Ex-GI becomes Blonde Beauty," the New York Daily News reported in 1952.



Though some states, including Oregon, have greatly expanded health care coverage and legal protections for transgender people, most news articles about transgender people still focus on the physical transformation, Abelson said.



"That's what's really unfortunate about this kind of continuing coverage," Abelson said. "The visibility can be beneficial to any marginalized group, but when it only focuses on these sensationalized aspects and not the real problems, it's not as helpful."



The public examination of Jenner for signs of surgery or hormone-related changes is no different than what many non-celebrity transgender people regularly experience, Abelson said. Transgender people say they're constantly asked about their bodies and their medical history.



"Anyone would see that as very invasive," Abelson said.



Abelson pointed to a 2014 interview on ABC in which Katie Couric asked transgender actress Laverne Cox and transgender model Carmen Carrera about their genitals.



"Your private parts are different now, aren't they?" Couric asked Carrera.



Jenner hasn't spoken publicly about gender identity, despite the widespread public conjecture. Because of that, Abelson and several other transgender activists contacted declined to speak about Jenner or the rumored upcoming E! Television show tracking Jenner's transition.



Speculating about someone's gender can have serious, harmful consequences, said Nico Quintana, policy director for Basic Rights Oregon.



"Folks face high rates of discrimination and high rates of violence. Because of that, and because of the way transgender people are treated in the United States, it's important that people are not outed or even assumed to be transgender unless they say so," Quintana said.



Last week, The Human Rights Campaign issued a report identifying 13 transgender women murdered in 2014. The women were shot, burned, strangled and beaten. Most of the murders remain unsolved. And 2015 is off to a dire start: A transgender or gender-non-conforming woman of color has been killed every week in 2015.



Those stats don't make magazine covers. And they don't become the basis for reality TV shows.



Because of that disparity, Brewis said she does not plan to watch if E! does produce a show documenting Jenner's transition.



"I see it enough in my normal everyday life, I don't need a TV to show me," Brewis said. "I would be happy to give (Jenner) credit for the courage to transition. That wouldn't diminish the transition in my eyes. But we don't need people to exploit their stories, to spin off from the real stories of our lives."





-- Casey Parks

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