We have known for months that Bruce Jenner was becoming a woman, and we rejoice if this brings her happiness. But were we prepared for this woman?

What does it mean that Ms. Jenner’s newly revealed “true self” (in her own words) comes packaged like a 30-something starlet along the lines of her famous daughters and stepdaughters? She is even likened to “an elegant starlet” in the Vanity Fair profile. Like her children, Caitlyn will soon allow her life to be minutely chronicled in a reality television show, produced by the same team responsible for “Keeping Up With the Kardashians” — that docudrama devoted to makeup, hookups, breakups and, of course, plastic surgery and clothes.

Long ago, Ms. Jenner was a hero, admired for dazzling athletic skills. Even on the Kardashian show, Bruce often distinguished himself as the voice of reason amid a circus of vanity and consumerism. But as Vanity Fair’s Caitlyn, Ms. Jenner has morphed into a consumable commodity — a strangely static, oddly youthful and elaborately adorned body that is, rather than does. This seems less the liberation of a true self than a reminder of the straitjacket requirements of acceptable, desirable womanhood.

That Ms. Jenner makes an excellent icon of fashion is unsurprising. Not only has she long lived within the corridors of Hollywood celebrity, but her physique — still the slim-hipped, sinewy body of a male Olympic athlete — actually lends itself (with a few tweaks) more easily to the female modelesque ideal than do most genetically female bodies. And certainly, very few transwomen could achieve this aesthetic ideal either, as the actress and transgender activist Laverne Cox has pointed out in a widely read Tumblr post.

What of the millions of other 65-year-old women, whether born female or trans, who deserve attention? The millions of women who become invisible with age and could never successfully mimic a Kardashian (and would not wish to)? They remain offstage and out of mind, their own accomplishments unknown to us.