I Am Cait – Episode 3

The latest episode of the trans sisterhood reality show continues the road trip started in episode 2. I seem to be getting the habit of reviewing each show, so here goes.

The material from the meeting at the HRC offices in San Francisco was used again at the start of this episode, and was much better edited. Some of it is still a bit weird. I don’t understand why the camera has to spend so much time on Angelica Ross but not when she is speaking. I dearly love Chandi, and Blossom is clearly an inspiring person, but there seems to be some sort of unspoken subtext that it is OK for the white girls to be both classically beautiful and articulate, but not for the black girls.

Much of the show was devoted to Caitlyn taking her new friends on some adventures. There was rollerskating, dirt biking, and wine tasting. I loved the fact that they did something that was not stereotypically feminine.

Jenny Boylan continues to shine through as a saintly elder. Judging from Twitter, she’s getting a lot of great response from fans of the show. Jen Richards didn’t get so many opportunities to be smart this time, but she was brilliant on the subject of being able to tell if someone is trans.

There needs to be a party game in which you give a bunch of pictures of pretty cis women to a group of men and ask if they would have known that these women were trans. Then you have a good laugh at all of the random explanations they come up with to justify the fact that of course they would have known. And finally you watch their faces when you tell them that the women are actually all cis.

The dating discussion was much less prominent than it had been trailed to be, and was fairly coy. Probably that’s a good thing because we don’t want the audience focusing on genitalia. On the other hand, there are myths that need exploding. The TERFs still go around claiming that trans women can’t enjoy sex because we have “mutilated ourselves”. I wish someone had addressed that.

Mostly it wasn’t a very interesting episode, though it did make me very homesick for California. Next week, however, Cait gets to meet Kate Bornstein, which should be fascinating.