As someone who has been diagnosed with Generalized Anxiety Disorder, I do not know why I choose to indulge in social media while giving the slightest damn about my own mental health. When faced with this question I tell myself, “It’s because you can’t keep in touch with your friends otherwise, Phil.” While there is a semblance of truth to that, the reality is that Facebook and its bastard spawn only drive me closer to madness every time I compulsively log in and lurk around the political, fiscal, social, conservative and liberal pissing contests being aimed around on data mining platforms that are only safe and secure when its users post anecdotes about their cats.

Within the past week my obvious masochism has led to me to learn what a sampling of 350,000,000 people within the Earth’s population think about Caitlyn Jenner, Josh Duggar, and as of this morning, Lena Dunham and some inflections she apparently imposed on her own sister – a story that was first brought to me by Alaskan wonder Sarah Palin, reporting on words from her daughter, bastion of wisdom Bristol. It was a trending topic on Facebook’s righthand sidebar.

Opinions don’t drive me to the public forum unless I strongly believe they are wrong. To put it in the parlance of the popular metaphor, I drag my proverbial soapbox out of my pants when assholes are at their smelliest. In the case of the Conservative/Liberal Civil War that’s pitting brother against brother on an hourly basis, there are opinions and then there is my own opinion.

I’ve already introduced a lot to sort out here. I’ll begin with the simplest.

Caitlyn Jenner is a woman. It doesn’t matter that Caitlyn used to be a man named Bruce. This is because of how the transgendered individual operates within and outside of themselves. It is a physical, mental, biological, spiritual, psychological and discomforting feeling that one was not born in their correct physiological body. Like homosexuality, it is not a choice. A man does not wake up and decide to put on a dress and/or later take estrogen and/or have his penis surgically inverted into a vagina, nor does a woman wake up with the same random hair. This is a process that begins at birth, either out of an inward sense that corrections need to be made, or emerging from the womb as a hermaphrodite and being faced with picking one physical gender over the other.

In other words, it’s about science and nature.

Though trans people are cultivated by a scientific process, there are those among our population who don’t adhere to basic scientific facts. The same people who will only accept that the Earth is six thousand literal years old and was created in six literal days are not going to believe science when it says that transgendered individuals are scientific fact. One cannot go from wading safely in the indoor heated shallow end to landing face first in the cold, outdoor deep end.

This bothers me. But what bothers me even more is the quickness of the Judeo-Christian majority to forgive Josh Duggar for putting his hands on his little sisters, and in the same breath condemn Caitlyn Jenner, who transitioned into a woman but does not have the same history of molesting children. I have seen the Christian community kiss Josh’s ass, give him hugs, Tweet about the nature of forgiveness and God’s love and footnote it with a collective shrug of “boys will be boys.” Meanwhile, Caitlyn is the sign of the End Times, the seven year Tribulation and New Sodom rising up from a pile of ash to engulf America in raw immorality.

This was to be my second ‘level’ of complication within this cathartic clusterfuck, but it’s really no more difficult than the first topic because there is a clear distinction here: Caitlyn Jenner found comfort by embracing her femininity; Josh Duggar found comfort by feeling up small children in their sleep. That is not “boys will be boys.” At fourteen you know what you are fucking doing when it comes to bad touch even if your frontal lobes haven’t shaped your finalized personality matrix.

You know, or you should know, even if you belong to a fundamentalist sect/cult of Christianity that treats women like property and delegates their roles to baby factories and toys for their future husbands. I’m digressing into a nature vs. nurture argument regarding the Quiverfull Movement here, but even someone raised in a nuthouse like that should have some semblance of rationality. I’m not letting Duggar off the hook. To anyone who is not a complete asshole, hands stay off children even if those children are girls viewed by the family cult as second class citizens.

TLC, the subject of a future post I am certain, has canceled 19 Kids and Counting over the scandal, a year after striking Here Comes Honey Boo-Boo off the schedule, again due to molestation allegations. I’d like to be optimistic and believe that TLC will eventually drop all its culturally devoid reality geek shows and return to being owned by NASA as The Learning Channel, but we’ve a long way through the wilderness yet.

But onto Lena Dunham.

Well, let me catch my breath. When I spend my entire early morning turning “whats” and “what ifs” over in my head on the same day I have to report to work, that’s an early sign I need to take a mental health day, sit on the front porch with a bottle of flavored water and stare reflectively into the middle distance.

I confess I don’t know much about Lena Dunham beyond watching the first season of Girls and Tiny Furniture eons before that. She’s become a figurehead and cultural icon among the Left and within the contemporary Feminist movement. She likes to appear nude on camera a lot, an act that offends dickheads because her curves don’t give them as good an erection as a woman whose tits look more edible under studio lights.

She’s also written a book, Not That Kind of Girl, a tell-all series of autobiographical essays. It is a particular passage or series of passages within this book that has the Palins’ pigeon feathers aflutter.

“Do we all have uteruses?” I asked my mother when I was seven.

“Yes,” she told me. “We’re born with them, and with all our eggs, but they start out very small. And they aren’t ready to make babies until we’re older.” I look at my sister, now a slim, tough one-year-old, and at her tiny belly. I imagined her eggs inside her, like the sack of spider eggs in Charlotte’s Web, and her uterus, the size of a thimble.

“Does her vagina look like mine?”

“I guess so,” my mother said. “Just smaller.”

One day, as I sat in our driveway in Long Island playing with blocks and buckets, my curiosity got the best of me. Grace was sitting up, babbling and smiling, and I leaned down between her legs and carefully spread open her vagina. She didn’t resist and when I saw what was inside I shrieked.

My mother came running. “Mama, Mama! Grace has something in there!”

My mother didn’t bother asking why I had opened Grace’s vagina. This was within the spectrum of things I did. She just got on her knees and looked for herself. It quickly became apparent that Grace had stuffed six or seven pebbles in there. My mother removed them patiently while Grace cackled, thrilled that her prank had been a success.

Immediate thoughts: Questionable. Curious. A seven-year-old of either gender does not have the mental or physical capacity to really equate ‘sexuality’ with ‘gratification,’ unlike a fourteen-year-old who will have been decorating their bedroom with fluids for at least two years beforehand. At the same time, a seven-year-old who spreads apart an infant’s vulva, in my opinion, could benefit from some manner of intervention. This speaks of playing doctor on a stranger level.

The media, namely the right-wing media, picked up on the story and perpetuated it to the masses, doing what they excel at: fearmongering. Headlines like “Lena Dunham Describes Sexually Abusing Her Little Sister” leave little room for argument or a forum for discourse. There are people who do not read their news beyond the headlines, and the Right revels in this. Bristol Palin penned her blog post calling us all hypocrites, and Mama Palin expanded on it via Facebook and Twitter.

A quick word  before moving on: the Left is not innocent of sensationalism. Not at all. Both parties wade heavily in this stink, and their respective news outlet share the guilt. This is why I try to avoid the politically polarized news as best I can.

So we have a woman who accounts doing something off color to her baby sister as a seven-year-old. With some reservation I can pass this off as a child not knowing any better. But as I delved further into the story, I kept reading comments and reminders that similar actions of Dunham’s continued until she was seventeen, and that this has also been chronicled in Not That Kind of Girl.

I see two problems here. First, I have not read Dunham’s book at this point in time. All of my information is being derived from the news, Left and Right, and the vitriol being spewed back and forth in comment sections. Until I read Not That Kind of Girl for myself, my only venue is listening to what the Internet says. Does the book really say this continued until Dunham’s late teens, or has someone made shit up?

Second, experience and common sense have taught me to take a Palin’s words with the smallest of smallest salt grains. I trust a Palin as much as I trust a rock.

Here’s the thing about a rock. Let’s assume, hypothetically, that it possesses a level of consciousness and self-awareness. A rock doesn’t like to move on its own accord. It is content with staying exactly where it is. This creates few opportunities for learning experiences. The only time it moves, and thus learns, is when it is moved by an outside force, usually a strong current or flood water. Such is a Palin.

In response to Mama and Baby Rock: we’re not being hypocritical when we speak against Josh Duggar. Josh was a horny teenage boy who put his hands where they didn’t belong. His family covered it up. His criminal record was destroyed. That is the issue, and that is why 19 Kids and Counting is gone and 45 minutes of the average American’s time is freed up to do something other than keeping up with their freaks –  like reading.

The Left is dividing on Dunham just as the Right is screaming about it and telling us to stay afraid and be afraid. There is no Liberal double-standard here. My observations indicate that the Left is conflicted about this as well.

And again, Josh Duggar touched children. Caitlyn Jenner did not.

Learn where priorities are.

Addendum: I had to Google how to spell ‘Dunham’ and ‘Duggar’ multiple times throughout this article.