“All body mutilation is a tragic joke, except for gender mutilation, which is a wondrous thing”

Daniel Harris, as quoted by Bookworm on a post titled Sex and State Power - What's Behind Obama's Transgender Push.  (via Instapundit)

. . . TGs (transgenders) have ambushed the debate and entangled us in a snare of such trivialities as the proper pronouns with which to address them, protocol as Byzantine and patronizing as the etiquette for addressing royalty. They insult us with the pejorative term “cisgender,” which they use to describe those of us who accept, however unenthusiastically, our birth gender, as opposed to the enlightened few who question their sex. Moreover, they shame us into silence by ridiculing the blunders we make while trying to come to grips with their unique dilemmas, decrying our curiosity about their bodies as prurience and our unwillingness, or even inability, to enter into their own (often unsuccessful) illusion as narrow‑mindedness.

[snip]

While I fervently support TGs’ rights to transition and to do so without fear of reprisal, I believe that the whole phenomenon of switching one’s gender is a mass delusion. For one, the physical manipulation involved in transforming oneself into a man or woman is apparently different in kind—or so the transgender community presumes—from the nips and tucks undertaken by the trophy wife or celebrity, anti‑heroes of a materialistic culture with whom the TG, having taken advantage of the same merchandising of the body promoted by commercialized medicine, bears a strong and unfortunate resemblance. The general public almost universally disapproves of plastic surgery and laughs derisively at celebrities who present a face “different from the one they rode in on,” as one commentator referred to their futile—and often ruinous—efforts to roll back the hands of time. The obscene trout pout of Donatella Versace, the misshapen nipples and oblong breasts of Tara Reid, the Joker’s grimace of Kim Novak, are all fair game for that most American and democratic of blood sports, the desecration of the rich and famous in tabloids and gossip blogs.

And yet what is the actual difference between Michael Jackson whittling his nose down to a brittle sliver of bone and whitening his skin with alpha hydroxy acid and arsenic in order to efface his blackness and the TG sanding down her brow bone and hacking off a sizeable chunk of her mandible in order to efface her gender? Why is the one decried as a racially reprehensible instance of self‑mutilation, self‑denial, and self‑loathing and the other extolled as a celebratory instance of self‑liberation? Why is it not only okay but valiant for Caitlyn Jenner to liberate her inner woman through rhinoplasties and laryngeal shaves while it is deplorable and pathetic for Michael Jackson to liberate his inner Caucasian through bleaching and cleft chin augmentation? When Rachel Dolezal goes to the Palm Beach tanning salon for her weekly $30 dip, she is committing the unconscionable crime of appropriating blackness (or, in her case, as the Gawker put it, not blackness but “Medium Brown Spray Tan”), but when Laverne Cox, one of the breakout performers on the television show Orange Is the New Black, slaps on a transdermal estrogen patch, she is lauded as a hero and role model. All of the arguments against plastic surgery—that it is dangerous, even fatal, often botched, and symptomatic of either extreme body dysmorphia or a lamentable effort to accommodate Hollywood’s chauvinistic ageism—can be leveled against those who transition from one sex to another. The trophy wife and the TG swim, it seems, in the same surgeon‑infested seas.

It's a long article, but if you really want to understand what is at stake, what the push is really about please read the whole thing. I found it eye opening.