Life with Gracie: Caitlyn or Bruce? I’m confused

Topping the list, though, is people who transition to another gender. I don’t understand how or why, for instance, Bruce Jenner, now Caitlyn, knows in her heart of hearts that she was meant to be a woman and not a man or that Chaz Bono (born Chastity, daughter of Sonny and Cher) knows that he is, in fact, a man.

Jenner's journey was the subject of a Diane Sawyer interview last month and again Monday when she graced the cover of Vanity Fair. In a Twitter post, the magazine said the Olympian spoke emotionally about her gender journey: "If I was lying on my deathbed and I had kept this secret and never ever did anything about it, I would be lying there saying, 'You just blew your entire life.'"

I understand not wanting to die with regrets. I understand, too, how secrets can sometimes hurt us. I don’t understand how a man changing into a woman fixes that if you’re still attracted to women.

Jenner, who married and divorced reality show star Kris Jenner, has appeared for years on "Keeping Up with the Kardashians." Come July 26, Caitlyn will star in her own docu-series called "I am Cait" chronicling her transition on the same network, E!.

It stands to reason that if there are as many as 700,000 transgender men and women in the U.S., that all of them can’t be wrong but I still find it hard to understand, to make that leap.

My straight 26 year-old, who thinks being a medical school student makes her smarter than me, tried explaining it to me one day recently pointing, for instance, to hermaphrodites, people who are born with both male and female organs or characteristics. But I still don’t get it.

I feel like I imagine my daughter’s Yorkie, Bella, must be feeling when she looks at me, cocks her head and lifts her left ear as if to say, seriously?

I have gay friends and colleagues who say they don’tunderstand this either. I asked one of them, for instance, why would you make the leap from a man to a woman but still prefer women?

He told me it’s not about sexuality, it’s about gender. I think I understand that.

But then I read that prior to the unveiling of Caitlyn, Jenner said he preferred the pronoun “he,” which left me with yet another question. Why?

I know that there are people who find it difficult to even believe in a higher power. They don’t understand, for instance, believing the Bible is the inerrant word of God as I do.

I start my day reading scriptures even though I don’t always understand them either. For instance, why does God permit evil to flourish or how will he usher in a new heaven and a new earth?

I believe, however, that he will bring everything he says to pass.

In one of the stories I read about Jenner, Renee Richards, who famously transitioned from man to woman in 1975, said Jenner should benefit from living in a more enlightened time.

Richards was a successful doctor and, like Jenner, a father and star athlete.

But she had to sue to be allowed to play tennis at the U.S. Open, where she made it to the women’s doubles finals in 1977. And she said doctors initially refused to help her when she approached them as a 40-year-old man.

“It was too scary for them,” Richards told GQ Magazine. “They couldn’t fathom how someone who had been so supremely successful in everything — in medicine, in sports, in life — as a heterosexual man, as a husband, as a father, they couldn’t understand that.”

“In this day and age,” she added, “they would understand.”

But that’s the point. I don’t.

Maybe I’m missing something. Maybe looking through a medium as obscure and opaque as the heart can be sometimes, prevents me from seeing. Maybe it is as the Apostle Paul says in 1 Corinthians 13:12 “For now we see through a glass, darkly.”