What an interesting time to be alive.

Recently, I’ve been thinking about a comment I saw on a playmate’s post. The comment came from a young woman. She blasted the playmate for her “fake” breasts, assumed Botox, lip fillers, etc. Many men and women attacked the negative commenter, accusing her of jealousy. Others were harsher, slamming her heavily tattooed body, short blue hair, and many piercings. It became a never-ending back and forth.

I must have caught the action early, because the commenter’s page was still public. She identified as non-binary, so perhaps I shouldn’t have called her a young woman. But I’m not exactly hip to the new gender names, codes, etc. And I don’t plan to be. I accept and respect whatever it is you want to be. Just don’t expect me to learn a new language because of it.

Naturally, I studied her posts. She was in her late 20s, living on the West Coast. Many of her posts featured transgender people and their plight, mainly men transitioning, or fully transitioned, into women. What fascinated me was the double standard.

Why is it wrong for a woman born with breasts to augment them, yet acceptable for a man to undergo plastic surgery for breasts, facial feminization, vaginoplasty, etc., all to look like a woman?

How interesting that some who attack women for altering their own bodies are also the loudest advocates for men to alter theirs completely. I see this often, and I find it fascinating.

I detest any sort of bullying, online or otherwise. I believe the unhappy, the insecure, and cowards bully, but that’s another conversation.

Back to the question at hand: is someone who alters their hair color, covers their body in tattoos and piercings, really in the right to point the finger at someone who alters themselves in a different way?

If you’re advocating for men to alter themselves completely so they can feel authentic, how do you find fault in women who do the same? Is one plight real and the other superficial, or are both simply human attempts at becoming?

And in the end, who decides what is authentic? Who decides what is real?