I feel as though I'd just emerged from a six-month coma--otherwise, how could I have missed something like this?

While perusing online newspapers, as I'm inclined to do, I happen to run across a familiar name and a phrase I never thought I'd see linked together: "Bruce Jenner" and "sex change".

The "click bait" worked. True or not, there's no way in hell I was going to pass this by.

It seems the onetime Olympic athlete was undergoing a rather strange transformation--longer, thicker hair, thinner face, thinned-out brows. Even more oddly, he had supposedly just undergone a tracheal shave, a procedure a lot of us MTFs undergo. From this the tabloid media--in particular the Daily Mail-- made a leap longer than any of Jenner's Olympic jumps and immediately came to the conclusion that he was in the process of becoming a she.

I kept looking for "April 1" as a publication date, but alas, no. Still, I did notice that the only sites reporting this were those that were the least credible. I'll believe it when I see Bruce on the cover of Sports Illustrated in a dress.

So, upon further investigation, the story appears to be hogwash, as I suspected. Yet this is one story I desperately wanted to be true.

I remember Jenner well. I was fourteen when he won his gold medal in the decathlon, breaking the previous Olympic point-total record in the process. It was all I could talk about, gushing over it in my audio-tape diary that evening. In retrospect, that should have been a clue that I liked guys, because I couldn't help but notice how cute he was.

That face graced every Wheaties box--he was everywhere, someone who seemed to represent the best our country could offer. How fitting, then, that an icon in one era could be an icon in another, for a group badly in need of one.

Think about it. We MTFs need our own counterpart to Chaz Bono--a high-profile celebrity who takes us along on the journey toward a life as a woman, just as Chaz had done when he transitioned to male. Yes, we have Lana Wachowski and Laura Jane Grace. But they're celebrities who appeal to a certain niche. Not quite equivalent to Chaz, the child of a pop superstar, a person people of my generation had watched grow up on-air.

When I followed Chaz's transition, it occurred to me that if he had been born male and moving in the other direction, the mainstream media response would not have been quite so positive, and the coverage would have more closely resembled what I saw when I meandered through the muck of the tabloids. Not that Chaz hasn't gotten his share of ridicule--there simply would have been a great deal more guffawing and outraged sputtering both online and off had he gone the other way. The old double standard at work.

However, he would still have endured all of that with grace and dignity, perhaps changing minds in the process. He, in my view, did much to strip away the circus-like reputation that being transgender has acquired, allowing people the world over to see him as a person first.

A male-to-female role model as personable and recognizable as Chaz would do us considerable good, putting a familiar face on a process the general public still views through a Jerry Springer-distorted lens.

Bruce, maybe you really ought to consider posing in that dress.