From my point of view the highlight of this episode was where Cait and Candis visit a support group for trans kids in LA that is run by Chandi. That’s partly because Chandi is fast becoming my favorite part of the show. She’s so sensible and grounded, and so amazingly herself. But it was also the real bit of the show. It featured actual trans kids talking about the problems they have getting their ID changed, and the hassle that they get in the meantime. This is the sort of thing that someone with Cait’s level of privilege is able to avoid.

When Cait says that what she is trying to do with the show is make the world a better place for those kids, and for others who come after them, it makes the whole of the rest of it worthwhile.

The rest, in this episode, is mostly about Kris. The show’s producers, understandably, are determined to play up the family drama for all it is worth. There is no way that Cait, or indeed any trans person, can come out of such a situation looking good. Cis viewers, especially female cis viewers, are always going to end up sympathizing with the trans person’s wife. Mostly, I suspect, they’d be right to do so.

The show has tried to make the best of a bad job by bringing in Jenny Boylan’s wife, Deedie. It is good to be able to show that couples can stay together through transition (Jenny says that about a third do), and in the long term come to love and accept each other again. But even Deedie admits that during the transition process she was caught between the terror of the future with Jenny, and the terror of the future without her.

Caitlyn, of course, is too caught up in the desperate need to be herself, and the giddy excitement of having made it happen. I remember that all too well. But she too is worried about facing the rest of her life alone. Having had her family life define her for the past decade or so of living it in the public eye, she’s not prepared to face the black pit of abandonment that so many of us have walked into because there was nowhere else to go.

Of course when I got to the bottom of mine I found Kevin there waiting for me, and things got mostly better from then on. Other people are not so ridiculously lucky.