Those of us who grew up in the seventies would no doubt remember the Sonny and Cher variety show. We’d also remember the cherubic little blonde two-year-old girl, their daughter Chastity, whom they introduced to us. I remember being struck by Chastity’s uncommon good looks, even as she was lovingly held in Sonny’s arms. You could tell he adored her. I don’t remember her being held by Cher. Not on the show anyway. She tended to model, in matching outfits, next to her insanely beautiful singer mother, Cher of the taut body, perfect olive complexion, bone-straight long black hair. And the clothes! How I wanted Cher’s outfits! I recall a white pair of go-go boots that I coveted! Oh, to have a mother as foxy as Cher, who seemed like Chastity’s hip older sister, I thought. My own mother was something of a clothes horse but she couldn’t hold a candle to Cher’s mishmash of bell bottoms, fringe jackets, halter tops, and whatnot. Sure, every once in a while I’d model in my mother’s ankle-wraps and cheese-bottom wedgies — that’s what girls did! – but, you know, the hip Cher quotient wasn’t truly there.

But I digress… everybody could tell how much Sonny and Cher loved their only daughter. They were the picture-perfect, all-American family. I was a young girl then, so I suppose it was excusable for me to assume their beautiful family would never, could never be touched by shadows.

Then I grew up. And I learned that good-looking families often have some of the ugliest secrets. The Bono family, we saw over the years, had its share. It was marred by divorce, death, chaos, you name it. In short, just another Hollywood family.

Still, there was a sense that in the latter years, things had been put back on an even keel. She’d emerged unscathed from that marriage to Gregg Allman, and Sonny died in that freak skiing accident, but Cher was a survivor. Every decade she’d reinvent herself as a woman and an entertainer so that she didn’t fade into irrelevance. And we loved her even more. Chastity, however, remained a fuzzy image in the background one glimpsed occasionally. There was a whiff of scandal when she came out in the mid-90s but, still, it was Cher we fixed our celebrity-trained gaze upon. Did she have another face-lift? Which young boy was she sleeping with? What the hell did she do with all those Bob Mackie gowns she wore in the 90s?

Imagine my shock when, a few years ago, I read that Chastity had begun gender transitioning. Chastity was going to become Chaz. Apparently, being lesbian wasn’t the right fit for her either; she felt like a man, not a woman who digs chicks.

Last Monday, in an interview with Oprah, Chaz’s appeared in all his portly male glory. I have to tell you, it was a shock. He looks like a man. His voice is now male, and scarily like his late father’s. And he successfully removed his breasts, which, according to him, were what offended him most about his former woman’s body.

Gender transitioning is an issue that has always made me uncomfortable. Maybe I’m simply not one of those enlightened types who understand the fluidity of gender. To reassign one’s gender, I always felt, was to simply be playing God. If the divine design was for me to be female, wasn’t I then flying in the face of God to go to the extent of an operation to become a man? But hearing Chaz Bono talk about hating his woman’s boobs, I realised that he’d seriously been in the wrong body. That’s what sold me on his claim to feeling like he didn’t fit in. “Why not just continue being a lesbian, Chaz?” I kept shouting at the TV screen. Why go to the trouble of becoming a man in order to be in a relationship with a girl? (His long-time girlfriend is still with him.)

But, as he tells it, it’s not simply about an attraction to women. He feels like he was actually meant to be a man who’s attracted to women. Two of the things that had to go were the breasts. I know no woman who would willingly lop off her breasts and celebrate their loss. Even as a pre-emptive strike against breast cancer. Look how many of us lift trembling fingers to do our breast self-examination each month for fear of finding a lump. The idea of having to live without one of the major organs that define our femininity makes us quake with fear.

But transgender talk still makes me queasy. Especially female-to-male reassignment. There are some questions I have that weren’t addressed in the interview. For example, how will Chaz’s girlfriend characterise herself now? Is she still a lesbian who’s in a relationship with a man without a penis? (Chaz admitted he’s still a woman below the waist.) Does the girlfriend’s image of herself change now because he’s changed? Is this fair?

Another question is: how should a parent deal with this? Cher, apparently, is having a rough time coping. She’d no sooner finally accepted her child was gay than had to call on a reserve to summon support for the child she knew to be a girl to become a man.

And my final question, the million-dollar question I guess, is this: if we accept that there are people who feel as though they’re packaged in the wrong body, and those who’re left to choose the body they most relate to –as what obtains with intersex people, for example — what does that say about the creationism theory we automatically embrace? How do we reconcile ourselves with the scripture that talks about us being fearfully and wonderfully made? Is there such a thing as divine design? Maybe it’s easier to dismiss transgender people as screwed up, unsure of what they want, because it challenges the tenets of our Judaeo-Christianity. After all, if God didn’t get it right with them, how else did He strike out with us? Seeing that He loves us all the same? Can we in all sincerity aver that the Creator doesn’t make mistakes? And what good is faith, in that case?

Chaz appeared on Oprah because he wanted to get a conversation on a difficult subject going. The truth is, young people are increasingly faced with these and other complicated issues about sexuality. Regardless of whether they make us uncomfortable, they aren’t going away. We have to talk about them.