Bryon Noem, a “transwoman,” and Tiresias walk into a bar …

The Bryon Noem story is a sad one, even to someone not overly sympathetic to men who get off on dressing up like women.

Because Bryon Noem is a man so consumed by his sexual fetish for “bimbofication” that he, as a semi-public figure, risked a degree of humiliation it is almost impossible to imagine without feeling some uncomfortable combination of horror and disgust and pity. If not for him or his wife, at least for his three children. Then there was the national security risk.

And of course there was his wife’s career, until she ended that all on her own. Removed from partisan politics and from the backdrop of an organized campaign to blur distinctions between the sexes so men can claim womanhood as their own, the story could make even those of us whose hearts have been hardened by said campaign feel a little sad for him.

But can his story be removed from those things?

By his own account, Bryon Noem wants “to be a woman so bad.” Meaning he understands he is not one now. But he believes he knows how to change that. According to texts attributed to him by the New York Post, he believes he could be a “great woman.” All it would take would be, “[h]air removal. Huge fake tits. Ass implants. Hormones.”

Which raises an interesting question about what should be done with Bryon Noem if he goes ahead with it all, the huge fake tits, etc., etc. And thusly believes himself to be a woman.

Specifically, it would be a good question for the “transgender” rights apparatus. The ACLU, HRC, GLAAD et al. The pink-haired men in Protect the Dolls T-shirts and miniskirts. The celebrity cheerleaders like Megan Rapinoe. Possibly your neighbor or your kid’s teacher or someone even closer to you. Because they have been telling us that a woman is someone who says he’s a woman and some women are born in the wrong body and they’re called transwomen and transwomen are women. And so forth.

What this seems to mean is that Bryon Noem doesn’t need the huge fake tits, much as he might like to have them anyway. He needs only to say the words. And he’ll be every bit as much a woman as Caitlin Jenner or Dylan Mulvaney or Lia Thomas. Or me.

It might not get him too far in South Dakota, but the special affirmation and validation that can only come from infiltrating female spaces awaits right over the border and in many other blue states.

Better yet, his story won’t be a sad one anymore. It will be one of redemption. Metamorphosis. Liberation. He would go from humiliation to celebration, from sad and embarrassing to stunning and brave.

Or would he?

So, this is the question for the transgender rights apparatus, if Bryon Noem says he’s a woman, will you welcome “Crystal” nee Bryon Noem into the fold? Will you celebrate him as one of your own kind?Or are there some people who say they’re women who aren’t women? And if so, how do we know the difference? Does who you are married to matter? Or does the interest in bimbofication change anything?

Maybe not. See the Pulitzer-award-winning author Andrea Chu, who has equated his own trans-identification with consumption of “sissy pornography.” It doesn’t matter if not all men who call themselves transwomen are acting out a fetish. The point is that doing so isn’t disqualifying.

There is a figure from Greek legend said to have been turned into a woman for seven years. Not because this man, Tiresias, wanted to be a woman so bad. It was because he was being punished. Of course, the idea of womanhood and its incidents as a punishment for transgression runs deep. Recall Eve. Bryon Noem seems to tap into this idea of womanhood as a degrading punishment, promising his online dominatrix to be her “trans bimbo slut.” Reading this, you can hear the echoes of Andrea Chu, the patron scribe of transness, describing womanhood as something accessible to men through extreme degradation.

What, then, is the difference between a transwoman and Bryan Noem, at least once he gets his huge fake tits or has degraded himself enough that he believes he’s crossed the threshold into womanhood? Or simply says he is a woman.

I have no idea.