Did you hear the one about Bruce Jenner?  No?  You missed it?  Well, then, it’s probably too late.

A grown man says he’s a woman, shaves off his Adam’s apple (for starters), and shows a former network anchor his little black dress.  You’d think the late-night comedians would have enough material to get them through the summer.  But a funny thing happened immediately after the infamous interview with Diane Sawyer aired, shattering ratings and my eyeballs: The jokes stopped.

Yes, Bruce Jenner’s name came up during the hour that followed the late local news.  The topic, however, was a different sort of elephant in the room: “Everyone tuned in to watch Jenner make a pretty big announcement,” said The Tonight Show’s Jimmy Fallon.  “That’s right, Bruce Jenner declared he is a woman and a Republican.  In other words, the GOP finally found something that might be able to beat Hillary.”

The other comedians followed suit, laying off the obvious and seizing on the incidental.  Jenner, a living looney tune, can only be mocked for saying he’s a Republican, or for being a glory hound.

Such was not the case just, it seems, a few minutes ago.  Jimmy Kimmel, Saturday Night Live—all of the politically correct “satirists” and “observational humorists” made regular jokes not only about a gold-medal decathlete who is now playing third fiddle to the famous-for-being-famous Kardashians, but about the very fact of his obsession with pretending to be a woman.

What changed?

Besides Jenner’s 65-year-old estrogen-therapy-enhanced bosom, what changed was the mood of the left’s cultural minders.  Having won on every front in the battle over “gay marriage,” they’ve now turned to the next confrontation between traditional, natural-law morality and their aversion to the divine “no”: transgenderism.

The timing seems diabolically deliberate.  With the Supreme Court deliberating whether pretend marriages between sodomites are protected by the U.S. Constitution, the transgender blitz began in earnest.  NBC News launched a series of vign ettes profiling boys who want to be girls and girls who want to be boys.  (Unrelated: As I write, NBC’s “Transgender Kids” page is on my screen, and at the top is an ad that reads, “Fifty Shades of Grey: Unrated—Own It Now.”)  “Jacob’s Journey” aired on April 21.  It profiles a five-year-old girl named Mia Lemay, whose affluent parents have renamed her, chopped off her hair, and dressed her as a boy since at least age four.  Mother Mimi weeps as she relates how her daughter asked her, “Why did God make me wrong?” and declares that she now refuses to “force him [sic] to be Mia.”  She says that friends and family told her Mia’s obsession with being a boy was a phase, but “phases end,” and Mia’s hatred for her body only grew with each passing day of being forced to live according to the sex she was assigned in utero.

CNN then profiled Ryland Whittington, a girl transitioning to a boy whose story (via YouTube) inspired the Lemays.  Oddly enough, every waymark in the process is identical, right down to the snippets of conversation described by the parents (“Why did God?” . . . “phases end”).  At age six, Ryland, cropped hair, suit and tie, read a speech to the 2014 Harvey Milk Diversity Breakfast, in which “he” thanked “his” parents for “letting me be what I want to be,” and gay activist Milk (d. 1978) for “helping the world to be a better place.”  At the microphone, Mother Whittington held the little script and whispered to Ryland as “he” read.

All of these parents point to Jazz, the most celebrated transitioning child, who this summer will be the star of a reality TV show on TLC.  ABC’s Barbara Walters has championed Jazz’s cause, going back to 2007, when Jazz related to Miss Walters that at age two “she” asked “her” mother when the good fairy would come and use her magic wand to change “her” penis into a vagina.  Jazz is now a fully transitioned teenager who for years has taken massive doses of hormones to alter the process of puberty.  From a very young age, this boy was not just feminine-obsessed but, as home movies reveal, overtly sensual.  Despite demurrals, Jazz seems to relish camera time, even punctuating Walters’ years-long narrative with affirming gestures.  “Most transgender children identify with mermaids,” intoned Walters in 2007.  “Mom, is that a mermaid!” cries Jazz in 2013, as “her” eyes briefly catch the camera in front of a shop window.  Later in that program, Jazz texts a curious boy to inform him that “she” has a penis.  “Like a tattoo that won’t rub off,” Walters says ominously in voiceover, “the p-word is likely to follow Jazz everywhere.”

The groundwork having been laid for him, Jenner took center-stage wearing lipstick and makeup.  Coaxed along by Sawyer, the Olympic athlete and reality star denied that he’s doing any of this for attention.  “We’re going to do some good,” he said through tears, referring to his claim that by placarding himself he will help Americans to accept transgendered youth, who have a high rate of suicide.

Thus, we discovered just one day after the interview aired that America has now accepted transgenderism, and if you disagree you are a bigot.  (CNN called it “Culture’s transgender moment.”)  You may not speculate whether this pathology is a pathology, unless you want children to kill themselves.  You may not wonder aloud whether parents, whose children all seem to be reciting the same script, might have failed to correct their children properly and consistently, and to teach them that a boy is a boy, a girl is a girl, and there is a right way for a boy or a girl to behave.  You may not detect rehearsed psychobabble in the speech patterns of four- and five-year-olds whose level of self-awareness seems more than unusual for their age.  You may not laugh—or even cry, except for tears of joy, as you thank the good fairy that the sexual abuse of children is now celebrated by all of the major networks and even the President of the United States.

Speaking of scripts, the left’s über narrative was the same with regard to the cultural acceptance of homosexuality and gay marriage.  Obsessed with yesterday’s political battles, we don’t see what is happening right before our eyes.  The joke’s on us.