Becoming Caitlyn: Does Olympic legacy need a rewrite?
After Bruce Jenner’s highly publicized transition to Caitlyn Jenner — well documented on Keeping Up With the Kardashians, in a Diane Sawyer interview and in a Vanity Fair cover that together have made her arguably the most famous transgender person in the world — a lesser star of the media universe took to social media to say: No way.
“Sorry,” Drake Bell, a musician and former child star, wrote in a tweet since deleted, as Us Weekly reported. “Still calling you Bruce.”
Excoriated by many who deemed the tweet transphobic, Bell tried to explain himself.
“I’m not dissing him! I just don’t want to forget his legacy!” Bell wrote — in another tweet he later deleted. “He is the greatest athlete of all time! Chill out!”
But Bell’s insensitive declaration raises an interesting point.
Did Bruce Jenner or Caitlyn Jenner win those Olympic gold medals and appear on those TV shows? And if Caitlyn Jenner did, must history be rewritten? Is every source that refers to “Bruce Jenner, record- breaking athlete” — or “Bruce Jenner, guest star on Silver Spoons” — now in need of a correction?
Wikipedia seems to think so. By Tuesday evening, it was redirecting its “Bruce Jenner” page to “Caitlyn Jenner” and using the pronoun “she.” Example: “At the 1976 Summer Olympics in Montreal, Canada, she won the gold medal in the decathlon, setting a world record of 8,616 points, beating her own world record set at the Olympic Trials,” the Caitlyn Jenner Wikipedia page read on June 1. This sentence was a bit jarring: “Jenner was also the Associated Press Male Athlete of the Year in 1976.”
Could Bruce be Caitlyn before he knew he could be Caitlyn? In the ABC interview that aired in April, Jenner tells Sawyer to use pronouns such as “he” and “him.” But in Vanity Fair, she implies that Caitlyn — or a version of Caitlyn — was there all along.
“I’d walk off the stage and I’d feel like a liar,” Jenner says of the 1976 Olympic win. “And I would say, ‘ F---, I can’t tell my story. There’s so much more to me than those 48 hours in the stadium, and I can’t talk about it.’ It was frustrating.”
According to GLAAD’s media reference guide, “Ideally a story will not use pronouns associated with a person’s birth sex when referring to the person’s life prior to transition. Try to write transgender people’s stories from the present day...”
The problem: Caitlyn Jenner is a sports legend, and her story began decades ago.