Jenner savors transgender advocate role
Caitlyn Jenner has a wide array of titles to attach to her identity.
Reality TV celebrity. Olympic decathlon gold medal winner. Parent. Author. And, most notably now, transgender woman.
But Jenner thinks her true calling is to be an advocate for the transgender community and those struggling with gender dysphoria as she did for 65 years.
“I look at it like this: Bruce did just about all he could possibly do. He won the (1976) Games, raised 10 wonderful children, was a couple (in relationships). Then, I finally got the guts to live my life authentically,” Jenner told USA TODAY Sports in a wide-ranging phone interview.
“I’ve lived a fascinating life.
Especially now, being in the fourth quarter, I’m happy to be where I’m at. I sincerely want to make a difference, to help my (transgender) community.”
But Jenner says her approach — learning a new world on the go, living in the public eye and spilling all of her secrets — has made her mission as an advocate difficult and misunderstood largely because of her celebrity. Her political leanings and friendship with President Trump also have been factors, she says.
Although Jenner is easily the most recognizable transgender person on the planet with a gigantic platform to reach people and evoke change, her identity as an advocate can be overshadowed by Kardashian-centric and paparazzi-infused headlines.
“I get criticized, especially by the trans community,” says Jenner, who recently completed a book tour for her memoir, The Se
crets of My Life. “But everybody does it differently. I don’t speak for the whole trans community. I speak about my journey and try to help the trans community that way the best I can.”
Since her transition in 2015, the 67-year-old has centered the Caitlyn Jenner Foundation around LGBT equality and suicide prevention, teaming with organizations such as Gender Proud, Human Rights Campaign, GLAAD and Trans Chorus of Los Angeles, while her collaboration with MAC AIDS Fund provided $1.3 million to 21 transgender organizations nationwide. Her gender transition E! television show I
Am Cait — although reminiscent in reality format to the popular Keeping Up with the Kardashians that Jenner starred in with her family — took on a more serious tone by focusing on social issues in the transgender community through two seasons (2015-16).
Nick Adams, director of GLAAD’s Transgender Media Program, noted that more than 80% of people in the USA have never met a transgender person and said of Jenner’s reality show: “Caitlyn had a lot to learn about the transgender community, and by bringing viewers along with her as she met trans people around the country, she and the show influenced the way Americans see and understand trans people and the issues they face.”
Cyd Zeigler, the co-founder of Outsports.com, an online magazine for LGBT athletes, says, “I understand the frustration that some people in the transgender community might have with Caitlyn, but what she did in coming out is immeasurable from the impact it’s had not just on the country but internationally.
“Suddenly, people in the middle of the country knew a transgender person for the first time. And it was a person they might’ve looked up to, who was sitting on their breakfast table (Jenner appeared on a Wheaties box as an Olympian).
“Caitlyn has had to face the fact that she’s not like other trans people. Most trans people don’t live in Malibu and grocery shop with millionaires. Many trans people are unemployed and struggle to find work. But putting herself in an unfamiliar position has opened up a lot of people’s eyes. …
“Across all civil rights movements, there are three steps forward and one step back. Whatever (the trans) community is facing at this particular moment in the country doesn’t mean they’re not moving in the right direction. The reason it’s moving in the right direction is because you have people who are courageous enough to come out, personalize their experience and be true to themselves.”
Jenner’s greatest athletic moments, the ones that made her — then as Bruce — the epitome of masculinity and athletic achievement with an American flag wrapped around her neck and a gold medal in her hand, came in a different country and in a different time — in Montreal in 1976 as a member of the U.S. Olympic team, to be exact. Asked now how she would have responded to a transgender athlete coming out during her athletic heyday, Jenner took a minute to ponder.
“I would have been quiet to an extent because I wouldn’t have wanted to out myself,” says Jenner, who says she almost came out in the 1980s but refrained because society wasn’t ready for it and the worry of how it would affect her family. “When I was growing up, there wasn’t a name for being trans. You just kept your mouth shut and never told anybody. I know I wasn’t the only one hiding. But even back then, my feelings ... they’ve always been about equality for everybody. I would have said, ‘ Good luck’ to a (transgender) Olympian. That’s how I am. I love to compete no matter what.”
Jenner, who golfs regularly at Sherwood Country Club in Thousand Oaks, Calif., says she used sports and competition to channel her deep-rooted pain and always had “something to prove in my soul about who I was.”
“I wasn’t the average kid who didn’t really need sports,” Jenner says. “For me, I sports. All of a sudden, I had a chance to be the best in the world. My obsession grew greater and greater.”
Jenner commended the International Olympic Committee for the way it has handled transgender inclusion. Under new guidelines ahead of the Rio Games, those who transition from female to male are eligible to compete without restriction and those who transition from male to female are eligible to compete without gender reassignment surgery and with one year of hormone therapy. The old guidelines, from 2004, required surgery and two years of hormone therapy.
Jenner says, “I remember back in the ’70s, all the Soviet women, I even wondered, ‘Are they on the right team?’ This isn’t easy stuff to deal with, and I think (the IOC) is doing a good job and studied the subject. The big questions are with testosterone (levels) for (transgender) females and if males who transition to female are going to have a tremendous advantage. Other organizations will have to follow the Olympic movement, because there’s going to be a transgender (person) coming out in just about every sport. Just watch.”
And that’s where Jenner says she wants her voice to be most heard as an advocate. Spokespeople from the IOC, NCAA and NBA say they would be open to or interested in working with Jenner on transgender inclusion.
“I would love to help out in any way I can,” she says. “The sports world is where it all began for me.”