Breasts make my golf better, says Keeping Up With The Kardashians sex-change star
highest paid reality TV star, earning $53m in 2015, according to Forbes magazine. Yet the Kardashians’s success could not stop Jenner’s yearning to be a woman.
‘I was crossdressing for years and all the time I was scared to death that I was going to get caught,’ she recalls. ‘I would walk around the hotel [dressed as a woman] and I kept thinking, “Why am I doing this? Is it the excite- ment of how far can I go and how many chances can I take?”
‘But it was more than that, and it was a long, long journey to find that out. I first thought I’d transition in the 1980s. I thought I’d do it when I was 40 but I got to 39 and couldn’t do it, I just couldn’t.
‘Cut to two-and-a-half years ago, Kris and I have gone our separate ways – which is fine – I’m living in Malibu, I’ve raised 10 of the most beautiful children in the world, all great kids, so I’d done that job. Now it’s all going to be about me. How am I going, at 65, to deal with the issue I’ve been dealing with since I was eight years old?’
She adds: ‘For two years before I transitioned, I was destroyed every week in the tabloids [because of the split with Kris].
‘I would have four or five paparazzi cars following me, cut- ting me off, they would follow me to the grocery store, they would follow me everywhere. I would even wear the same clothes every day so they couldn’t get a different shot of me. It was horrible – on me, my family, and my loved ones.
‘My mother would call me up and say, “I saw this in a tabloid – what is this?” I hadn’t told her yet, so I would have to fob her off. It was brutal. This is a very serious issue. People commit suicide over it. People get murdered over it. I could have done this quietly. I could have gone to Alaska, found a nice little town in the backwoods, had a nice little life out in the middle of nowhere – and then the media would have found me and it would have been a scandal.
‘I thought, “What I am going to do is bigger than the Olympics. How can I do it and make a difference to the LGBT [lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender] community?” So I decided to do it more publicly.’
And how did the family take it? ‘My kids were great about it,’ Caitlyn says.
‘The first one I told was Brandon. He said, “Dad, I have always been proud to be your son but I have never been more so than I am now”. My daughters were more worried. My sister was terrified. But they were concerned for me because they love me. Once they figured out it was all going to be okay, it was wonderful.’
She adds: ‘The way it is now, the media has thrown old Bruce under the bus. I couldn’t even think of leaving the house as Bruce now. That guy is gone, because this Caitlyn girl is a lot more interesting. And the good of it has so much outweighed any negative. The other morning I was walking round the house, just doing this and that, and I thought, “You know what, I’m really happy”. It was a really simple feeling but I hadn’t woken up happy in a long time.
‘The only thing in my life that hasn’t improved is my cooking. I do a little bit of it but let’s not dwell on that.’