Keeping Up With The Kardashians sex-change star: Breasts make my golf better!
Caitlyn Jenner on the unexpected benefits of becoming a woman
I crossdressed for years and was so scared I’d get caught
AS A champion athlete, Bruce Jenner invented the victory lap after taking a spectator’s flag and running around the track – a tradition that continues to this day. Now Jenner is at the forefront of a new revolution for, after ‘transitioning’ to become Caitlyn, the Olympic gold medal-winning decathlete has become the world’s most famous transgender woman.
And in a rare and remarkably frank interview, the star of Keeping Up With The Kardashians – the popular reality show about her extended family – has revealed some of the unexpected benefits of becoming a woman.
‘When people ask me about my new life as a woman, they always ask the same question about my golf game: “Are your breasts going to get in the way?”’ she says.
‘The answer is no, my game is still really good. And to be honest, the breasts are really good for putting. I used to put a sock under my arm to help keep my arms straight, but now I don’t have to do that any more because I can hold my arms against my breasts, so it’s perfect.’
But along with the highs – not to mention the international attention that her sex change has attracted – came the lows and self-doubt that have plagued Caitlyn since childhood.
Speaking before a new series of her own reality TV show I Am Cait is aired, the 66-year-old – who had gender-reassignment surgery last year and has since featured on the cover of Vanity Fair magazine – reveals the inner torment that led her to become a woman late in life.
And she insists that assuming a new female identity has not changed the person inside.
‘This woman who I am now has lived inside me for all of my life, but Bruce is inside me, too,’ she says.
‘I still fly planes and I still go to the racetrack. I still do all that fun stuff and why not? Girls can do it too. I still have my same views, my same relationships with people – all of that is the same.
‘One thing that has changed is that I am much more comfortable in going out in public. In the old days, I never went out, even with the family – I dreaded it. These days we are going out. Going to dinner, going to an event, being with my girls [her community of transgender girlfriends]. Life’s become much more fun.’
Caitlyn also reveals how her belief that she had been born in the wrong body had blighted her childhood.
After years of feeling she was living a lie, only now, in her 60s, does she feel that her gender confusion has been resolved.
‘I’ve been dealing with the issue of being transgender since I was a young kid,’ she explains. ‘Back in the 1950s and 1960s, these were issues you couldn’t talk about with your parents or with anyone.
‘I was a dyslexic kid, suffering from low self-esteem, thinking everyone else was smarter than me, better students than me, and the only thing I had going for me was sports, which I was pretty good at. So I hid all my issues in playing sports. It was my way of proving to the world that I was worth something, and it also distracted me from my real issues in life.
‘But the day I broke the world decathlon record at the 1976 Olympics in Montreal was the day I retired from athletics. I knew I had to move on in life because there was nothing else in sport for me to achieve.
‘I remember waking up the next morning and looking in the mirror with not a stitch on and the gold medal around my neck, and it being a really scary moment. I was thinking, “Where do I go from here? What is my next distraction going to be? I don’t even have to work out today – what am I going to do?”’
After winning the gold medal, Jenner became the poster boy of American athletics, which in turn led to a lucrative TV career that, Caitlyn admits, allowed her to keep running from her demons.
‘The next day, the TV studio ABC called up and offered me a job and for the next 30 years I dived into that and into my family,’ she adds. ‘I was constantly living distractions.’
Jenner married Chrystie Scott in 1972 and had a son and a daughter – Burt and Casey. The couple divorced in January 1981, and days later Bruce married actress Linda Thompson in Hawaii. They went on to have sons Brandon and Brody, before they divorced in 1986.
On April 21, 1991, Jenner married Kris Kardashian, the first wife of O. J. Simpson’s friend and former lawyer Robert Kardashian. Robert represented the American football star turned actor in his infamous 1995 trial for murdering his wife Nicole and her friend Robert Goldman.
Mrs Kardashian already had four children – Kourtney, Kim, Khloe and Rob – and she and Jenner went on to have two more children, Kendall and Kylie, before they separated in 2013. They divorced last year.
The extended family has been at the centre of the hugely successful reality TV franchise Keeping Up With The Kardashians since 2007, making global celebrities and multi-millionaires of all of them.
Indeed, Kim Kardashian, who is married to superstar rapper Kanye West, was last year named as the highest paid reality TV star, earning £37 million in 2015, according to Forbes magazine. Yet the Kardashi-
ans’ 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 excitement 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 ten 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 she started dressing in a more feminine way]. I would have four or five paparazzi cars following me, cutting 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 as I was going through the grocery line – 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 more quietly. I could have gone to Alaska, found myself 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 my son 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 – “Oh, my God, how is that going to work out?” My sister was terrified. But they were only concerned for me because they love me. Once they figured out it was all going to be OK, 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.’