What happened to Bruce Jenner?
TCaitlyn Jenner calls her life, is bookended by two magazine covers: Sports Illustrated, in the summer of 1976 — Bruce Jenner, arms upraised to celebrate his decathlon gold-medal win at the Montreal Olympics; and Vanity Fair, in the summer of 2015 — Caitlyn Jenner, celebrating her coming-out as the woman she always wanted to be. Jenner’s memoir is “The Secrets of My Life.” The title is a bit of a joke, an acknowledgment that, as the best-known transgender woman in the world, there are no secrets anymore. This Q&A was excerpted from our live conversation at the Los Angeles Times Ideas Exchange. Listen to or read the interview in its entirety at latimes.com/opinion.
As I was looking online, I noticed there’s no Wikipedia page for Bruce Jenner — there’s just Caitlyn Jenner.
They wiped it out?
Was that your doing? No, no!
So where does Bruce fit in your narrative?
Bruce was around for 65 years. Bruce did a lot, OK? And I’m very proud of his accomplishments. He lives now inside me. Caitlyn gets a chance to live, where Caitlyn was always inside and Bruce lived.
I raised my family, raised great kids, worked all my life, was successful, won the games, beat everybody in the whole world. I’m proud of that life. So I don’t say, just forget it. That is part of my journey.
It was actually sad when I got my [Caitlyn] driver’s license and all that stuff, because I liked Bruce. Then all of a sudden, right down to my birth certificate, the names were changed and gender markers were changed and it was tough to take. He’s still there.
When you did your book tour, I assume at the top of your agenda there was transgender issues. There is still the North Carolina bathroom issue, there are still questions about prosecuting attacks on transgender people as hate crimes.
Boy, have I gotten hammered over the last two years for being a Republican. I get it. The Republicans do not do as good a job when it comes to LGBT issues.
I sat down with evangelical Christian conservative senators and Republicans at a private dinner in Washington. Probably none of them had ever met anybody who was trans. I wanted them to get to know me. I wanted them to know I’m not crazy, I’m not nuts. We talked for three hours about faith, about politics, about the issues that are out there for our community.
That’s the only way you can slowly change minds. I would
rather convince the Republican Party to do better with all LGBT issues than try to convince the Democrats to do lower taxes, less regulation, and let the people go.
But my loyalty was not with Donald Trump, not with the Republicans. It’s with my community.
You spoke often about how fortunate you were to be able to afford the treatments you wanted to do. Should transgender surgeries be covered by insurance policies?
Well, it is expensive. I know. And yeah, obviously I would like to have insurance cover those types of things. I would fight for it. In some cases it [does]. Insurance will come in and help lower the cost in certain ways, maybe pay for the anesthesiologist, pay for the hospital, do things like that. Is it universal everywhere? Absolutely not. It would be nice if we get to that point where we can help everybody if they need to have it done.
How do you accommodate transgender kids, transgender athletes? For example in locker rooms in school, in college, even when you get to the pro athlete level?
[I met the superintendent] at Arcadia [Unified School District] and he was just fabulous. They fought this whole thing about the locker room. They were going over this whole thing and he says, once we got the lawyers out of the room and we sat down with the parents, and with the school, we just kind of worked these things out. What this school system did is put up curtains for the showers. It was that simple.
You spent 20 years in a houseful of women, and you’ve made your transition — what do you really think of people who leave the toilet seat up?
I’ve realized that they’re horrible people. I didn’t know that at first!