Bruce Jenner’s tell-all interview: ‘Yes, I’m a woman’
By Nick Bond
Bruce Jenner has spoken publicly for the first time about his gender identity in an eagerly anticipated interview with Diane Sawyer that aired overnight in the US.
The former Olympic athlete and member of the Kardashian clan said that he was in the process of transitioning from a man into a woman.
“Yes, for all intents and purposes, I’m a woman,” Jenner told Sawyer in the much-publicized ABC special. “My brain is much more female than it is male. . .It’s hard for people to understand that, but that’s what my soul is.”
(Bruce did, however, say that he was more comfortable using the pronoun ‘he’ during the interview -so that’s what we’ll use here).
He said that he had been undergoing hormone therapy for 18 months but had not yet made up his mind about reassignment surgery. He declined to provide the name he might use during or after his transition, citing privacy concerns.
Jenner said that it was his ex-stepdaughter Kim Kardashian who had become his most trusted confidante in the family since he revealed the news to those close to him – and that Kim’s husband Kanye had played his part in helping the family come to terms with the news.
“Kim told me a story. She goes, “You know what really turned me around on thinking about this?” I said, “What?” She goes, “Kanye.” I went, “Oh, okay.”’
“He says to Kim, “Look, I can be married to the most beautiful woman in the world, and I am. I can have the most beautiful little daughter in the world, and I have that. But I’m nothing if I can’t be me. If I can’t be true to myself, they don’t mean anything.”’
Jenner revealed during the interview that Kim had even caught him wearing a dress several years ago, and that those behaviours first started back in childhood. At the age of eight years old, he started trying on his mother’s dresses when she left the house.
“I marked the closet so when I put it back I could put it all back, everything back in the exact same spot so I wouldn’t get caught,” Jenner said. “And, at the time, I didn’t know why I was doing it besides it just made me feel good.”
A gold medal winner at the 1976 Olympics, Jenner became one of the most famous sports stars of all time and was at one point dubbed the “world’s greatest athlete.”