Bruce Jenner: “What I’m Doing Is Going to Do Some Good”
On Friday night, Diane Sawyer’s interview with Bruce Jenner aired. The 65-year-old revealed that throughout his life he’s been very confused with his gender identity. “I’ve been thinking about this day forever and what I should do with my life. How do I tell my story? How do I tell people what I’ve been through? And that day is today.”
Jenner’s life, to this point, has been what can be described as incongruous: As a kid, he secretly wore his mother and sister’s clothes; he trained as an athlete so intensely that he won Olympic gold and broke world records; he married and divorced three women, and starred on a reality show, plus so much more.
But that’s everything the public’s already known. During hies interview with Sawyer, Jenner disclosed what’s been hiding all along. Here’s what we learned:
Jenner, for all intents and purposes, is a woman. Throughout his life he’s been very confused with his gender identity, admitting that he thinks his brain and soul are much more female than it is male. “I hate the phrase ‘girl stuck in a guy’s body.’ I’m just me,” he said. “Bruce is a lie, she is not a lie.”
He secretly wore his sister’s dresses and mother’s scarves. “I didn’t know why i was doing besides it just made me feel good.”
Sexuality and gender are not the same thing. “I’m not gay, as far as I know, heterosexual. I’ve never been with a guy, always been married, raising kids.” For now, he’s going with asexual.
Keeping Up With the Kardashians has been on the air for years and Jenner was the one with the story all along. “We’ve done 425 episodes I think, over almost eight years, and the entire time I kept thinking to myself, ‘Oh my god,’ this whole thing, the one real, true story in the family was the one I was hiding and no one knew about it. The one thing that could make a difference in people’s lives was in my soul and I couldn’t say anything.”
He’s never socialized a lot. “I never fit in. When you deal with this issue you don’t fit in,” Jenner admitted. He enjoys playing golf, but 99 percent of the time he said he’s alone. "I look at women all the time and I think, 'Oh my god. How lucky are they?’“
He hopes to make a difference coming forward. “What I’m doing is going to do some good and we’re going to change the world. I really firmly believe that.”
Aging helped him come to the decision to become a woman. “If I die, I’d be so mad at myself that I didn’t explore that side of me, and I didn’t want that to happen.”
His first wife Christy was the first person to know. They divorced not because of that but because Jenner was “restless” in the marriage.
Before meeting third wife Kris, he was taking hormones. In the ‘80s he had consulted with a therapist who had provided him with estrogen. He did so for almost five years, undergoing both plastic surgery to change his face and electrolysis to get rid of his hair, before eventually backing out.
His kids have been supportive. The four oldest sat down with Sawyer.
Jenner was mainly concerned with how to protect his children. “Those are the only ones I’m concerned with. I can’t allow myself to hurt them. How do I do this and not hurt my children?”
The Diane Sawyer TV special was the last TV interview he’ll do as Bruce. After, he’ll reemerge as himself. “I’m saying goodbye to people’s perception of me and who I am. I’m not saying goodbye to me because it’s always been me.”
