Caitlyn Jenner

Former professional athlete; television personality

• Born: October 28, 1949
• Place of Birth: Mount Kisco, New York

Formerly known as: Bruce Jenner

Education: Graceland College

Significance: A former Olympic athlete and reality television star, Caitlyn Jenner also became known as a celebrity advocate for the transgender community, though some of her views remain controversial.

Former professional athlete; television personality. Caitlyn Jenner, formerly known as Bruce Jenner, first found fame as an Olympic athlete who won the gold medal in the men’s decathlon at the 1976 Olympic Games in Montreal. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, she parlayed her victory into a successful career as a celebrity spokesperson and motivational speaker. Jenner married Kris Kardashian in 1991 and became a visible member of the Kardashian family empire, which includes Kris Kardashian’s children from her first marriage—most notably Kim Kardashian—as well as the couple's two daughters, Kendall and Kylie. Jenner appeared on the reality television show Keeping Up with the Kardashians beginning in 2007. In 2015, she publicly came out as a transgender woman.

Background

Caitlyn Jenner was born William Bruce Jenner on October 28, 1949, in Mount Kisco, New York. Jenner grew up in the Sleepy Hollow/Tarrytown area, where her father was a tree surgeon. Her mother was a homemaker who took care of Jenner and her three siblings. In an interview with Diane Sawyer for 20/20 on April 24, 2015, Jenner recalled being eight or nine years old and acting on a deep yearning to put on one of her older sister Pam’s dresses. She did not know why she wanted to do it, she recalled to Sawyer, but she knew it felt good. Sometimes, when her mother was not home, Jenner would leave the family’s tiny apartment wearing a dress and covering her short hair with a scarf. The jaunts were exhilarating, but Jenner felt alienated and lonely.

Growing up, sports were her refuge. Jenner also had dyslexia and flunked the second grade, but in fifth grade, she competed in a race and won. She soon found that she excelled at other sports as well. In high school—she first attended Sleepy Hollow High School but transferred to Newtown High School in Connecticut when her family moved during her junior year—she was named the most valuable player of the basketball team, football team, and track team. She graduated in 1968.

Athlete and Celebrity

Jenner began participating in decathlons—a grueling two-day, ten-event competition that includes the 100-meter dash, running long jump, shot put, high jump, 400-meter run, 110-meter hurdles, discus throw, pole vault, javelin throw, and the 1,500-meter run (in that order)—as a student at Graceland College (now Graceland University) in Lamoni, Iowa. Jenner won the 1971 decathlon championship of the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics and made the Olympic team in 1972 after finishing third at the US Trials. At the games in Munich, Jenner finished tenth and vowed to devote the next four years of her life to training for the 1976 Olympic Games in Montreal.

In 1976 Jenner shattered the world record to win an Olympic gold medal in the decathlon. At the time, she was the world’s greatest athlete; her face appeared on the cover of Sports Illustrated and on a series of Wheaties boxes. Capitalizing on her success, Jenner embarked on a new career as a celebrity. In 1980, she appeared in a cult film called Can’t Stop the Music alongside actor Steve Guttenberg and the disco group the Village People.

Television Career and Transition

Throughout the 1980s, Jenner worked as a celebrity spokesperson, sports announcer, and motivational speaker. In 1981, she appeared in several episodes of the television series CHiPs as Officer Steve McLeish. Jenner also guest starred on several other television programs, including The Fall Guy in 1984, and Murder, She Wrote in 1985.

In the mid-1980s, Jenner began to change her gender expression to align with her gender identity as a woman. She received hormone treatments and underwent plastic surgery to change the shape of her nose and electrolysis to remove her facial hair, but she began to lose the nerve to publicly come out as a woman around the time she met Kris Kardashian, whom she later married in 1991.

Kardashian became Jenner’s manager and revived her career as a celebrity spokesperson. The couple began appearing on infomercials for exercise equipment, and sixteen years into their marriage, Kardashian secured a deal for a reality television show on E! called Keeping Up with the Kardashians. The show premiered in October 2007. It became an overwhelming success, and Kardashian parlayed the family’s celebrity into a number of lucrative business deals and product endorsements. Jenner’s celebrity was originally used to sell the concept of the show, but she was quickly outshined by her wife, stepdaughters, and daughters.

In 2013, Jenner began to grow out her hair, and other aspects of her gender expression changed noticeably. She separated from Kardashian in 2013 and divorced in 2014. Despite the clues that something much deeper was at play, Jenner became popular fodder for talk show hosts. After one particularly traumatizing run-in with the paparazzi, Jenner briefly considered suicide. But according to Jenner, she was most concerned about hurting her children. When Jenner began telling her children about her gender identity, they were supportive (as was her elderly mother, Esther). Many of them admitted that, on some level, they had always known.

In June 2015, ESPN announced it was naming Jenner as the recipient of the Arthur Ashe Courage Award for bravery. Jenner officially came out as Caitlyn Jenner in Vanity Fair magazine in July 2015, in an article and accompanying photo spread shot by Annie Lebowitz, titled "Call Me Caitlyn." Between 2015 and 2016, she appeared in an eight-part television series, I Am Cait, which followed Jenner as she adapted to her new role as an advocate for the transgender community. The show tied for the 2016 GLAAD Media Award for Outstanding Reality Program. In 2017, Jenner published the memoir The Secrets of My Life, a series of recollections of her life from childhood up to her transition. The memoir caused controversy, with members of the Kardashian family claiming that some events discussed in the book were fabricated or exaggerated.

A longtime Republican, Jenner endorsed Donald Trump in the 2016 US presidential election. However, in an October 2018 opinion piece for the Washington Post, she wrote that she had retracted her support for Trump, having mistakenly believed that he would support the LGBTQ community. Her response came after his administration submitted a proposal to restrict the legal definition of a person's gender to that assigned at birth. She had previously criticized Trump for rescinding federal requirements giving transgender students the right to use the school bathroom that fits their gender identity and for instituting a ban on transgender people from serving in the military.

Jenner continued to be involved in other ventures as a celebrity alongside her work as a transgender advocate. She appeared on the reality shows I'm a Celebrity. . . Get Me Out of Here! in 2019 and The Masked Singer in 2021. (In 2021, Keeping Up With the Kardashians also aired its twentieth and final season.) Jenner also further pursued politics, announcing in April 2021 that she would be running for governor of California amid efforts to recall the state's sitting leader, Democrat Gavin Newsom. Although she received more than 75,000 votes, her campaign drew opposition from many LGBTQ groups due to her previous support of Trump as well as her support of the conservative view that trans girls should not be allowed to play on girls' sports teams. Although initially seen as an ally for the trans community of which she was a part, her views on trans women in sports became an issue for Jenner, but in 2023, she expressed outrage when Nike partnered with another trans activist, Dylan Mulvaney. Jenner slammed what she termed “woke culture” despite having her own successful endorsements with sports companies as a trans woman.

Impact

Jenner is recognized as one of the foremost Olympic athletes in history and will be remembered for her dominance in the decathlon at the 1976 Montreal Olympics. Jenner was also among the first public figures to undergo a highly public transition in gender expression, and she joined fellow transgender celebrities such as actress Laverne Cox as a prominent advocate for the community. Jenner sought to use her celebrity as a platform to talk about transgender issues; her April 2015 interview with Diane Sawyer on 20/20, for example, was part profile and part education in pronouns, gender reassignment surgery, and the difference between gender and sexual orientation. However, she also earned backlash from some others in the LGBTQ community for her conservative political views.

In 2022, Jenner joined Fox News as a contributor. She continued to address issues involving sports, politics, and the transgender community.

Personal Life

Jenner was married to Chrystie Crownover from 1972 to 1980, to actor Linda Thompson from 1981 to 1986, and to Kris Kardashian from 1991 to 2015. She had a total of ten children, including six biological children and four stepchildren.

Bibliography

Bissinger, Buzz. "Caitlyn Jenner: The Full Story." Vanity Fair, 25 June 2015, www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2015/06/caitlyn-jenner-bruce-cover-annie-leibovitz. Accessed 4 Oct. 2024.

"Caitlyn Jenner Fast Facts." CNN, 23 Oct. 2023, www.cnn.com/2021/06/08/us/caitlyn-jenner-fast-facts/index.html. Accessed 4 Oct. 2024.

Edelman, Adam. "Caitlyn Jenner Launches Bid for California Governor." NBC News, 23 Apr. 2021, www.nbcnews.com/politics/elections/caitlyn-jenner-launches-bid-california-governor-n1265064. Accessed 4 August 2021.

Flood, Brian. “Caitlyn Jenner Joins Fox News As Contributor: ‘I Am Humbled by This Unique Opportunity’.” Fox News, 31 Mar. 2022, www.foxnews.com/media/caitlyn-jenner-joins-fox-news. Accessed 4 Oct. 2024.

Jenner, Caitlyn. The Secrets of My Life. Grand Central, 2017.

Jones, Chris. "The Strange Thing about Bruce Jenner." Esquire, 20 May 2012, classic.esquire.com/article/2012/6/1/the-strange-thing-about-bruce-jenner. Accessed 4 Oct. 2024.

La Force, Thessaly. "Bruce Jenner and the Modern American Family." New Yorker, 26 Apr. 2015, www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/bruce-jenner-and-the-modern-american-family. Accessed 4 Oct. 2024.

Morton, Victor. “Caitlyn Jenner Rips Nike over Transgender Sports-Bra Model Dylan Mulvaney: 'This Is an Outrage.'” Washington Times, 6 Apr. 2023, www.washingtontimes.com/news/2023/apr/6/caitlyn-jenner-rips-nike-over-dylan-mulvaney-its-n/. Accessed 4 Oct. 2024.

Quinn, Ben. "Caitlyn Jenner: A Life in the Public Eye." Guardian, 1 June 2015, www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2015/jun/01/caitlyn-jenner-a-life-in-the-public-eye. Accessed 4 Oct. 2024.