The Secrets of My Life

by Caitlyn Jenner

  “There is nothing more painful than losing your child. Nothing,” said Katharine Prescott in an interview with the New York Daily News. “Kyler was the sweetest, gentlest human being. He wouldn’t hurt a fly. The only thing on Earth he would hurt is himself. And if I can even help one family, one other transgender kid like Kyler, I will do it, because this has to stop.”

  Katharine Prescott shows me pictures of Kyler. She tells me of his love playing the piano. She lets me read a poem Kyler wrote about transitioning. She talks with passion and beauty, something you can only feel when you are on the front lines. “I feel like I did everything possible to embrace his gender identity… but my child committed suicide anyway, and I’ve struggled with the unfairness of that.”

  I join the family and Kyler’s friends at a memorial service at a nearby beach, where balloons are released in his memory. The kids ask me questions, as they have in other settings from Dubuque to Brooklyn to San Francisco. I answer all of them as best as I can, telling them that whatever their struggles are, they do get better. Maybe it sounds trite, but I sincerely believe it as long as kids have love and support.

  We have to do better. I have to do better. Hanging out at an Oscar party with Lady Gaga is nice, and I truly appreciate her public support of my transition. Hanging out in private with kids needing support is more rewarding.

  Last year I gave out my cell number at church to a teenager struggling with gender dysphoria and communicating with parents who had trouble dealing with it. I told him to call or text me, and he does.

  I met at my house for several hours with a mother and her trans teen daughter who had flown out from New Jersey. I invited a trans woman I have gotten to know named Ella, who transitioned as a senior in high school only a few years earlier. I wanted the daughter to see that Ella came out thriving on the other side, and now the two of them follow each other on social media.

  As a parent I also can identify with the fears of the mom, not simply in terms of acceptance of her daughter in school and the community, but the impact transition had on their own relationship. I remember someone asking me one day how I would handle it if one of my children had transitioned as a teenager. Despite my own transition, I know I would have had anxiety, this feeling of my daughter or son becoming someone I no longer know. But no matter how difficult it would be for me, I would never stand in the way of any of my children. The mom felt relief when I related to her that her fears are common for any parent.

  I have received thousands of letters. Many thank me for going public with my story and how it inspired them to transition. Some have told me they were contemplating suicide and decided not to because of my willingness to be so open.

  About a year ago I was connected to a transgender woman from South Dakota who was convinced she would not be able to find work because of the climate of the state: legislation restricting bathroom use in schools by transgender teens was passed until a veto by the governor. Other anti-LGBTQ legislation had been proposed as well. She was right to think the atmosphere was toxic:

  Nobody will hire me.

  We spoke on the phone at least a dozen times. I asked her what her interests were, and she said she loved doing makeup. Because of my association with MAC Cosmetics, I told her to see if there was a retail store in the state and I would call the company to make sure she got hired. There wasn’t one, so I urged her to try a department store. She was terrified when she went in to apply. She got a job and afterward sent me a video of her crying, she was so joyful.

  None of this makes me remotely special.

  Only human.

  Focusing on the issues is enormously important. But when I first met with the trans women who would become a part of my reality television show on E!, I Am Cait, and talked about all the lives we had to save, I remember Chandi Moore saying something I will never forget. Chandi has spent years working with trans and gender nonconforming kids at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles in the program Brave Leaders Unified to Strengthen our Health (BLUSH). As I was talking she interrupted me, which is typical of Chandi when there is something that needs to be said.

  You can’t save every soul, but you can save one soul at a time.

  It sunk in that you can talk about the big issues as much as you want, and that’s important, but you also have to go one-on-one on a personal level. I can only do so much. I obviously cannot prevent every suicide, as much as I wish I could. But I also know how crucial it is to reach out to individuals, which is why I do it. I hope others in a position to do the same will reach out as well. If we all save one soul at a time, then collectively we will save thousands.

  I watch those balloons released into the sky on that strip of beach. I leave feeling not just sadness but anger that this could have been prevented if our society would begin to pride itself on acceptance instead of rejection, inclusion instead of exclusion. Stop making us outcasts. We are a vibrant and diverse community.

  I think of Kyler Prescott slumped in the bathroom. I think of his mother finding him. I think of the poem he wrote. Not only was it unusually haunting and beautiful for a fourteen-year-old; it also captured the exact same feeling I had when I looked into the mirror and for so long saw someone I did not recognize. It captured the struggle in all of us.

  My mirror does not define me:

  Not the stranger that looks back at me

  Not the smooth face that belongs to someone else

  Not the eyes that gleam with sadness

  When I look for him and can only see her.

  My body does not define me:

  Not the slim shoulders that will not change

  Not the hips that give me away

  Not the chest I can’t stand to look at

  When I look for him and can only see her.

  My clothes do not define me:

  Not the shirt and jeans

  That would look so perfect on him

  But I know would never fit me

  When I look for him and can only find her.

  And I’ve been looking for him for years,

  But I seem to grow farther away from him

  With each passing day.

  Chapter Two

  Just Drop the Damn Ski

  It is gym class at my elementary school in Tarrytown. The coach has set up a series of cones in the parking lot. Everybody is going to be timed.

  Let’s get in there and see what we can do.

  I have never gone out for a team sport in school. I have no idea of my skill level. Frankly, I’m not very competitive. I do things because they are fun and come naturally, and this seems like fun to me.

  Each of us runs around the orange cones, the coach poised with his stopwatch. He jots down all the times. He looks at me. Classmates who have never given me the slightest attention are patting me on the back. The coach’s stopwatch confirms it.

  I’m the fastest kid in the entire school!

  So maybe there is an outlet for success for me. And it’s not just success as I move up the sports ladder. What better way to prove masculinity? What better way to get rid of this thing? Athletes don’t try on women’s clothing. Athletes don’t walk around the block in a scarf. Athletes parade their private parts in the locker room. We are the titans.

  Sports is the perfect cover in the 1960s, the kingdom of the male, specifically the white male (and it is still the perfect cover now). There is no Title Nine, providing equality for men and women in sports. Integration in college sports is slow and hesitant. As for issues of gender or sexuality, sports are once again the perfect protection. An openly transgender athlete in the 1960s? It is still an underground network: express yourself and you run the risk of being harassed or arrested. Stonewall, the watershed event in the history of the LGBTQ movement, when members reacted violently to a police raid of the Stonewall Inn in New York, would not take place until 1969, when I was in college. The raid targets trans women in standard police procedure of the era: because of a New York City criminal statute requiring three articles of gender
-appropriate clothing, police take into custody those deemed in violation, whereupon they would either feel them up or make them undress to determine their gender and whether the three-article rule is being followed.

  It will not be until 1975 when I am twenty-six that Dave Kopay, a journeyman National Football League running back for nine seasons, will tell the Washington Star that he is homosexual after a series in the paper quotes an anonymous gay football player whom Kopay recognizes as someone he once slept with. And that is two years after his retirement, since going public while playing would have been career suicide. (Even today there are no openly gay athletes actively playing in either Major League Baseball or the National Football League. Professional female athletes have been far more open about their sexual preference, an indication that the environment is far less hostile, and the athletes are more honest and celebratory of themselves.)

  I have found my calling because of that race in fifth grade.

  When I move up to junior high, word is out that I’m fast, and a couple of older kids come up to me one day.

  So you’re fast, huh?

  I guess.

  Let’s see what you got. Let’s race.

  I am fast. But I’m not stupid.

  I run.

  Home.

  As a kid dealing with all these confusing feelings, nothing makes me feel better about myself than going out on the football field and clocking someone. It isn’t just aggression but an expression of one’s ego—you feel dominant over something and can never let go of it. I was never naturally a great athlete. But as I get older and see how my drive to perform and outwork all the other athletes develops, the decathlon becomes more important to me. While this drive obviously comes from a sense of competition, it also comes from a place of having to constantly purge what is going round and round inside, that the only way to fight inferiority is with superiority.

  Aware of the status that athletics bestows, I play popular team sports such as football and basketball at Sleepy Hollow High School in Tarrytown. I like them. They are fun. But I prefer situations where I rely on myself. I want to be in control of my destiny, maybe because so much of my life is about control.

  If I win, I did it. If I lose, it is my fault. I get to walk away by myself. I don’t have to commiserate with teammates or for that matter celebrate with them. I am a loner, inevitable for anyone who carries inside the secret of themselves they cannot share. I am friendly but still aloof, still at arm’s length from everyone else. Because I am good at what I do, people leave me alone. I have friends on the football and basketball teams, but I don’t hang with them. People like me, probably because my first car is a 1954 Cadillac hearse (not kidding) and I am able to pack twenty-four of my high school compatriots into the casket compartment one night (still not kidding).

  I don’t want people to know who I am, what I think about, and what I grapple with. If anything I act a little goofy because it puts me further above the fray, the Jenner kid who marches to his own tune. It is not that I cannot feel, but I am scared to. All feelings do is stir up conflict within me. I am on the fringe because I like being on the fringe. It’s safer, easier, better.

  The loner.

  The sport I like the most is track and field. And the event I like the most within track and field is the pole vault. I pick it up as a freshman in high school. I like the freedom and the spiraling aloneness. There is nothing like running down a narrow lane with a long pole and planting it like a staff into the indentation, arcing in a slow curve before you spring to get over the top. I like that it involves mind and body and lessens the inner turmoil. My dad builds a pole vault pit in the backyard so I can practice. I ultimately become the Connecticut state champion in high school and two-time MVP of the track team.

  In addition to school-based sports, my dad is looking for an activity that the entire family can participate in on the weekends.

  He chooses waterskiing, so he buys a boat. We all go out on Candlewood Lake in Connecticut. I am scared, or maybe more accurately I’m afraid of embarrassment that will only add to my already thick layer of insecurity. I have been embarrassed enough as a child. My dad knows me better than I do and admires my athletic skills more than I do, because I don’t think there is anything particularly special about me. I’m just a confused kid trying to get by. He knows about the dyslexia, but he doesn’t know I like Mom’s closet and how that is affecting my self-image as well. And he will never know. Ever. I will never tell him. He will never catch me. That can never happen. Ever. Plus it’s just some weird thing I like for the time being. It will pass, so there is no point in ever mentioning it to anyone.

  One of his favorite routines on Candlewood Lake is the so-called whip technique: he takes the boat in a circle, the effect of which makes the skier go faster and faster because of the centripetal force created. I scream at him the first time he does that to me at the age of ten or eleven. He keeps on doing it, and I scream some more. My sister Pam picks it up quickly, which only makes matters worse. Until it finally begins to click. Then he wants me to drop one of my skis so I’m only skimming the water on one ski, and here we go again. I won’t do it. I can’t do it. I’m just getting used to two skis.

  Please, Dad, don’t make me try. I can’t handle the failure. I have had enough of those in my life. I’m already weird enough. I feel it every day. Please, Dad, don’t add to it.

  He won’t let go.

  Just drop the damn ski.

  Okay, I’ll do it. Just don’t say it anymore.

  Just drop the damn ski.

  Okay, I said I would do it!

  Just drop the damn ski.

  I take the chance. I do it.

  I feel exhilaration afterward. I go on in my middle and late teens to win the Eastern States waterskiing championship three times. The victories are sweet, but what I really learn from waterskiing, thanks to my dad, is the humility that will carry through the rest of my life. His credo is simple: actions speak for themselves, not speaking.

  Let everyone else go out there and perform, then you do it without a word. Don’t even tell them you can ski. Let them figure it out for themselves once you’re done.

  High school is about other things besides sports, of course. I suppose it’s about grades, although my only academic interest is in that C average so I can remain eligible. There is also dating and sex, which go hand-in-hand with being a big man on campus.

  I am a star on the football team, the most popular sport in high school. So going out with girls is the thing to do. But I am shy and awkward and date only a handful, none with lasting consequences. As for sex, guys talk about it nonstop, so I feel I have to go in that direction. Because I both put women on a pedestal and envy them, I am not a stereotypic aggressive male jock. I prefer being on the bottom instead of the top, which in the context of a suburban town in the 1960s is heresy. So I take the top bunk, so to speak, and do my best.

  I have sex with my first girl when I am a senior at Newtown High School in Sandy Hook, Connecticut, where we moved to in my junior year. It takes place in the backseat of my mom’s black Ford Falcon station wagon. I’m ever the romantic. The only thing I remember with perfect clarity is that she is a lot smarter than I am. I do it because I am curious, and there is a definite attraction. And maybe I do it out of obligation to maintain appearances. Everybody in high school knows who has slept with whom, and this is helpful to me in maintaining cover.

  Unlike many athletes I will get to know in later life after high school, I do not keep a running journal in my head of conquests. It would be a very short scrapbook if I did.

  I don’t have the appetite for it, which is why the public’s obsession over my sex life now, whether I will or won’t, is annoying to me. It hearkens back to this endless misperception that men and women transition because of their sexual preference and desires. They endlessly wonder if a man becomes a woman and still enjoys sex with women, what does that make her? Who the hell cares? Why must labels be attached to everything? My pref
erence has not changed now that I have transitioned. Why would it? I have always enjoyed women. Not that I think of it a lot. Of the most important things in my life, sex is beyond the bottom; it has been that way for a long time. A future female companion? Yes, I do think about that. A future female sexual companion? Not happening, at least for now, and perhaps not ever.

  A future male sexual companion? I have never had the inclination. But maybe that attitude might possibly change if I have the Final Surgery. Maybe removing the last physical appendage of my maleness, or more precisely, maleness as defined by the medical establishment, will make me feel differently. Some would argue that there is no good reason to have gender-affirming surgery as a trans woman unless you are intent on having sex with men. For me the reason to do it is different: feeling as authentic as I possibly can.

  Mostly I float through high school. I have no burning ambition in sports, maybe because I have yet to find the right event that plays into my versatility. I am good in the pole vault but not competitive on a national level. The decathlon? At this point it’s just another word I have difficulty spelling. Unlike so many great athletes who come out of the crib ready to go, I am not. I like to win, but competition does not ooze from every pore. I maintain that happy-go-lucky core, so much so that when I make all-county in track and the local paper wants to take a picture of me and other athletes honored, I forget to bring my track shoes and appear in loafers.

  If there was ever an athlete not destined for greatness, it was me. I do have self-discipline. I am able to shut things out, including my gender issues. They are always there, but in high school they are mostly in check. I still cross-dress when I can. But getting the opportunity is hard, although I have moved up to Pam’s clothing since Mom’s is now way too small. Just as I admire women, I am also jealous of them. I feel that bubbling inside me, not because of the way they look but because of how comfortable they seem and knowing I will never be able to feel that way. Just as I see how comfortable men are and knowing I will never feel that way, either. I feel as if I am of no gender, trapped in the worst place to be: the middle.