The Secrets of My Life

by Caitlyn Jenner

  Sure, I can help.

  He gives me the names of two men and a woman. Because of my eternal discomfort with men I choose the woman. Her name is Gertrude Hill. She is doing sessions out of her house in the Encino area in the Valley, and I make an appointment. I drive out there and I am scared to death. But I am also excited at the

  prospect of letting go of all this, getting it all out, years and years of pent-up feelings finally exploding. I will see her in individual therapy for the next five years up until 1990 as she helps me through the darkest period of my life.

  The first thing I notice about her is that she is about a foot shorter than I am, maybe closer to a foot and a half. She has a thick Jewish accent and is Dr. Ruthian in appearance and manner, in her early fifties at the time. There is an inordinate sensitivity to her. I sense she has been through something that has given her uncommon empathy for people. Later on I find out why.

  Born in Hungary, she and her mother were rounded up by the Nazis and taken to Auschwitz when she was eleven in 1944. Her father had been taken away two weeks earlier and perished. When they were herded from the railroad car at the concentration camp, a Jewish capo, knowing that mothers and daughters were immediately marked for the gas chamber, pulled Trudy aside:

  Don’t say to anyone that this is your mother. Stay clear. You are not a child anymore.

  She stayed near her mother but never beside her. During her five months there a mother killed her newborn baby so she would not be turned in. The deceased infant was then given to Trudy for disposal.

  Someone handed me something dirty and messy and mushy in my hands and said, “Bury it.”

  She and her mother were then transported to two different concentration camps, Salzwedel and Bergen-Belsen, before their liberation by Allied forces in April 1945.

  Trudy never lost her faith in God, which is of tremendous solace to me because there have been so many times I am convinced that God has lost faith in me. The more I see Trudy and get to know her, the more it becomes clear that she has made gender dysphoria her specialty to alleviate the pain and suffering of others who feel like they have no place else to turn. Somehow she had converted the inhumanity of the camps into her own humanity.

  The first thing Trudy gives me is desperately needed perspective, that the feelings inside me are not abnormal and there are many others who have them. She wants to try to pinpoint the full extent. She puts me through a series of psychological tests and questionnaires. The only one I remember is the Rorschach, where everything looks like a butterfly. Based on those tests the diagnosis is clear: I am gender dysphoric—she explains the term so I fully understand it for the first time—and am a woman inside.

  This is the way you are. It will never go away.

  Is there any cure for this?

  No. It’s only a matter of how you deal with it.

  How do I deal with it? By denying it? Been there, done that. I am extraordinarily lonely. I don’t fit in anywhere. There is no place for me. I have let go of pretty much everyone I know. I feel increasingly estranged from my mom: after watching her go through the death of Burt, there is no way I am going to unload this on her.

  I do tell Pam somewhere in this period of the early to mid 1980s. I will never forget her reaction, no matter how much she tried to understand: her eyes were so glazed by shock that it was like she did not recognize me. Neither will Pam:

  Bruce was still Bruce then. He called me and said he was in Miami, where I lived, and that he wanted to have dinner. I said that sounds great, let me check with my husband at the time, Bill. He said, “no no no, I want to talk to you about a family matter.”

  It was extremely rare, but it did not send up any red flags at the time. I thought it had maybe to do with his marriage. We went to a restaurant and made small talk for a while and he said, “I have something to tell you. I have always felt like a woman.”

  I couldn’t even understand what he was saying at the time. He said, “When we were young I used to go in and try your clothes on and sometimes Mom’s.” I am just dumbfounded. I can’t believe what I am hearing. He said, “I really think I need to do something about it.” I can’t remember how I responded.

  I do remember my drive home, and I am crying so hard I can hardly see the road. Sobbing and sobbing. For several reasons. One was selfishly: “My famous brother who I idolize is thinking about becoming a woman?” Then I started to think about his pain for all those years. This was a new person in front of me. I had a very hard time sharing it with anybody. I didn’t even tell my husband. It was our secret.

  Most of all I feel estranged from my dad. But every time I play out the conversation, it turns out differently. He can accept it. He can’t accept it. He won’t accept it.

  I’m not Bruce, Dad. I never really was.

  Then who the hell are you?

  I saw those tears of joy fall down his cheeks when I sought him out in the stands after winning the Olympics. It was as if I could feel them on my own face.

  What would he think now?

  You’re not a goddamn woman! You’re my son. You’re Bruce. Snap out of it, for chrissakes. You’re talking nonsense.

  My self-imposed isolation unit is the Malibu shack, in an area known as Point Dume (trust me, you can’t make this stuff up). It is small with a galley kitchen and an open living room upstairs and two bedrooms downstairs. The so-called master bedroom is claustrophobic, so I put my bed in the living room, which has sliding doors and a good view. I use one of the downstairs bedrooms for my growing collection of women’s clothing. My mom visits me once, sees them, and is happy I have a girlfriend.

  Wendy Roth, a coordinating producer for Good Morning America, where I worked as a field reporter, has purchased many of them for me. Wendy has become my confidante, the person I trust the most and have told the most until I go into therapy. Unlike anyone else, as far as I know, she did think something was astray:

  I knew something was off. Because he wasn’t your typical macho guy. He wasn’t, like, going after women. He wasn’t very sociable. He wasn’t living the celeb life that he could have been leading. He didn’t feel sorry for himself. I never got that sense. I just got the sense that he wanted to be somebody else. And we often talked about it—“why don’t you just go away”—but then there was also the whole thing of how do you support yourself and does somebody who is well-known just disappear.

  I speak to Wendy almost every day during various periods in the 1980s. I sometimes talk for an hour straight and she listens, she actually listens.

  She sees in me embedded qualities that I have lost sight of because of my self-loathing: kindness, generosity, somebody fun to be around. She knows that I like big and expensive toys (Porsches and planes). But she also knows that I couldn’t really care less about money. By Malibu standards the Malibu shack is actually more of an outhouse. Hey, I’m cool with that: the water runs, there actually is a toilet and it flushes, and there are no leaks.

  Wendy is based in New York but travels to Los Angeles on a regular basis. When we are together we go shopping—a dress, maybe, or some lingerie. When a salesperson asks if we need help, we tell them we are shopping for Wendy and she has dragged me along. All the salesperson has to do is look at us to know the story is suspect—Wendy could almost fit in the back pocket of my pants so an extra large would envelop her—but at least we are left alone. Later on, to make the story more plausible, we tell the salespeople we are shopping for a friend. Sometimes Wendy just goes out on her own, buying me wigs because she thinks the ones I mail-order are cheap and crappy and ill-fitting, which they are. Later on, as my marriage to Kris is dying in 2013 and I ultimately move out, I open a debit card account in Wendy’s name and deposit money into it so she can buy clothing for me online without anything being billed directly to me.

  There are stretches in the mid 1980s where I stay inside the shack for a week, except to get food. Dishes pile up. I am never going to get an A for dusting and vacuuming. The place is an embarrassment
for someone who signed the million-dollar deal with General Mills and the very generous contract with NBC and can still give corporate speeches. But there is the familiar refrain I repeat over and over in my life. I say it once, I say it a thousand times:

  I don’t really care.

  Once again I do not contemplate suicide, but I sometimes wonder what the difference is when you are hollow inside and nothing matters and you can’t make a connection to anyone. You never feel on even ground, emotional calm and then the street begins to buckle: emboldened to transition and take the step, then terrified. So eager to be authentic, then incapable. Knowing what you should do but not doing it.

  Remember this?

  He simply is a real-life version of the American dream, fairly bursting with honest vitality, infectious health and cheerful good humor. Is it his fault that he’s direct, self-assured, sincere? The type of person we’d all like to be when we grow up?

  —KENNETH TURAN, THE WASHINGTON POST

  Maybe I owe the world a correction.

  When I first start seeing Trudy, it doesn’t take long for her to sense my misery. She reinforces that I am not the only person struggling with such conflict and feelings. The concept of gender dysphoria is no longer alien. It is in her office that for the first time in my life I see a transgender woman face-to-face. We are having a session and it is winding down and a little light goes on to indicate that the next patient is in the waiting room. Trudy mentions that the patient is a trans woman and without giving me her name or any other identifying characteristic, wonders if I might simply like to see her. I go into the waiting room and grab a magazine and don’t dare talk to her. My initial reaction is so similar to how much of the public reacts now to a trans person.

  I feel nervous. I feel shy. But she seems so comfortable with herself. Is that what happens when you transition? You actually become comfortable with yourself? You can just blend in?

  Trudy’s underlying goal was to help me come to terms with myself in whatever way I defined it, and as hard as it was, to not be trapped by the expectations of others. Because that is not a life. It is the pose of a life.

  Without directly saying it, I can tell that for my own personal welfare she thinks I must take some actual steps to physically feel more myself. Since there is no cure for this, I have to deal with it on my own terms, as is true for anyone with gender dysphoria. They are little things that I think I can get away with, nothing like facial feminization surgery and certainly not the Final Surgery. I am not ready for any of that and may never be.

  Since at this I point I am driving around a little bit at night anyway I decide to meet Trudy at her office, now in Beverly Hills. I have a long skirt on and a nice top. A cute little outfit if I say so myself and I do. I park my car half a block from her office. I sense the lights of a vehicle shining on my back. It drives right by as if nothing happened. It reminds me of back when I was a little boy in Tarrytown walking around Sleepy Hollow Gardens but with a slightly different sensation.

  How nice is that? I just blend in. How cool is that?

  I go to Trudy’s office and she tells me I look great. She suggests dinner. But that’s too much for me. I couldn’t even use my voice to order, way too recognizable. I can just see the furtive smiles as they look at me and then glance away and elbow their dinner companions to sneak a look but be careful don’t let him know! The self-consciousness will cause me to want to run away and never stop.

  One step at a time.

  It’s all I can do.

  I hate my beard. It is revolting to me, clean-shaven in the morning and then all those nubby black bristles back by nighttime like unwanted ants. It is the same with the hair on my legs, which I begin to regularly wax.

  Trudy provides information on electrolysis. It is common for someone in the process of transitioning to have his beard removed. She helps me find a qualified technician I remember only as Olga. She has a house near Los Angeles International Airport with a back room that has an examining table and equipment. I walk in the first time with three or four days of growth. I want her to think that it’s simply irritating and I hate shaving. But I am pretty sure she has worked on clients taking steps of transition. She knows who I am, but she never asks. She is a consummate professional.

  I can only handle two hours at a time because the pain is so terrible. It is like getting a shot in your face with the needle pretty far down into the skin—okay, it hurts, but I can handle it—and then Olga hits a button with her foot to set off the electric charge and now you are at DEFCON 1. The shock only lasts for a millisecond. So you try to tell yourself the worst is over when you are zapped again and again and again. Plus after every shock she tweezes the follicle out. In some areas it may take four or five treatments to get all the hair out. I also have decided to go all the way down to the neck and chest. Pull out every hair, Olga. Every goddamn one.

  There is numbing cream you can apply as well as oral medication. Anyone in his right mind would use them, but I never even bring the subject up. I lie there with tears in my eyes after each dig and zap and pull. The upper lip and around the nose are the worst of all, but I still lie there and take it.

  Olga works quickly, the only merciful part of the ordeal. She charges forty dollars an hour and never raises her prices, but even so the entire cost can be upward of $30,000.

  Olga and I are a year and a half in before potential disaster strikes. I am early for an appointment and park down the block as usual to avoid detection. But another client apparently sees me on the street, and the next time he starts asking questions.

  Was that Bruce Jenner down there?

  Olga covers for me and denies it. I am grateful to her. She tells me that the client who saw me is a transgender woman.

  Well, you know, I have my own gender issues.

  I kind of figured that.

  You become friendly with someone who pulls your hair follicles out week after week. There is a certain intimacy there, although I think there are probably better ways to achieve that intimacy. When you are not trying to reduce the pain medically, talking is the only antidote. So we chat about everything else—kids, what’s new, life—but never the trans issue except for that one mention.

  Olga is almost finished when she tells me she is moving to San Diego. I panic a little bit, because there are some areas that need to be touched up, but then I figure out what I will do.

  I have always loved flying and have owned a plane of one kind or another since the Olympics. As a kid I remember going to nearby Westchester County Airport and just watching them as they took off, wondering where they were going, trying to imagine what it would be like to go anywhere you wanted without traffic lights or stop lights or arguments over directions. What joy there must be in that. What freedom. I never thought I would own a plane, because I never thought I would have enough money. I dated a girl in high school whose dad owned a plane. It was the coolest thing ever, and I stuck around in the relationship longer than I should have just so I could hear some of his flying stories. I cannot be sure, but I think she finally realized that I liked her dad’s plane more than I liked her. So she dumped me.

  Shortly after the Olympics, I had enough money to buy my first plane. The sensation was exactly what I expected, up in the air in the one place where I could be alone and not feel alone.

  Now, in the 1980s, I own a Beechcraft Baron, but because of the financial situation I am in, I won’t be able to afford it much longer. Nevertheless, for the next month or so I fly to San Diego. Olga immediately picks me up and we drive to her house. It’s easier now and only takes about an hour, just a little zap zap zap where the hair has grown back. She drives me back to the airport after she is finished. I fly home. Nobody knows a thing, all very cloak and dagger. I feel like the James Bond of electrolysis.

  I hate my nose. I have always hated my nose. It has a kind of Bob Hope ski jump look going. I want a smaller nose. A cute one. I go to a plastic surgeon in Beverly Hills and give him the spiel: I can’t stand
my nose so I am wondering if you can take the hook out of it. He does it, but in my mind he doesn’t do it very well, which—along with the electrolysis—only arouses whispers down the line in the media that Bruce Jenner is looking a little weird these days.

  Then comes hormone therapy.

  It is an enormous decision. There certainly will be significant physical changes, including the development of breasts and some loss of muscle definition. Hair also grows at a slower rate, which means less electrolysis. Avoiding detection will ultimately become more difficult than ever—hiding breasts is not for the faint of heart—but living with myself as Bruce is a million times harder. The woman inside me needs estrogen to blossom. I have to feed the beast, so to speak, and since I obviously cannot produce it myself I need an alternative. I am now determined to fully transition before I turn forty in 1989. I want to have some life left. I don’t want to do it when I am old. I am also now actively considering facial feminization surgery, a lengthy procedure to reconfigure the face that can take as long as ten hours. Now that I know so much more, I am thinking about the Final Surgery as well.

  During my therapy with Trudy, she asks me for my ultimate fantasy. The first thing that comes to me is being fully transitioned and walking down a California beach absolutely free. Free from all the inner struggles. Peace in my soul. Free to really be me without anyone caring.

  Which is why I am almost afraid to bring up the issue of hormone therapy with her. In my soul I want to do it. But am I crazy? I am still a celebrity, even if I am tarnished. Is it going too far? Do I really have a choice?