I don't know Bruce Jenner. But I do have a dim childhood memory of an Olympic hero who smiled at me from Wheaties boxes in the grocery store, a friendly face that encouraged fitness before America really started losing its battle of the bulge.
If you're a bit older, you know what Jenner's 1976 decathlon gold-medal win in Montreal meant for a country crazed by every glimmer of Olympic success during the gloom of the Cold War. If you're a bit younger, you might think of Jenner only as the kooky supporting cast member on "Keeping Up With the Kardashians." Jenner is a cross-generational brand of celebrity, simultaneously iconic and artificial in the way that only today's manufactured reality of infotainment can convey.
But there's reality TV, and then there's something real. And Jenner's announcement Friday night in an interview with ABC's Diane Sawyer that he self-identifies as a transgender woman after years of speculation is one brave declaration. We should not let the tabloid drama that has followed Jenner deflect the significance of the moment. Jenner has shared something about himself, something that is never easy. It's a unique and unimagined paradox -- Jenner provided an insight into something so private, but did so on a stage that is unprecedented in the trans community.
And the road is not over for Jenner putting petty tabloid rumors to rest. Will his life help us further understand and accept any trans person, and every person, for who they are and who we all are -- just people, famous or not?
Transness is an increasingly better understood element of our common humanity, but Jenner's transition between genders is unique, albeit for a different reason. Given the Kardashian-Jenner reality TV experience, it will be the most scripted (and most public) transition of all time. We can wonder about how well Jenner, 65, has armored himself against the difficulties he will face. What was Jenner's sense of community with other trans folk? At the same time Jenner was winning Olympic gold, Renee Richards was blazing trails as the first out transgender athlete -- what did that mean to Jenner then? We can hope that Jenner's experience with reality TV has prepared him for the ongoing onslaught of media attention (good and bad) he will surely face.
The real challenge is separating the overlap between what this moment means for Jenner, and what it might mean for everyone else. It would be only too easy to burden Jenner with unfair expectations as one of the world's most visible trans people. But what does Bruce Jenner really owe anybody? The singularity of Jenner's experiences, as an athlete and as a person, can be admired, but can they really be emulated? What might some people want or need from him as a public figure? As "Orange Is the New Black" star and LGBT advocate Laverne Cox might put it, is Jenner supposed to be a "possibility model" for others? After Cox appeared on the cover of Time magazine's "The Transgender Tipping Point" issue, you have to think so.
Similar high-profile public declarations can be counted on your thumbs: Film director Lana Wachowski of "The Matrix" and "Cloud Atlas" fame staged a slow transition that traveled from initial rumors (as far back as 2003) to her own public declaration in 2012. And there is the tragic story of Los Angeles Times sports writer Mike Penner/Christine Daniels, who came out much more publicly and immediately in 2007, only to move back to life as Penner in 2008 and subsequently commit suicide in November 2009.
I know Lana. I knew Christine. But these examples with two very different outcomes do not provide an instructive pattern to help navigate what we should understand about Jenner's own journey. All of the preparations Jenner has made and will continue to make in the future came after long deliberation among the members of America's most visible family -- a clan whose genius for staying in the public eye inspires envy, adulation and ridicule -- but this is still his life, and his decision to act on who he is. In my own low-key transition back in 2003, I realized I did not and could not have all of the answers, having never done it before. I wound up telling friends, family and colleagues in baseball that if they could give me the benefit of the doubt as I went through it, I would do the same with them, and it's to the credit of all involved that it worked out as well as it did. But that's just it: If there is one thing that is true for every trans person confronting their need to transition, it's that there is only one "right way," and that's the way that works best for them.
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