Three days before Jenner’s interview with Sawyer, the cover of the New York Daily News featured illegally obtained photographs of Jenner in feminine attire, with the enormous headline “Bruce in a Dress,” emphasizing Jenner’s male name attached to an item of clothing most closely identified with being a woman. The first line of the accompanying article, “Who’s that lady?”, is a taunt I’ve specifically heard bigots on the street use when they’ve encountered trans women who don’t pass. Jenner’s dour expression in these pictures stand in stark contrast with her triumph in 1976, also immortalized in the Daily News, when she was cheered on by thousands of people and embraced by a loving wife. Everything about the 1976 cover says success, while the 2015 cover only communicates disappointment.

These were just a few of the numerous transphobic jokes and depictions that preceded Jenner’s announcement. Even if her interview with Sawyer was done partly for publicity, it was also an opportunity for Jenner to control her narrative — to counter an image of her as deviant in favor of her simple desire to live as a woman. When Sawyer asked what Jenner wishes for, Jenner said, “I wish to be able to have my nail polish for long enough that it can chip off.” Jenner was effectively asking the American media — and, by extension, the American public — why they are so enamored with gender roles that someone can’t perform the inoffensive action of going out with painted nails just because she happens to have been assigned male at birth. When she implored the public, “Have an open mind and an open heart. I’m not a bad person. I’m just doing what I have to do,” I asked myself why she needs to feel responsible to us for choosing to live as herself, why we have the right to think ill of her just because she dares to embody her own personal truth.



Yet even as I fully support Jenner’s transition, I still struggle to let go of the man in my head from all those years of watching her on TV. There’s something pathetic about how hard it is for me, a trans woman, to displace the iconic image of Jenner’s ideal male body with the reality of her womanhood. I can only imagine what it’s like for cisgender people who once lived vicariously through Jenner’s athletic achievements and rapturous good looks when she presented as a man. It’s likely that no other trans woman has borne the weight of this much collective expectation.

Jenner has and will make choices I don’t agree with, yet I still can’t help but admire her. That her transition will be the subject of a reality TV show concerns me given how limited that genre can be in portraying the actual nuances of reality. I wonder about how attached she seems to be to conventional constructions of beauty — so much that she doesn’t seem ready to be fully herself until she is “transformed.” Few people can afford the type of transformation she envisions, and many want to live publicly as women without access to surgery, fabulous outfits, or a “glam room,” as Jenner described her future closet. As much as Jenner risks turning her life — and, by extension, the lives of all trans women — into a distorted spectacle, the reactions she is sure to arouse will also be an opportunity for the American public to grapple with their own distorted perceptions. As has been the case throughout her career, Jenner’s public life will be less about her as an individual and more about what she and her body represents. In 2015, like in 1976, the public’s relationship with Jenner’s body will reflect American values, and it’s up to each of us to determine whether those values will include a fundamental respect for all transgender people.

[Author’s note: While the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) recommends that the media use male pronouns when referring to Jenner, stating that “at this time, Bruce Jenner has not indicated that a new name or pronoun should be used,” I disagree. Since Jenner told the public that she has never fully thought of herself as male, I don’t believe that we should necessarily defer to using male pronouns just because that’s how Jenner has been referred to in the past.]