5 Takeaways From The Bruce/Caitlyn Jenner Interview

Wow! Last night was something special wasn’t it?

For those not in the know, the former Bruce Jenner, the 1976 Decathlon champion of the Olympics, which made him the greatest athlete in the world at the time, was interviewed by Diane Sawyer of ABC News where he announced to the world that he considers himself a woman, named Caitlyn. The topic was compelling enough to get me to turn on the TV to watch, as the only things I’ve watched on TV for the last bunch of months has been a couple of movies, some sports and WWE Wrestling. 🙂

I decided to get my thoughts in early on this one because, I’ll admit it, I know that there’s going to be a lot of people who will write about this one later and I hope to beat a bunch of them to the punch; old expression but so be it. And, because I know people love list posts so much, I decided to give 5 things I got from this entire process. Here we go.

1. We got this response right from the beginning from Caitlyn: “I am a woman.” Wow! I was hoping we wouldn’t have to wait an hour for that one and instead we got it out of the way right from the beginning. That was smart because it allowed the two of them to talk about it without their being this albatross in the room about “Is he or not; let’s get to it already.”

2. As nervous as she seemed early on, you could tell that she had been prepared to tell her story for a long while. It was interesting to see how she’d kind of told her previous wives about her interest in wearing women’s clothing during a time when that would have been a major taboo. I like how she said she knew hhe first wife thought she could change him; wives, you can never change your men unless they want to be changed. lol

Her second wife couldn’t handle it all that well, but after all Linda Thompson had also been with Elvis Presley and been through a lot of stuff then, and probably thought she had a good thing going with “Bruce” and then he started his first round of treatments; I don’t blame her for anything.

3. The family dynamic overall is an interesting one.

His older kids seem to be the most comfortable and openly supportive of it all. One of her sons even said “Now it all makes sense”. Her other son is the coolest, mellowest guy I’ve seen in a long time. Her previous wives had nice statements of support also.

Her sister had an interesting first response. Seems she told her 10 years ago and she handled it well initially, cried while driving home, and never talked to her again about it. She hadn’t reached out to Caitlyn again, until recently, thinking that maybe it would just go away. She owned up to wearing her sister’s clothes as a child; that freaked her sister out. I could appreciate her response on this one, and was glad she owned up to it. I figure that most siblings might react this way, especially with the clothes issue.

The second family? Well, that was intriguing. Seems the only one who’s really come along was Kim Kardashian (whom I’ve always liked, even if others have tried to beat her down), and she came along because of someone I’ve never liked but have to give him his props on this one, her husband Kanye West, who said to her “I would never be happy if I couldn’t be myself.” The one he thought might be the most supportive was Khloe, and she seems to be the one with the most problems in dealing with it.

But the person who came off the worst in my opinion? Kris Jenner, the architect of the entire Kardashian franchise, the one who used to kind of berate him and beat him up here and there on the show (which I never saw an episode of but used to see clips here and there) decided to give a “no comment” when asked for a statement. Come on; her entire life has been commenting on things, living her life in the public, even having a talk show for a short period of time, and she couldn’t deign to give a comment? Is she that ashamed, or is it that she couldn’t give one because she wasn’t going to get any money from it? Sheesh!

Still, Caitlyn was gracious to each and every one of them, and you could tell that those were the people he was worried about the most, even more than himself. Class!

4. The thing about sex and sexuality came up a few times in the interview, and Caitlyn was probably more comfortable with it than most of us were. My issue with it is that I’ve never fully understood why people immediately feel like all these things have to do with is sex. I mean, when people think of homosexuals they immediately start thinking about how they have sex rather than what kind of people they are. I’ll admit to not knowing a lot about transgendered people but the thing furthest from my mind is their sexual preferences.

Even with that, Caitlyn started out saying she was heterosexual, but asked how she’d see herself after the sex change, she looked thoughtful at first, then said she was 65 years old, wasn’t thinking about relationships at this point in her life and just wanted to be herself; I thought that was enough. It was also gracious of her to allow Diane Sawyer and the rest of us to refer to “him”, just to keep things going smoothly (I’ve changed those tenses in this article).

5. No one but Diane Sawyer could have done this interview; I was thinking that as we got close to the end. I couldn’t think of a single male interviewer other than Larry King who might have been able to pull this off, but I don’t think Larry would have asked the types of questions or gone into the type of research Diane did.

Also, I tried to think of which women interviewers had enough cachet to handle this and Diane Sawyer is pretty much the only one. But there would have been some close contenders. I think Katie Couric would have done pretty well with it, possibly Meredith Vieira. Barbara Walters… nope. Lesley Stahl; not sure she’d have had the compassion to do it. Oprah… nope, I think she’d have injected more of herself into this one than Sawyer did, based on her interview with Lance Armstrong. If this was even 10 years ago I’d have said Connie Chung or Deborah Roberts could have pulled it off. But Diane Sawyer was perfect; great job!

That’s all I have. Actually, I have lots more, but this is long enough. If you saw it what were your thoughts on it all?