During a commercial break after the first taped segment of my Ellen appearance in September 2015, Ellen DeGeneres leaned over and, to the best of my recollection, said in a friendly voice:
You know, I heard your views on the marriage equality act and same sex marriage have really progressed over the years.
Yes, they have.
I would love to talk about that.
I believed, as anyone would, that that was exactly what she wanted to talk about—my progression in terms of changing attitude over the years. I said the following when we came back on the air:
Gay marriage. I have to admit that I remember fifteen years ago, twenty years ago, whenever it was, the whole gay marriage issue came up at first, I was not for it. I mean, I thought I am a traditionalist. I’m older than most people in the audience. I mean, I kind of like tradition and it’s always between a man and a woman, and I’m thinking I don’t quite get it. But as time has gone on, like a lot of people on this issue, I’ve really changed my thinking here to: I don’t ever want to stand in front of anybody’s happiness. That’s not my job. Okay. If that word marriage is really, really that important to you I can go with it.
Ellen responded:
… It’s funny you’re still kind of a little not on board with it.
I was surprised when she said that. I am for it. I did not initially understand why marriage was so important, influenced no doubt by my own personal experience. Now I do, and it is a wonderful thing to see.
After I appeared on the show, I was publicly accused of being a hypocrite: how can someone in the trans community not be open-minded enough to support the Marriage Equality Act? This discussion only further alienated me from members of the LGTBQ community. Ellen’s appearance on The Howard Stern Show, where in my mind she even more emphatically took what I said out of context, made it go viral.
Several months later, in a lengthy interview in Time magazine in December 2015 after being on the short list for Person of the Year, I was asked a question about image. I gave the following reply:
One thing that has always been important to me, and it may seem very self-absorbed or whatever, is first of all your presentation of who you are. I think it’s much easier for a trans woman or a trans man who authentically kind of looks and plays the role. So what I call my presentation I try to take that seriously. I think it puts people at ease. If you’re out there and, to be honest with you, if you look like a man in a dress, it makes people uncomfortable.
Not a great career move…
I have examined what I said in Time. I have thought about it. But I won’t disavow it. A trans woman who looks like a man in a dress makes people uncomfortable: just watch the look on their faces when they see one, or how they instantly look away. Any man wearing a dress for whatever reason makes them uncomfortable. Any man who wears nail polish makes them uncomfortable. Anyone who is gender fluid makes them uncomfortable. The majority of the public is made uncomfortable by anything that isn’t mainstream. It is a commentary on them and not the other way around. But we cannot ignore it.
What I am trying to do, what I am doing, is to ultimately make the mainstream public comfortable with us, or at least semi-comfortable, since changing attitudes may be the hardest societal task of all. The best way for me to do that right now is to meet people and show them I am friendly and “normal,” because I am friendly and “normal” to the degree that anyone is normal. Like every other trans person I have met. I want to be accessible.
Am I engaging in some superficial notion of womanhood because I want to look as good as I can? Actually the reason is simpler than that:
I like to look good. It is important to me. I am not trying to make any judgment on womanhood as it applies to physical characteristics. I have absolutely no right to do that. I also know that I have the money for surgeries, a luxury that most trans women do not have. For me, it boils down to the fact that some women and some men are consumed with the way they look, and some just care the usual amount, and some don’t care at all. It is a trait of personality, and everyone is different.
All the criticisms sting, but I brush them away. I will continue to push issues facing the transgender community in the best way I see fit, disregarding those who attack me for the advancement of their own agenda or to be inflammatory in the inflammatory age in which we live.
But I have learned some lessons.
The next time Eddie Redmayne plays a trans woman, count me out.
Chapter Nine
Here’s Brucie!!
The first time I hear the name Kris Kardashian is in Ketchikan, where all I just want to do is catch a fish.
I am in Alaska in 1990 with former Los Angeles Dodgers and San Diego Padres first baseman Steve Garvey and his wife, Candace, shooting a television show in which we are salmon fishing. I have known Garvey for a long time—the fraternity of sports celebrities is smaller and tighter than Yale’s Skull and Bones—and the arc of his public life has been eerily similar to mine. When he was with the Dodgers and Padres, he was known as Mr. Clean. He played through whatever it took for 1,207 straight games, still the National League record. His sturdy solid-jaw looks were referred to over and over again. He inherited the crown of the All-American sports hero after I lost it because of my messy personal life and controversial divorces. The press went over the top in depicting him just like they did me. Sports Illustrated wrote:
For most of his 41 years Garvey lived at the corner of Straight and Narrow. He played football at Michigan State. Graduated with a B average. Signed with his boyhood idols, the Dodgers. Married the prettiest girl in school and had two daughters Norman Rockwell might have painted…
Sound familiar? It sure did to me. From my own experience I knew there was only one way for Garvey to go, and that was down into the pits. Garvey’s messy personal life, culminating in a horrible divorce from his first wife, Cyndy, in 1983 that went public and a child born out of wedlock after an affair, turned Mr. Clean filthy. He had done what he had done. But it was the glee and venom and mockery with which he was dismantled that I so identified with, built up by the media out of all proportion and then crucified for it exactly as it was for me. The only thing worse than being called Mr. Clean is the Golden Boy. Or Prince Valiant. Or Adonis…
It’s probably why we are fishing together in Alaska, the ultimate hideout where not even the bears read the tabloids.
I am wearing sweat pants, attire I think appropriate for fishing. Maybe I look a little slovenly for television, but I have never been a clotheshorse. As far back as I can remember it was the women in my life, starting with my mother, who bought all my clothing, with the exception of that pair of tight bell-bottoms in college. My lack of style is such that GQ, a magazine dedicated to style, has gone out of its way to point out that I have none.
Candace shows up in her customary outfit of head-to-toe Ralph Lauren. She looks like she is just off the runway, not the kind of person interested in bait on the hook. She takes one look at me and decides this will not do at all, probably because she is right: I look even more of a wreck than usual because I am a wreck, trying to put together the pieces of my life and not really knowing if I will be able to.
Candace thinks I need a woman:
I have a friend who would be perfect for you.
Who is it?
Her name is Kris Kardashian. She is in the process of a divorce and lives in Beverly Hills.
Beverly Hills? Way out of my league. I’m not interested.
Steve, what do you think about Bruce and Kris going out together?
It’ll never work.
Now I am interested. As much as I love Garvey, I generally try to do the opposite of anything he says. There is a reserve that just makes you to want to go up to him and muss up his hair and watch as he uses a slide rule to put it back in place. But there is still hesitation on my part.
Chrystie and Linda were both down-to-earth, a quality that attracted me to them and was similar to myself. A woman from Beverly Hills strikes me as the ve
ry opposite, most days spent shopping in the fashionable boutiques and brand-name stores that rim Rodeo Drive. Kris is also in the process of a divorce, and the last thing I need is somebody coming out of a divorce, given my own track record.
Candace now tends to agree.
She has four children. It would never work.
The wheels click in my mind:
She has four children.
I have four children.
That’s eight kids.
Kris has the same amount of baggage that I do.
Now I really am interested.
Candace quickly sets something up for the following week. Garvey and I are playing in Magic Johnson’s golf tournament at the Riviera Country Club, the historic course in Pacific Palisades. She invites Kris to join us at a party afterward and then dinner.
Kris brings along her nanny, which is open to many interpretations, none of them good.
The first time I see her she is in a white pantsuit. She looks great. I go up to her at the party and put my arms around her.
At last in the arms of a real woman with four children.
I am hoping she will laugh.
She doesn’t.
But neither does she look at me like I am crazy. I actually think she is flattered by it or at least thinks it is a step up from Hey, baby, want to touch my gold medal?
We mix into the crowd. I know a lot of people there in the way that men know a lot of people, which is to say we don’t know anyone at all and float off once the sports talk is exhausted. Kris knows everybody and everybody knows her. They are much more happy to see her than me. I have never met anyone this effortlessly social.
Who is this person?
I still don’t know a single thing about her other than the little Candace has told me.
We go out to dinner afterward at Ivy at the Shore in Santa Monica. It is one of those places to be seen, although I prefer to be in places not to be seen and think McDonald’s approaches haute cuisine, depending on how crispy the fries are. I have the meatloaf and mashed potatoes because I always have the meatloaf and mashed potatoes when I go out if it’s available. Kris knows a lot of people there as well, but once again she doesn’t work the room: she really knows these people. It reminds me there is an entire world out there that I knew existed but never felt comfortable with. But I am still not entirely hooked.
Right before we leave Kris applies pencil outliner on her lips. She doesn’t even use a mirror. She just goes zip zip zip. It’s perfect. Now, I actually know something about using pencil outliner, and it’s very hard to do without a mirror (although I am proud to say I have mastered it).
Now I’m hooked. A year ago, even six months ago, that simple act would have heightened my gender issues. I would have felt the familiar pang of envy that she can simply do this whenever she wants wherever she wants. She doesn’t carry a pack of makeup remover wipes in case the police stop her. She doesn’t carry around a note from the therapist. She hasn’t thought about gender a single minute in her life. Why would she? Why would anyone I know? It’s not an issue. But now that I have decided not to transition, I am trying not to make it an issue as well, suppress my urges to the greatest extent possible. I cannot afford them in my life anymore. I don’t want them.
Kris and I start going out. I have a dinner scheduled one night with a producer acquaintance I know and bring Kris along. Since he is in the business it is one of his job requirements to act as if he knows everyone in the business. He is showing off a little bit, another job requirement, self-importance as a work of art. But every time he mentions someone, Kris says she not only knows her or him but also the entire family, without trying to show off in the least. Finally flummoxed, the producer turns to her in the middle of dinner and says:
Who are you?
To which Kris says something so uncharacteristic of her today that it seems hard to believe she said it, but she did, because I was there:
I’m just a mom in Beverly Hills.
Right at that moment I see qualities in Kris that will serve her extraordinarily well and make her somebody one day—the way she deals with people and takes charge without them even knowing it, the habit of sending flowers or some other gift after a meeting. A combination of charm and professional intelligence, knowing that remembering a birthday goes a long way because of the attentiveness and thoughtfulness it implies.
She is everything I am not. I am not confident. I am not comfortable in my own skin. I am not social. I am lousy at giving gifts. She is natural and disarming about it all. It doesn’t feel remotely like name-dropping when she says she knows this person and that person. It is quiet, sweet really.
I have been in a rat hole the last six years. But I can feel Kris bringing me out of that even after our first few dates. It feels good to go out again after all those years in the Malibu shack.
Whatever the differences that developed between Kris and me later on, and there were big ones at the end, she saved me at this point in my life, just like sports had saved me as a young child.
I fall in love with Kris quickly. She falls in love with me quickly (we marry after a courtship of seven months). Love is at the crux of us. But I believe, and this is my opinion and my opinion only, we both want something from each other.
I know I do.
Kris restores my credibility. She helps to restore the image of Bruce. I also believe, and once again this is my opinion only, that Kris gets something from me. Her divorce from Robert Kardashian, a successful lawyer and entrepreneur later made famous for his ceaseless loyalty to his longtime friend O.J. Simpson when he was tried for murder, had been ugly. Kris had married when she was twenty-two. She told me there was just much more life she wanted to live. She had been involved in an affair with a man in his twenties, which could not have been a boon to the marriage. But close friends of the couple were still shocked when she left. They could not understand why she was willing to give up the Beverly Hills lifestyle. They could not understand how she could cause such tumult to her children. They all loved Robert because there was a great deal to love about Robert—an incredible father, a man of decency who encouraged my role as a stepfather as long as I always remembered that he was the father.
Robert was angry as well. He could not believe that Kris was leaving. There was a great deal of acrimony. As in many difficult divorces, I believe that Robert wanted Kris to realize she had made a terrible mistake and end up in some crappy apartment in the Valley. It didn’t happen that way. We made a glamorous couple, clearly in love. We began to have success in business as a team. I was well known. So sometimes I wondered if Kris was making a statement to her former husband: a big fuck you.
Since—let’s not kid ourselves—everyone wants to know, Kris and I have good and frequent sex at the beginning. It is imbued with affection and love, but my attitude is no different than it was in high school: I’m just not entirely comfortable with it. Sex, to be sustained in a relationship, requires emotional tools that I simply do not possess because of fear of expressing emotion, to the point where it ultimately became easier to have it only sporadically and then not have it. It means giving, and while I believe I am better now, I have never been good at it.
I tell Kris about my gender issues before I make love to her. I don’t want to repeat the unfairness of what I did to Linda, literally springing it on her one day after we had been married for several years. I don’t tell her the full extent, that Trudy Hill had said unequivocally that my condition would never change and the only thing I could do was somehow try to live with it on my own terms. But I tell her a great deal.
This will always be a subject of dispute between Kris and me as to how much she could intuit about my gender issues. She insists that she was taken by surprise by my ultimate transition to Caitlyn, which obviously means in her mind that she did not know enough. On Keeping Up with the Kardashians she shed copious tears in coming to grips with it. Given what she saw, the whole reaction seemed a little puzzling then and seems puzzling now
.
All I know is what I know.
I told her there had been a woman inside me all my life. I told her I dressed as a woman, and she knew I did, because I did it several times in front of her after we were married. I don’t know how much I elaborated on the electrolysis to remove the hair from my face and chest, but I would say it was pretty self-evident.
I also told her I had been in hormone therapy for roughly the past four and a half years before stopping six months earlier. It was obvious that the effect of the hormones had caused something—two somethings to be exact. To me they were the development of breasts, size 36B. To Kris they were man boobs caused by my being out of shape. I was out of shape, but not out of shape enough in my mind to cause size 36B man boobs. In my mind, she must have known what they were, which would indicate someone very confused about gender. So the idea that she was later shocked by my transition is equally shocking to me. It implies that I left her in the dark about the severity of my struggles.
At least to me it does.
Let’s leave it at that.
Maybe the fact that we had healthy sex at the beginning, as well as my love of such “macho” activities as skiing and car racing, did indicate to her that my so-called maleness was intact. Maybe she thought that whatever gender issues I had, she could change me.
I did tell Kris I was gender dysphoric. But given my decision roughly a year earlier not to transition, I was determined to never pursue such a path again, applying instead the same willpower and discipline of mind as I had when training for the decathlon. I did not want to ever live my life in seclusion again. I wanted the marriage to work and would do everything to make it work. We did have something going for us: We loved each other, and several years into the marriage had two wonderful children together in Kendall and Kylie. I also love and adore my stepchildren, and I felt the love was mutual as I played a pivotal role in raising them, without ever thinking I was supplanting their father, because I was not.
The Secrets of My Life Page 15
