Jenner, Caitlyn

Caitlyn Jenner, original name William Bruce Jenner, (born October 28, 1949, Mount Kisco, New York, U.S.), American decathlete who won a gold medal at the 1976 Olympic Games in Montreal with a then record score of 8,618 points and in 2015 became by far the most prominent athlete to publicly come out as transgender.

Bruce Jenner began an athletic career at Newton (Connecticut) High School, where Jenner lettered in gridiron football, basketball, and athletics and independently took up waterskiing, becoming East Coast all-over champion in 1966, 1969, and 1971. Jenner entered Graceland College (Lamoni, Iowa) in 1969 on a football scholarship, but a knee injury restricted Jenner to basketball and track. After first participating in the decathlon in 1971, Jenner finished 10th in the event at the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich, West Germany. Then Jenner moved to California to train with individual-event stars rather than with other decathlon athletes.

Caitlyn Jenner

After the 1976 Olympic triumph, Jenner became active as a network television sports commentator and made television commercials, lectured, and published several books. In 1991 Jenner married Kris Kardashian, and the gold medalist later gained a new type of fame by becoming one of the central figures in the popular reality show Keeping Up with the Kardashians (2007–21), which followed the exploits of the couple’s family. (The pair divorced in 2014.)

In April 2015 Jenner announced that she identified as a woman, and two months later she revealed that she wanted to be referred to as Caitlyn Jenner. I Am Cait, a reality series documenting her transition, debuted in July; it ran for two seasons. Jenner’s public shift from a male gender identity to a female one became a cultural touchstone. Her efforts to raise the visibility of transgender people were both widely praised and heavily scrutinized. In April 2021 Jenner, a Republican, announced that she was running for governor of California; the state’s recall election was scheduled for later that year. However, her campaign struggled—at one point she suspended activities to appear on the TV reality show Celebrity Big Brother in Australia—and she had a poor showing in the election. The memoir The Secrets of My Life was published in 2017.