Bruce No Longer “call Me Caitlyn”

W YORK, N.Y. — Speaking pub­licly for the first time since com­plet­ing gen­der tran­si­tion, Caitlyn Jenner com­pares her emo­tion­al two-day pho­to shoot with Annie Leibovitz for the July cov­er of Vanity Fair to win­ning the gold medal for the decathlon at the 1976 Olympics. She tells Pulitzer Prize – win­ning V.F. con­tribut­ing edi­tor and author ofFriday Night Lights Buzz Bissinger, “That was a good day, but the last cou­ple of days were bet­ter.… This shoot was about my life and who I am as a per­son. It’s not about the fan­fare, it’s not about peo­ple cheer­ing in the sta­di­um, it’s not about going down the street and every­body giv­ing you ‘that a boy, Bruce,’ pat on the back, O.K. This is about your life.”

Jenner tells Bissinger about how she suf­fered a pan­ic attack the day after under­go­ing 10-hour facial-fem­i­niza­tion surgery on March 15 — a pro­ce­dure she believed would take 5 hours. (Bissinger reveals that Jenner has not had gen­i­tal surgery.) She recalls think­ing, “What did I just do? What did I just do to myself?” A coun­selor from the Los Angeles Gender Center came to the house so Jenner could talk to a pro­fes­sion­al, and assured her that such reac­tions were often induced by pain med­ica­tion, and that sec­ond-guess­ing was human and temporary.

Jenner tells Bissinger the thought has since passed and not come back: “If I was lying on my deathbed and I had kept this secret and nev­er ever did any­thing about it, I would be lying there say­ing, ‘You just blew your entire life. You nev­er dealt with your­self,’ and I don’t want that to happen.”

Bissinger spent hun­dreds of hours with the man the world knew as Bruce Jenner over a peri­od of three months, and then count­less hours with Caitlyn, also attend­ing the pho­to shoot with Leibovitz at Jenner’s Malibu home.

Bissinger apol­o­gizes to Jenner for repeat­ed pro­noun con­fu­sion and asks whether she is sen­si­tive about it. “I don’t real­ly get hung up,” she tells him. “A guy came in the oth­er day and I was ful­ly dressed — it’s just habit, I said, ‘Hi, Bruce here,’ and I went, Oh fuck, it ain’t Bruce, I was screw­ing up doing it.”

Bissinger speaks exten­sive­ly with Jenner’s four chil­dren from his first two mar­riages — Burt, 36, and Cassandra, 34, with first wife Chrystie, and Brandon, 33, and Brody, 31, with sec­ond wife Linda — and describes an insen­si­tive father who had been absent for years at a time. Jenner open­ly acknowl­edges mis­takes made with them as Bruce, and express­es gen­uine regret. Says Burt, “I have high hopes that Caitlyn is a bet­ter per­son than Bruce. I’m very much look­ing for­ward to that.”

Watch a behind-the-scenes video of Annie Leibovitz’s pho­to shoot, as Caitlyn dis­cuss­es how much liv­ing ful­ly as a woman means to her.

For the Jenner chil­dren, the issue of the tran­si­tion has become a non-issue. They were already aware of their father’s iden­ti­ty as a woman when he told them indi­vid­u­al­ly about the tran­si­tion — Burt and Cassandra had learned from their moth­er rough­ly 20 years ear­li­er, when they were 13 and 11; Brandon had assumed it because of the obvi­ous phys­i­cal changes he had observed; and Brody was told by his moth­er when he was 29. They tell Bissinger they feel both hap­pi­ness for their father and inspi­ra­tion at his brav­ery, and they all still see their dad as their dad regard­less of any gen­der label. Brandon said he was a lit­tle tak­en aback when he saw Caitlyn for the first time after surgery and she pulled her top up to reveal her new breasts. “Whoa, I’m still your son,” he remind­ed her.

As part of the tran­si­tion, Jenner start­ed host­ing small gath­er­ings called “girls’ nights” with wine and food where Jenner could dress as desired and feel nat­ur­al in the pres­ence of women, and it was there that her daugh­ter Cassandra met Caitlyn for the first time. “I was just ner­vous that I wouldn’t make her feel com­fort­able,” Cassandra tells Bissinger. “I was wor­ried I wouldn’t say the right things or act the right way or seem relaxed.” But almost all of it melt­ed away when she got there. “We talked more than we ever have. We could just be girls together.”

Despite the renewed rela­tion­ship with their father, the Jenner chil­dren have refused to par­tic­i­pate in Caitlyn’s docu-series for the E! net­work, set to debut this sum­mer, for­go­ing finan­cial gain in favor of pre­serv­ing their father’s lega­cy. Initially, Caitlyn was “ter­ri­bly dis­ap­point­ed and ter­ri­bly hurt,” but has come to accept their deci­sion. For her part, Caitlyn is pre­pared for the crit­i­cism that it’s a pub­lic­i­ty stunt: “‘Oh, she’s doing a stu­pid real­i­ty show. She’s doing it for the mon­ey. She’s doing this, she’s doing that.’ I’m not doing it for mon­ey. I’m doing it to help my soul and help oth­er peo­ple. If I can make a dol­lar, I cer­tain­ly am not stu­pid. [I have] house pay­ments and all that kind of stuff. I will nev­er make an excuse for some­thing like that. Yeah, this is a busi­ness. You don’t go out and change your gen­der for a tele­vi­sion show. O.K., it ain’t hap­pen­ing. I don’t care who you are.”