Will Bruce Jenner's coming out make Americans more accepting of transgender people?
鈥淪hould I take the ponytail out?鈥� a teary eyed Bruce Jenner asked, letting his hair down for the camera.
In an emotional two-hour interview with ABC鈥檚 Diane Sawyer on Friday April 24, Jenner, who聽referred to himself using male pronouns throughout the interview,聽came out as transgender and detailed his lifelong struggles with gender identity.
鈥淔or all intents and purposes, I鈥檓 a woman,鈥� . 鈥淧eople look at me differently. They see you as this macho male, but my heart and my soul and everything that I do in life 鈥� it is part of me. That female side is part of me. That鈥檚 who I am.鈥�
Although there was a great deal of build up to the ABC 20/20 special, the interview was tasteful, focusing on Jenner鈥檚 journey as a transgender person and promoting understanding of transgender issues, rather than fixating on whether or not he had undergone gender reassignment surgery.
The interview gave the nearly 17 million people who tuned in not only the scoop on Jenner鈥檚 story, but a crash course on the importance of pronouns to transgender people, the , and the .
When it comes to Jenner, there is a generational divide. For younger people he is the patriarch of reality TV鈥檚 favorite family the Kardashians. For older generations he is the all-American athlete who won a gold medal in the decathlon at the 1976 Summer Olympics.
Both of these roles put him in a place to use his celebrity status to normalize the concept of being transgender for people who don鈥檛 understand or may be on the fence about transgender rights. that his coming out may have a similar effect in 1997 did for the now-widespread acceptance of homosexuality in America.
Not that Jenner is the first prominent transgender figure. Actress Laverne Cox, who stars in 鈥淥range Is The New Black,鈥� had a cover story in Time Magazine in which she discussed transgender movement and her own struggles with gender identity. But Cox has been out as a trans woman her entire career, whereas Jenner came out well after rising to fame.
Jenner鈥檚 story joins those of other transgender people who have made the news in the last few months, including , whose parents let him transition from female to male when he was only four years old, and , who took her own life in January after writing in her suicide note that her parents were not accepting of her gender identity.
Because of their relatively small size compared to other sexual minorities,聽little is known about America's transgender population. A well-regarded 2011 study by UCLA School of Law's Williams Institute found that , compared to the 3.5 percent of Americans who are gay, lesbian, or bisexual.
Americans hold overwhelmingly negative attitudes toward transgender people, but much of this negativity evaporates among those who know or work with a transgender person: A survey this month by the Human Rights Campaign, the largest LGBT advocacy group in the United States, found that 66 percent of those who know a transgender person , compared with 13 percent who did not.
The survey also revealed a significant increase in the number of Americans who said they knew a transgender person: 22 percent said they did, up from 17 percent last year.
