Just shy of 40
years after winning the Olympic gold medal and only three months after coming
out as a transgender woman during a televised interview with Diane Sawyer, Caitlyn Jenner accepted
the Arthur Ashe Courage Award at the sports equivalent of the
Oscars, the 2015 ESPY Awards.
And a ballroom
full of the world’s best and most popular athletes leapt to their feet to cheer
on her acceptance of the trophy. The highest-profile members of the sports
world—a world traditionally, and perhaps stereotypically, defined by strength,
hyper masculinity, and extreme heteronormativity—respectfully stood to applaud
the courage of a trans woman.
Some things you
never imagined you’d see.
“While it may
not be easy to get past the things you don’t always understand,” Jenner told
the crowd, “I want to prove that it is absolutely possible if we only do it
together.”
It’s the
inspiring, and unlikely, power of Jenner’s very public transition and
insistence of candidly living it in the spotlight that makes her latter
wish—togetherness—graduate from what many once thought would be an
impossibility to what may now, if we’re lucky, be an inevitability.
As should be a
shock to nobody, sports and the LGBT community haven’t traditionally been the
jolliest of bedfellows.
Few places are
as inhospitable to an effeminate or outwardly gay person, let alone a trans
person, than a sports locker room. In a realm where masculinity and brutishness
is lionized, homosexuality—regardless of athletic ability—is such fodder for
bullying, shame, and even discrimination that now, in the year 2015, there is
still only a handful of out sports superstars with professional careers. For so
long, the relationship between sports and the LGBT community was defined by
cruelty, shame, and intolerance.
But Wednesday
night at the ESPY Awards, that very community showered support on Caitlyn
Jenner, a woman who was once a heroic athlete indisputably deserving of respect
for, then, his athletic prowess, and who now is seizing the spotlight the
public interest in her transition is affording her to educate and advocate for
the trans community.
But Jenner shut
down such talk. “The people out there wondering what this is all about, whether
it’s about courage or controversy or publicity…it’s not just about one person,”
she said. “It’s about all of us accepting one another. We’re all different.
That’s not a bad thing. That’s a good thing.”
Women’s World
Cup soccer champion Abby Wambach, herself an out gay superstar athlete,
introduced Jenner’s award, using the moment to draw attention to startling
statistics: 20 percent of trans people are homeless at one point in their
lives, and 41 percent have attempted suicide.
“The ironic
part is that the whole world thinks they know who I am—and they know nothing
about me,” Jenner says, remembering his feelings at the time. But
the crux of her speech was a plea, a plea to save lives through the simplest
way possible: acceptance.
“I know people in this room have respect for hard work,
for training, for going through something difficult to achieve, something you
desire,” she said. “I trained hard. I competed hard. And for that people
respected me. But this transition has been harder on me than anything I could
imagine. And that’s the case for so many others besides me.”
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