Caitlyn Jenner

Caitlyn Jenner is an American television personality and former Olympic athlete who won the gold medal in the decathlon at the 1976 Montreal Olympics, becoming an iconic American sports figure. She publicly came out as transgender in a landmark April 2015 television interview with Diane Sawyer, followed weeks later by a celebrated Vanity Fair cover, and her transition was documented in the reality series I Am Cait (2015). That year she received the Arthur Ashe Courage Award, and her memoir The Secrets of My Life (2017) described decades of living with gender dysphoria while in the public eye. Jenner became one of the most high-profile transgender women in the world virtually overnight, bringing unprecedented mainstream visibility to trans lives. Her political views — she is a conservative Republican who ran in California's 2021 gubernatorial recall election — have generated significant controversy within LGBTQ+ communities, even as her 2015 coming out remains a landmark moment in transgender media history.