Laverne Cox recalls Caitlyn Jenner's rocky trans debut: "That first year out, it got dicey pretty quickly" - Queerty

A person was contacted after rumors of Caitlyn’s transition and was asked to speak with her. Caitlyn called the next day, discussed her transition and her children, and received support from many in the trans community. Early after coming out publicly, the situation became difficult as she made statements viewed as problematic. A specific example involved receiving Glamour’s Woman of the Year and saying that the hardest part of being a woman is figuring out what to wear, which drew backlash for being tone deaf. The speaker argues that early transitioning trans people should not be placed in front of cameras for several years because they have not yet lived the experiences of a trans woman, having previously lived as a person denying transness and benefiting from cisgender male privilege.

"In January of 2015, a friend of mine reached out to me, and there had been rumors that Caitlyn was going to transition... And she was like, 'She's never met a trans person before. Can you talk to her?'Caitlyn calls me the next day. We speak for like a few hours. She'd already had some feminizing procedures. She talked about her kids mostly. And I supported her, and a lot of us in the trans community supported her when she came out, and she had a show on E! with a lot of trans folks..."

"That first year out, it got dicey pretty quickly. She started saying some problematic things. I remember the day she got Glamour's Woman of the Year. In the article or a speech or something, she's like, 'The hardest thing about being a woman is trying to figure out what to wear.' And, like, the backlash. It was so tone deaf!..."

"I think early transitioning trans people should not be in front of a camera for at least five to seven years. For Caitlyn to all the sudden be held up-it was a rollout of her transness and her transition-she has not lived a life as a trans person yet.[At that point] she has lived the life of a person who is denying their transness, who is assumed as a straight cisgender male, with all the privileges that come with that, until she was 65 years old. She does not have the experiences of a trans woman yet."

Read at Queerty