Bruce Jenner has unsurprisingly found a supporter in Conchita Wurst, the bearded Austrian diva who won the Eurovision Song Contest last year. Conchita has come out to express her admiration for the Olympian cum reality TV dad as she chatted with Australian paper the Daily Telegraph.
“It is good that we have this on the table now because I think, if it becomes mainstream, people start to not see it as such a new and not normal thing.”
From the beginning of his interview with Diane Sawyer, it was clear that Bruce had struggled with feelings of gender identity for a long time. And as we found out in the interview, he spent five years in the 80s taking hormones and undergoing procedures to help him transition to female. Bruce’s wife at the time, Linda Thompson, said he even considered going out of the country for gender confirmation surgery, to return to his family going by “Aunt Heather.” She outlined her reaction to Bruce’s admission in an excerpt from her memoir published by The Huffington Post.
“As devastated as I was, my heart bled for Bruce and what he must have lived with his entire life,” she wrote. “It’s impossible for those of us who are comfortable living in our own skin to fully grasp what an imprisonment that must feel like to be born into the wrong body. I know it’s difficult to understand, to emotionally or even intelligently wrap your head around. It was extremely difficult for me to comprehend, and adjust my life accordingly to, the realization that the man I had married — the very masculine, gorgeous, ideal, wonderful hunk of a man — would be no more. The human entity was still alive, but it truly was like mourning the death of the person I had grown to know and love.”
[via Mirror, The Huffington Post]