Bruce Jenner, The Interview

Friday afternoon update
Daniel D'Addario, writing at time.com, isn't certain that Bruce is actually coming out this evening:

Bruce Jenner, the Olympic gold medalist and Keeping Up With the Kardashians TV personality, has been the subject of intense media scrutiny lately, thanks to a rumored gender transition. Jenner’s body, and the manner in which he styles it, were long the province of Internet comment sections before mainstream outlets picked up the story. On Friday night, ABC will provide a welcome conclusive answer, one way or the other, on the question of Jenner’s story, and the network has done an admirable job of presenting the news with good taste.

If ABC does indeed have the story of Jenner announcing a gender transition, it’s completely understandable that it wouldn’t want to scoop itself with an errant commercial that says too much. And so it is that the promotions for Diane Sawyer’s interview with Jenner have operated with an abundance of caution. In one recent ad for the Jenner/Sawyer special, we see Jenner saying fairly simple statements that could mean anything. On family: “Those are the only ones I’m concerned with.”

But that caution in avoiding giving away the revelation (or lack of it) that would make viewers tune in is also tasteful, and better yet, fair. A person’s coming-out may not be ideally framed on a two-hour news special, but it would certainly be decontextualized and ill-used in a 30-second promo. If, indeed, Jenner is coming out as transgender on ABC’s air, the outlet he chose has done him a service by allowing him to tell his story, in full, to the audience, without preceding “spoilers.”

Original Post:
Every now and then my blogger juices go dry and I'm off the blog for a while. That's been the case recently, for no specific reason, but the big Bruce Jenner interview is tonight and that's enough to get me back to Writing The World.

Based on everything that's been written in the last few months, I'm assuming that at some point during the two-hour show, Jenner will indeed confirm that he's transgender and transitioning to be a woman. (And, side note, what the heck are they going to talk about for two freakin' hours?) Still, I can't shake a tiny little morsel of doubt. Leading up to tonight's show, as far as I've seen, no one with authentic first-hand knowledge of Bruce's situation has definitively stated that he is transgender, or transitioning to being a woman. We've heard about Bruce's journey, how he's been waiting for this his whole life and how he doesn't want to hurt his family, all of which points to a transition without actually confirming that he's transitioning.

Even in a Washington Post article that uses "she" and "her" to refer to Bruce, writer Zoey Tur apparently feels the need to hedge, not stating definitively that Bruce is transgender, rather saying that "tabloid coverage has led us to believe that Jenner, a gold-medal Olympian turned reality-TV celebrity, will come out as a transgender woman in her interview with Diane Sawyer."  (Full article here.)

And Bruce probably will. The fuzzy language is probably nothing more than saving the big reveal for the actual show. I just wanted to get my slight doubts on record.