I Knew Bruce Jenner Was Female Before You Did

The world was shocked when Bruce Jenner announced that he was transitioning to female and changed his name to
Caitlyn. I’m here to tell you, though, that I knew Bruce Jenner was female as early as 1977. Don’t believe me? Read on!

We had pet turtles for most of the years I was growing up. Technically, they were tortoises because they were desert land dwellers, not water turtles, but for the purposes of this story I’m calling them turtles because that’s what we always called them growing up.

In El Paso, many yards have either rock or stucco walls. Rock is (or at least used to be) abundantly available and would not succumb to dry rot the way a wood fence could and also did not pose a fire danger in a dry climate where we got ten inches or less of rain a year. Rock walls also afforded more privacy than chain link.

Another advantage of rock walls is that because they are set into the ground all the way across, it’s nearly impossible for pets to dig under them and escape. Dad only had to affix chicken wire to the bottoms of our gates to keep all of the critters we collected safely inside the yard.

And we did collect critters, including dogs, cats, parakeets, frogs, a hamster, and turtles (tortoises).

My Dad happened to find the first one as it was meandering dangerously in the street in front of our house. He rescued it and put it out in the backyard. My brother and I were quite young, probably about five and eight, and the task of naming the turtle fell on my brother. He promptly named it Yertle the Turtle after the Dr. Seuss story.

Shortly after bringing Yertle home, a neighbor found another turtle and knowing my Dad had rescued and kept Yertle, he brought the new one to Dad. My mother decided we needed something to rhyme with Yertle and so she christened the new addition Myrtle the Turtle.

I don’t know how long Yertle and Myrtle shared the yard together before someone at work brought my Dad yet another turtle to bring home to us. I guess by this point we were just the go-to family when someone needed to rescue a turtle. This one had a very slick, almost mono-color shell with almost no texture, which was kind of unusual. Mom named it Slick Sam.

The final addition came a short time later when yet another neighbor brought us a turtle. The first thing we noticed about this one was that he was fast. I know turtles are known for being slow, but I’m here to tell you that’s a myth. We watched this new turtle chase some kind of insect across our patio and snap it up in two gulps, and he hauled ass! We decided he needed a name befitting a runner, and since the 1976 Summer Olympics had just taken place, the perfect name was not difficult to find. We named our new addition Bruce Jenner.

And no, we never called him “Bruce”. It was always “Bruce Jenner”.

“Bruce Jenner is on the patio. I’m going to feed him.”

“Tiny is barking at Bruce Jenner.”

“I just put Bruce Jenner in the flower pot so I wouldn’t run over him with the lawn mower.”

We’re from the South. Calling out five names for one person is just in our DNA and doesn’t slow us down a bit. My grandmother’s name was Emma Rae and you didn’t call her Emma. You called her Emma Rae. Some of my older relatives always called me Katherine Rae, even though the majority of people called me Kathy and then later Kat. I can always rely on my Louisiana Cousin Judy to call me “Kathy Rae”.

Back to the turtles. Our turtles very much became part of the family as much as our other pets. They got so used to us they would actually come out and greet us and follow us around the yard, probably hoping to be fed. We could pick them up and pet the tops of their heads and they didn’t shrink up into their shells when we approached them.

Each turtle had a hole they had dug somewhere in the yard and in the winter they would dig in deep and hibernate. We knew which hole belonged to which turtle because they always seemed to return to the same ones. We fed them the same canned dog food that our dogs ate and they supplemented what we fed them by eating roly polys and other insects in the yard.

Sometimes they even ate dog poop, which made them very popular with my Dad and brother because that was less they had to clean up.

I think we had the turtles about a year or two before we discovered the first baby crawling out of one of the turtle holes. It was the size of a quarter and my Mom rescued it out of the yard and brought it in the house. She was afraid that being so tiny, the dogs might hurt it or Dad might accidentally run over it with the lawnmower. My dad had an old black cast iron cooking pot that belonged to his mother. It was the kind with a handle meant to hook over a camp fire or in a fireplace in the days when people cooked on their fires if they didn’t have a cook stove.

Dad filled the pot with dirt and our new baby had a home in the sunny corner of our kitchen by the two big picture windows. Mom named him “Snappy Tom”. I don’t know how she came up with the names she did but they still make me laugh. And of course, it was always Snappy Tom, not Snappy or Tom.

Before long, Snappy Tom had several siblings and then Dad had to move the “nursery” to a larger pot outside. We would teach the babies to eat dog food by taking a small dab of food on the end of our finger and literally smushing it against their tiny noses until they got mad and opened their mouths to snap. Then we smushed the food in their mouths and they would chew it and swallow. You only had to do this once or twice before they got the idea and you could just put food in a vitamin bottle lid and they would walk up and eat it (remember, they were the size of quarters when they first emerged from their mothers’ nests). You had to be careful to get enough food on your finger that only the food was actually touching the baby’s face and not your finger, or you’d end up getting a really nasty pinch on the end of your finger when they snapped their mouth shut.

I was very proud of the fact that, like my Dad, I never got my finger snapped like my Mom and brother did.

But back to Bruce Jenner. The turtle, not the Olympian.

As it so happened, we began to realize that all these babies were emerging from only three of the four turtle holes. In other words, the turtles laying eggs were Yertle, Slick Sam, and yes, Bruce Jenner. The only one NOT laying eggs was Myrtle.

For those keeping score at home, the only turtle with a female name was the proud Papa to all these babies. All the male-named turtles were his sister-wives.

That, my friends, is how I knew Bruce Jenner was female before you did.

The turtle, not the Olympian.

I was just as surprised as you when the Olympian announced her transition.

Makes a good story, though, right?

We were later told that in this particular kind of tortoise, the females have brown eyes and the males have red. I don’t know if that’s actually true, but it seemed to be accurate based on what we knew about our backyard brood.

We had completely misnamed our tortoise family, right down to that first baby. Snappy Tom turned out to have brown eyes and had a few babies of her own.

Post Script

Flash forward about thirty-five years. A friend of a friend brought us an adorable three week old solid black kitten, who had been abandoned by or lost its mother. I had been wanting another kitty since I had put down my nineteen year old cat the year before. I wanted a female because I was tired of dealing with males and their propensity to “spray” even after being fixed.

Our friend knew someone who had found this cute baby and said it was a female. He brought her to us and I named her “Luna”, which is the Spanish and Italian word for moon. I bought her a pink bed with leopard print on it and a pink water dish that said “Princess” on it. I know, total gender stereotypes.

About three weeks later she was grooming herself and I realized she had an extra appendage that should not have been there.

All I could think was, man we’re really bad at this in our family.

I didn’t want to change his name, because I had always wanted a cat name Luna. I just added “Mr.” to the beginning. Again, being Southern means it’s ok to call someone by more than one name at a time.

From now on, though, I’m going to wait until my pets reveal their genders to me before I name them. I’m sure you’ll agree that’s probably a good plan!