Caitlyn Jenner publicly endorsed Donald Trump during the 2024 election, even as his campaign spent millions of dollars on ads targeting transgender people. She seemed unbothered by an executive order Trump signed hours into his second term that would change all government-issued identification to reflect what the order calls a person's "immutable biological classification as either male or female" based on sex assigned at birth. But this month, when Jenner renewed her passport, the consequences became personal.
Her passport came back marked "male" instead of "female." She tried to get it corrected. It came back marked "male" again. During an appearance on the Tomi Lahren is Fearless podcast, Jenner described the situation as a practical crisis. "This is a safety factor. I can't travel internationally anymore, I can't use my passport," she said. "I'm trying to figure out at this point what to do."
Jenner has been trying to reach Trump to resolve the issue but says he hasn't returned her calls. She insisted she still supports him. "I don't blame President Trump. I love him, but for a lot of people, this is a huge issue," she said. When asked about the passport problem specifically, she added: "I don't think this was really thought out, what this means." But Trump's order was deliberately crafted. It was thought out.
This isn't Jenner's first run-in with Trump's approach to transgender issues. In 2017, when Trump revoked federal guidelines that allowed transgender students to use school bathrooms matching their gender identity, Jenner called it a "disaster." Despite that disappointment, she backed him again in 2024. She appears to have calculated that other benefits, possibly tax policy, outweighed her concerns.
Jenner's predicament highlights a pattern among some Trump supporters. During an economic downturn in 2019, a Florida woman named Crystal Minton told the New York Times: "I voted for [Trump], and he's the one who's doing this. I thought he was going to do good things. He's not hurting the people he needs to be hurting." That quote went viral because it captured something fundamental about Trump's appeal to certain voters: they support him not necessarily because they believe he'll help them, but because they think he'll hurt people they view as enemies.
For years, Jenner seemed to fall into this category. She was willing to accept policies that harmed the broader transgender community as long as she believed her wealth and status would insulate her. Now that the policy has touched her directly, she's suddenly disappointed. Whether this will change her political calculations remains to be seen. In the meantime, Trump appears too busy to take her calls.
Author James Rodriguez: "Jenner bet that being rich and connected would exempt her from the cruelty she was voting for, and now she's learning a hard lesson about how ideology eventually comes for everyone."
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