Do we like Caitlyn Jenner?
Our score: 2 out of 10. Her own PAC and public statements campaign on trans kids in sport and schools, with only a little real good from her past giving to set against it.
Jenner won the decathlon gold at the 1976 Montreal Olympics, setting a world record, and was a household name long before anything else. On 1 June 2015 she announced she is a woman, the same day Vanity Fair put her on its cover as Caitlyn, shot by Annie Leibovitz. For a lot of trans people at the time, she was the most visible trans woman on the planet.
Her politics have been a bumpy ride. In a 2018 op-ed she withdrew her support for Trump, writing “Sadly, I was wrong” and that the trans community was being attacked by his administration. Then came the 2021 California recall run, where she finished with about 1.1 per cent, 13th, and said she couldn't believe that so many people had voted to keep Newsom in office.
Now the harm check, and it's not close. In 2021 she told TMZ she opposes trans girls in girls' school sport, and in April 2023 she launched Fairness First, a PAC to fight “radical gender ideology”. In a Breitbart interview that month she said being trans “is not made up or fake” but is “oversaturated due to indoctrination”. Advocates call that discriminatory, while she frames it as fairness for girls, and where you land on the sport question is up to you. A PAC aimed at schools and youth is campaigning against kids, though.
The recent chapter is almost tragic. Her renewed passport came back marked “M” under the policy Trump ordered on day one, and she told Tomi Lahren she can't travel internationally anymore. She said she'd written Trump a letter and hadn't heard back, yet insisted “I don't blame President Trump, I love him.” Critics online say the policy was always aimed at people like her, while she says it's a safety problem nobody thought through.
On the legal side, the record is thin and not dramatic. Prosecutors declined to charge her over the 2015 Malibu crash, and a driver's civil suit was settled with her insurer. A British investor's class action alleged she broke securities laws over the $JENNER meme coin and said he lost over $40,000, but a federal judge tossed it in May 2025, noting scant details, with room to refile. She is accused there, not found liable, and the report carried no reply from her.
The good stuff is real but older. She said in 2023 that her foundation gave $2.5 million to trans organisations, and told the Evening Standard “I wanna be a trans example”, rather than an activist. PolitiFact has rated just one of her claims, a 2017 one about North Carolina's bathroom law, as False. That's honestly the whole list.