Bruce Jenner's Transition to Being a Woman Started in Tarrytown

For Bruce Jenner - gold medal-winning decathlete, former husband of three, father of six, stepfather of four - growing up in Tarrytown was where he first began to realize he was different.

In an exclusive interview that aired Friday, he told ABC’s Diane Sawyer that it was in the small apartment off Route 119 that he first tried on his mother’s dresses.

“I marked the closet so when I put it back I could put it all back, everything back in the exact same spot so I wouldn’t get caught,” said Jenner. (See the video below) “And, at the time, I didn’t know why I was doing it besides it just made me feel good.”

The two and a film crew traveled back to Tarrytown over the winter, the first time he had been back in 50 years, and Jenner showed Sawyer the brick apartment building he grew up in.

Now at age 65, Jenner can finally publicly acknowledge that he identifies as a woman and has begun the process to transition into being one. “Yes, for all intents and purposes, I am a woman,” he said. “People look at me differently, they see you as this macho male... but my heart and my soul, and everything I do in life, it is part of me, that female side is part of me. It is who I am.”

His journey began in the New York suburb, where he attended Sleepy Hollow High School and set some athletic records.

“His past really highlights excellence and that’s a quality that we want our students to aspire to, so the timelessness of that lives at Sleepy Hollow and that’s pretty cool,” Carol Conklin-Spillane, Principal of Sleepy Hollow High School, told WABC-TV. Jenner and his family moved while he was in his teens, and he ended up graduating from Newtown High School in Connecticut in 1968.

He has an award named after him at the school, which 2013 winner Ian Harbus told the Daily News that he is very proud to have won. But he admits that more students know about Jenner from the reality show “Keeping Up with the Kardashians” than his legendary athletic feats, particularly at the 1976 Montreal Olympics.

“Other than the award and some sort of plaque, the school does not really recognize that he went there,” Harbus told the Daily News. “I think people should know who he is. It’s quite unfortunate that people don’t. I didn’t know about the other sports he played at Sleepy Hollow — football and basketball.”

Jenner’s track coach from Newtown wishes him well in his transition.

“His hair is different and I guess he’s had some operations on his face and if he wants to change his sex, I don’t see any reason why he shouldn’t,” former Newtown coach Roger Streeter told the Daily News. “I see that he’s been around all these pretty women and girls and his wife seems pretty strong. Maybe he wants to be like them.”

Photo: Screen capture of Bruce Jenner via ABCNews.com

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