Caitlyn Jenner Spelling Her Name With a 'C' Is More Symbolic Than You Realize
We're so happy she didn't go with Kaitlyn.
Caitlyn Jenner made her world debut yesterday, and while most of the social media attention was overwhelmingly positive, people couldn't help asking one question: Why didn't she spell her name with a K?
After all, Kaitlyn would have fit in perfectly with Kris, Kourtney, Kim, Khloe, Kendall, and Kylie, right? But in choosing the name Caitlyn, Jenner made a very pointed, unmistakeable decision to distance herself from her famous reality TV family and form her own unique identity outside of the Kardashians.
And why shouldn't she? After all, Bruce Jenner was picked on and walked all over mercilessly on Keeping Up with the Kardashians. In her Vanity Fair interview, Caitlyn Jenner discusses the reasons for her split from Kris, reportedly saying, “The first 15 years I felt she needed me more because I was the breadwinner. Then, really around the show, when that hit and she was running the whole show and getting credit for it and she had her own money, she didn’t need me as much from that standpoint. I think in a lot of ways she became less tolerant of me. A lot of times she wasn’t very nice. People would see how I got mistreated. She controlled the money. All that kind of stuff.”
And during the interview with Diane Sawyer, Jenner expressed the desire to step out from the shadows and tell her own inspirational story: "We’ve done 425 episodes, I think, over almost eight years now. And the entire run, I kept thinking to myself, 'Oh my God, this whole thing...the one real, true story in the family was the one I was hiding and nobody knew about it.' The one thing that could make a real difference in people’s lives was in my soul, and I could not tell my story."
So really, choosing to spell her name Caitlyn instead of Kaitlyn is a sly, empowered choice that speaks volumes. After years playing second fiddle, the era of Caitlyn has arrived.
