Caitlyn Jenner had her eye on Deja Lynn Alvarez from her spot in an armchair on stage at the University of Pennsylvania.
Afterward, the reality star and the woman who runs Divine Light LGBTQ Wellness Center in North Philadelphia spent about 45 minutes talking to each other.
“Right from the jump, she reached out her arms,” Alvarez said. “She said, ‘I saw you from the stage. I kept looking at you.’ She wasn’t acting like a big-deal celebrity. She was interested in talking to another trans sister.”
Alvarez said she had hoped she wouldn’t be disappointed by Jenner’s Feb. 17 visit to Philadelphia — and she wasn’t.
“Caitlyn Jenner gets it,” she said. “She recognizes she’s new to this. She’s just looking for the chance to learn and to be accepted by her own community.”
Jenner spent an hour and a half in Irvine Auditorium on Penn’s campus with Buzz Bissinger, the former Philadelphia Inquirer journalist who will help Jenner pen her memoir and announced her coming out in last year’s Vanity Fair article.
Jenner was married for more than 20 years to Kris Jenner and appeared on the reality show “Keeping up with the Kardashians” on E! before starring in her own show, “I Am Cait,” on the same network.
Several people from the local LGBT community attended last week’s event. Most walked away with positive impressions, despite the fact that Jenner is “a divisive figure in many ways,” said Rebecca Schept, associate director of the Penn LGBT Center. She noted Jenner’s wealth and conservative Republican politics, which often don’t gel with other transgender people.
Jenner talked about her decision to transition at 65 and how it affected her relationships with her 10 children and mother. She said her biggest regret was not being able to come out to her father, a World War II veteran who died in 2000.
“I’m getting verklempt just thinking about it,” said Bob Schoenberg, director of the Penn LGBT Center, adding he didn’t have high expectations going into the talk.
“You could hear a pin drop. She got very weepy. She hopes he’s watching from Heaven,” he said. “She carried the night. She was articulate. Honestly, I just didn’t think she had a lot of guile.”
Alvarez found Jenner personable and funny.
“She accepts all aspects of herself,” she said. “That’s amazing. She has no problem acknowledging Bruce and the accomplishments he had and the turmoil he went through.”
Alvarez remembered Jenner joking while talking about her forthcoming book: “Buzz asked me one question and I gave him 1,000 pages of transcript.”
Schept said she did feel disappointed that Jenner focused so much on the gender binary. Jenner told the audience, “I’m thoroughly on the girls’ team now, make no mistake. Go girls.”
“A lot of transgender people don’t identify on the binary,” Schept said.
Dawn Munro, a Philadelphia transgender activist who does not consider herself a fan of Jenner, thought the evening was too rehearsed. She wanted to hear more questions about Jenner’s former spouses.
“Every trans woman I’ve ever known who has been married before, they’ve had stand-up fights with their spouses about this,” Munro said. “There was nothing about her intimate life. I suppose that was deliberate.”
Jenner also did not address the controversy spurred by the Mummers brigade that mocked her transition in the New Year’s Day parade.
Munro said she sees value in Jenner as a high-profile person who came out as transgender. But the visibility can backfire, she said, if people see Jenner having an easy transition and think it’s easy for all transgender people.
Munro said Jenner considers her transition difficult because it was public, but Munro countered that all transitions are public.
“She couldn’t go anywhere without being followed by the paparazzi,” Munro said of Jenner. “I’d take being hounded by the paparazzi any day than by the three guys who beat me and put me in hospital.
“Everyone’s entitled to tell their own story,” she said. “But my feeling is we didn’t get the whole story. It was a very sanitized version.”