It’s one for the book: and a history making interview that’ll be played for many years to come: in an exclusive interview with ABC’s Diane Sawyer on ABC’s “20/20,” legendary athlete Bruce Jenner announced: “I am a woman.”

Bruce Jenner was once hailed as the greatest athlete in the world and later became a reality television star with one of the world’s most famous families. Now, the former Olympian is revealing a secret that has caused him turmoil for decades.

“For all intents and purposes, I’m a woman,” Jenner told ABC’s Diane Sawyer in an exclusive interview that aired Friday in a special two-hour edition of ABC News’ “20/20.”

“People look at me differently. They see you as this macho male, but my heart and my soul and everything that I do in life — it is part of me,” Jenner, 65, said. “That female side is part of me. That’s who I am.”

In hours of interviews with Sawyer in New York and California, Jenner detailed his internal struggles with being transgender, which he said he has wrestled with since childhood.

During the interview, Jenner referred to himself using male pronouns and ABC News has chosen to follow his lead, though he also referred to himself as “Bruce” and “her.”

“I look at it this way—Bruce always telling a lie. He’s lived a lie his whole life about who he is. And I can’t do that any longer,” Jenner said.

“My brain is much more female than it is male,” he added. “It’s hard for people to understand that, but that’s what my soul is.”

And it wasn’t something that happened overnight:

In the late 1950s, during the Eisenhower era, Jenner said he was about 8 or 9 years old when he did something new: put on a dress from his mother’s or sisters’ closet when she was out of the house.

“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,” Jenner said. “And, at the time, I didn’t know why I was doing it besides it just made me feel good.”

Cross dressing became a part of Jenner’s adult life as well. He described trips on the road during his time as a motivational speaker where the anonymity of a hotel room provided an ideal venue for trying to express what he felt within.

“I’d literally go up into the hotel room, change [into women’s] clothes, and walk around,” Jenner said.

For decades, Jenner’s ex-wives and sister kept the secret of his gender identity struggle as the only people who knew. The circle expanded recently when Jenner told his mother and his 10 children. Jenner has six biological children – Burt, Cassandra, Brandon, Brody, Kendall and Kylie — and four step children — Kourtney, Kim, Khloe and Rob Kardashian.

The Daily Caller leads the story with this:

After months of speculation that he was transitioning into a woman, Bruce Jenner confirmed the news in an interview with Diane Sawyer that aired on ABC Friday night, clarifying that he is also a Republican and a Christian.

When asked about Barack Obama addressing LGBT rights in his State of the Union, the 65-year-old former Olympic athlete said that didn’t affect him much.

“I’ve always been more on the conservative side,” Jenner said.

Sawyer, looking shocked, asked if he identifies as a Republican, to which Jenner answered, “Yes.”

Jenner said he is a Christian as well.

“I would sit in church and always wonder, ‘In God’s eyes, how does he see me?’”

But now, he said, he’s realized that maybe this is part of his purpose.

“Maybe this is my cause in life.”

“This is why God put me on this earth…to deal with this issue.”

Meanwhile, the Los Angeles Times (which still has the best arts section of any newspaper in the United States) sees Jenner’s interview as part of a larger TV “transgender moment.”

But the ramifications go beyond Jenner, an American celebrity who’s spent decades in the public eye. For an estimated 700,000 transgender Americans, the interview is a milestone in how TV and the media continue to consider transgender people and issues.

Other breakthrough moments on television dramas and reality series have led to a perception in recent years that attitudes toward the transgendered may be shifting.

“We’re no longer just a punch line for comics, or just limited to that sphere,” says Dana Beyer, a transgender rights advocate and executive director of Gender Rights Maryland. “Stories about us are now of interest to the mainstream media, and not because we’re special but because we’re not just marginalized and ridiculed. We’re actually newsworthy.”

And apparently bankable. At least two network pilots are now in the works starring transgender actors in major roles: the CBS legal drama series “Doubt” with Laverne Cox and the NBC pilot “The Curse of the Fuentes Women” featuring “Transparent’s” Trace Lysette.

Several cable channels are or will be airing new series centered around transgender main characters such as Discovery Life’s first original series, “New Girls on the Block,” featuring six transgender women; TLC’s forthcoming “All That Jazz,” about trans teen YouTube activist Jazz Jennings; and ABC Family’s “Becoming Us” about a parent’s sex-change transition.

Paving the way were two groundbreaking series on streaming networks: “Orange Is the New Black” and “Transparent.” Their success suggests that television and the American public who made these shows popular have developed a more nuanced and realistic sense of what it means to be transgender.

On network TV, the recent transgender story lines on “Glee” and “The Bold and the Beautiful” appear light years removed from the old variety show model of the cross-dressing comedian.

Jenner’s interview will be so widely watched it could prove a tipping point, further normalizing Americans’ perceptions of the nation’s transgender population.

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JOE GANDELMAN, Editor-In-Chief

Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.

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