She Said, She Said: Kris Jenner Argues With Caitlyn Over What She Knew About Transition

Caitlyn and Kris Jenner. (Photo: Getty Images)

Kris Jenner says she never knew her ex-husband wanted to be a woman. That’s her story, and she’s (still) sticking to it.

In a preview for this Sunday’s episode of I Am Cait, Kris meets up with Caitlyn in New Orleans, and it’s clear the two still are not on the same page regarding when the Kardashian matriarch became aware of her ex’s identity struggles. The former couple split in 2014 after 22 years of marriage.

“Did she tell you early on?” a friend of Caitlyn’s directly asks Kris over dinner in the preview.

“No,” Kris emphatically replies.

“Oh, I did too!” Cait interjects. (In the clip, you can hear someone else at the table say, “Oh, yes she did.”)

“She keeps saying she told me but she didn’t,” Kris maintains. “What happened was a conversation in a driveway. He says to me, ‘Do you ever want to have more kids?’ And I said, 'Oh God no.’ So he says, 'Oh either do I, that’s great! And I couldn’t have any more kids if I wanted to.’ And I went, 'What?’ And he goes, 'Oh geez, you know, back in the '80s I messed around with this or that and it kind of screwed up my sperm count, but whatever.’"

Caitlyn looks none too pleased during this explanation.

Kris continues, ”[It] could have been, like, steroids for all I knew because he was an athlete. He never said it was estrogen, he never said anything, he just said, 'I took some s**t in the '80s.’ There was no, 'I am transgender.’“

Caitlyn still calls B.S. on Kris, claiming that at the time she said, "I had a condition that I’ve been dealing with forever, I was on hormones, and that’s the reason it might be tough to get pregnant… I certainly told her what was going on."

Photo: WireImage

While Kris and Cait usually keep it pretty civil — at least around the cameras — the “when did Kris know?” topic is something neither has really wavered on. And both get riled up about.

So who do you believe? Let’s examine both of their stories.

A couple of weeks after Bruce’s sit-down with Diane Sawyer last spring, E!’s Keeping Up With the Kardashians: About Bruce special aired. In it, Bruce had a candid chat with the Kardashian-Jenner kids and Kris.

“I always knew you struggled with wanting to dress differently and wanting to dress as a female, and that was something you did whenever you got that urge,” Kris admitted, adding she didn’t know how deeply he was struggling. “That’s the only thing I experienced with you, Bruce, and I don’t know when you went from this isn’t working for me anymore and I’m going to go all the way and I’m going to start taking hormones.”

Bruce responded, “I’ve always had these issues, honey, and I’ve never dealt with them. That’s what I’m trying to do, for the first time in my life — I’m trying to tell the truth. … You are the toughest one to talk to out of anybody, OK?”

A few weeks later, Caitlyn introduced herself to the world on the cover of Vanity Fair, and the public “she said, she said” really escalated.

“When I met Bruce, he told me that he had done hormones back in the early ’80s,” Kris revealed to the mag. “This was a conversation that took place in the early ’90s. So what he was telling me happened a decade earlier, and he never really explained it.”

Caitlyn told Vanity Fair that Kris was very much aware of the specific treatments and their side effects, including breast growth, which could not be reversed. She said Bruce was a “good, solid B cup” when they began dating.

Kris explained she brushed it off as a “little bit of a man-boob situation” but that there was “no B-cup going on.” She added, “There wasn’t a gender issue. Nobody mentioned a gender issue. … Somebody mentioned that [he] at one point in his life liked to dress up.”

Kris and Bruce back in the day. (Photo: Instagram)

Caitlyn conceded that Bruce might not have emphasized the severity of the issue but that it was impossible for Kris not to know about the gender struggle. Case in point? His cross-dressing. Caitlyn explained Bruce did cross-dress in front of Kris but that she ultimately put rules in place that he could only do that while on the road. Kris said that never happened but acknowledged “a few times I would see a suitcase or things lying around the house.”

Hmm.

For what it’s worth, the author of the Vanity Fair article appeared to lean more toward Kris’s truth.

“Kris was very civil during the interview, and she was very open,” Buzz Bissinger expressed on the Today show. “She said, ‘I didn’t know. … I had no idea about the extent of his gender issues, really the severity.’ I’ve got to say, I think she’s right. I think Bruce downplayed it [as], ‘It was a phase of my life, it’s over.’ It wasn’t over, and I think Kris had a sense that whatever happened in the past, I can fix it.”

Clearly, the fact Kris and Caitlyn remember things a lot differently isn’t a hang-up on their road to being friendly. Check out the full exchange this Sunday night on E!.