Bruce Jenner's second wife opens up about what it was like being married to the celebrity who was feeling trapped a woman in a man's body.

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Linda Thompson was Jenner's second wife and now that he has opened up about feeling like a woman in a man's body, Thompson is opening up about how she kept his secret.

"I never would have dared to speak on this issue before he was comfortable enough to do so first. It is, after all, his truth, so I knew he should be afforded the dignity to reveal that truth on his own time and in the way he sees fit. I have respectfully kept his secrets private and would have taken his confidences to my grave had he not spoken out," Thompson began the article.

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Thompson first recounts how "manly" Jenner always was and how other men looked up to him.

"Bruce was pretty much the perfect specimen of a man. Men aspired to be like him and wanted to hang out and play sports with him, and women were clearly attracted to him. The Bruce I knew back then was unstudied, affable, and seemingly very comfortable in his own skin. So it seemed."

It wasn't until their second child was three years old and their second was 18 months that Jenner couldn't seem to keep quiet any longer.

"Bruce came to me one day with a very somber look on his face and said, 'There's something about me that I really need to tell you, something you need to know.' I truly thought he might possibly tell me he had had an affair while on the road. But that's not what he wanted to confess to me. Bruce told me that he identified as a woman. Not understanding exactly what he meant, I questioned him. 'What do you mean you identify as a woman?' I asked. 'What does that mean?' He replied that it meant that for as long as he could remember, he had looked in the mirror and seen a masculine image staring back at him where there should have been a feminine reflection. "

When Jenner told Thompson, he reportedly said: "I have lived in the wrong skin, the wrong body, my whole life. It is a living hell for me, and I really feel that I would like to move forward with the process of becoming a woman, the woman I have always been inside."

Thompson recalls that there were absolutely no clues that Jenner was transgender. When he entertained the idea of leaving the United States for gender reassignment surgery and coming back as "Aunt Heather" to the kids, Thompson said she was "devastated."

Thompson ended her article with a call for kindness.

"My hope and my prayer is that humanity has evolved enough and been properly educated to exercise kindness toward those who have struggled or who we may perceive to be 'different.'"

Tags: Bruce Jenner linda thompson