Caitlyn Jenner has opened up about the impact Donald Trump’s passport policy has had on her, and many people online are responding with the same blunt phrase: “I didn’t think the leopards would eat my face.” Jenner’s comments came in a recent interview with conservative commentator Tomi Lahren.
According to Newsweek, Jenner said she had personally asked Trump for help after his administration’s policy left her unable to use her passport comfortably for international travel. “What do I do? This is a safety factor. I can’t travel internationally anymore. I can’t use my passport,” she said, according to Newsweek. She also described having an “M” sex marker on her passport as a “big problem”.
The policy she was referring to has been one of the Trump administration’s most significant anti-trans measures. In November 2025, the US Supreme Court allowed the administration to enforce a rule requiring passport sex markers to reflect sex assigned at birth, while legal challenges continue. That reversed the more flexible approach adopted under the Biden administration, which had allowed applicants to choose markers aligned with their gender identity, including an “X” marker.
Despite saying the policy has directly harmed her, Jenner made clear that she still supports Trump. “I don’t blame President Trump. I love him,” she said, adding that although she had written to him explaining how the rule affected both her and many other trans people, she had not heard back. She suggested the issue was probably not a major priority for him.
That contradiction is exactly why the response online has been so sharp. Many commentators have invoked the meme phrase “I didn’t think the leopards would eat my face”, which comes from a 2015 joke about people backing harmful policies only to be shocked when those same policies affect them personally. The phrase is commonly used online to describe political self-sabotage or a policy backfiring on one of its own supporters. That explanation is based on the widely recognised origin and use of the meme, rather than a single official source.
Jenner has faced this sort of reaction before. In January 2025, after Trump returned to office and declared that the federal government would recognise only “male and female”, she publicly celebrated his inauguration anyway, despite his administration’s increasingly aggressive moves against trans rights. Her latest comments about passport difficulties have revived that same sense of disbelief among critics, many of whom argue that she supported a political movement that was always likely to target trans people, including her. Reuters has reported that the passport rule was part of a broader Trump crackdown on transgender rights.
Jenner did suggest there were limits to her agreement with the administration. In other recent comments, she has said the United States has gone “too far right” on some trans issues and has criticised bathroom bans as unsafe. But on the passport question, she remains stuck in the same contradiction that many of her online critics keep circling back to: she says the policy is hurting her, yet still backs the man who put it in place.
