♪ but it's true ♪ [ cheers and applause ] ♪ this is "nightline." >> tonight, john stamos. the beloved star of "full house" opens up about fame and his personal struggles. hitting rock bottom with a dui. >> i could have killed somebody. it was the worst day of my life. >> juju: the dark secret he carried since childhood. >> i've had ten of my friends text me, oh my god, the same

thing happened to me, i haven't been able to talk about it. >> juju: finding joy, becoming a dad at 54. breaking barriers. transgender former college athlete skyler baylor sharing what he overcame to live authentically. >> discovering i was trans was terrifying. i thought, maybe i'm going to lose the thing i love in the world. >> juju: our conversation about sharing his truth with his closest family members. what was that conversation like with your grandmother? >> that was tearfying. i told the world before i told her. >> juju: the big personal news. >> just my close friends and family knew. ♪ let it go let it go ♪ >> juju: celebrating ten years of "frozen." the winter wonderland blockbuster that became a cultural phenomenon. why the world can't let it go. new emergen-c crystals pop and fizz when you throw them back. and who doesn't love a good throwback? [sfx: video game sound]

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>> looks like it was taken yesterday. >> well. >> do you get tired of people talking about how young you look and that you never age? >> i never know what to say. i think i won the genetic lottery or something. and i drink the blood of rob lowe and lori loughlin. >> reporter: john stamos, eternal heartthrob. known for his iconic tv roles like blacky parrish on "general hospital." >> want to go to dinner or something? >> yeah. >> reporter: or uncle jesse on "full house." >> have mercy. >> reporter: even at times rocking out with the beach boys like in this pbs special. has fame been everything you dreamed it would be? >> i love it. want to take a picture? great. you know. i did want it. the people that are asking for pictures and stuff, i owe them, i'm grateful to them. >> reporter: but behind the smiling selfies, stamos was fighting an internal battle.

>> i wasn't going to kill myself, but i -- i remember thinking, if i die, it's okay. what a dummy. i've done everything, i've got a sitcom, i got to play with the beach boys, i could die. >> reporter: for the first time john stamos giving fans unprecedented insight to his life and private struggles in his newly released memoir, "if you would have told me." >> first of all, i didn't want to write a book. i didn't think i had a story to tell. as i'm writing, my story started to come to fruition. then it became human very fast. i realized that without total truth, it's paralysis. >> reporter: "the total truth" starting with his infamous drunk driving arrest in 2015. >> i had a horrible dui. drove drunk. you know. i could have killed somebody. it was the worst day of my life. >> was that rock bottom for you? >> rock bottom. everybody's bottom is different. one of my dearest friends who writes the foreword, jamie lee

curtis, said, print out that picture of you in handcuffs and look at it every time maybe you want to drink again or how far i've come since then. it was hard. >> reporter: opening up about his very public divorce from actress and model rebecca romijn in 2005. >> i thought we were going to have a family. fairytale ending. for so many years, i blamed her for ruining my life. i realized that i played a big part of our separation, our divorce. it wasn't just her. to be able to finally sort of let that come out i think makes me feel okay. >> another topic that you talk about, really a revelation in the book, is about abuse as a child that you suffered at the hands of a babysitter. >> i warn parents, first of all, to know it's not some weirdo in a trench coat and glasses driving around the school. it could be an uncle, aunt, a schoolmate, a peer, someone at

church, a babysitter. so i thought, i need to talk about this. >> does that feel therapeutic? how does that feel? >> since that came out in the news, i've had ten of my friends, 11 friends, text me, "oh my god, the same thing happened to me, i haven't been able to talk about it." if one person got something out of it, i'm glad i did it. >> reporter: sharing the weight of the past, something stamos says does not come naturally. >> it's hard for me. i like to make jokes. it's also a way of -- >> hiding? >> yeah, a little bit. ♪ whatever happened to ♪ >> the hardest chapters were writing about "full house." >> why? >> i don't -- i've had such a interesting relationship with it over the last three years. i couldn't understand why it was still so popular, why people still want to watch it. i've wrestled with that quite a bit. i knew how important it was to people. i knew it was silly at times, i

knew it was over the top. you look at the show, home cooked meal of love. it feels safe. it became everybody's family. >> reporter: one person he says he couldn't hide his true self from, best friend actor and comedian bob saget who passed away in january 2022 after sustaining a head injury. >> i wish bob was around. he never left anything on the table. he always said, "i love you, care about you, i'm proud of you." one of his many services, if i don't talk about him enough, he'll get mad, you can hear him complaining somewhere. >> reporter: the permair met one set of "full house." >> i loved him, i studied him. i loved comedy and he was one of the best ever. then we just started going through life together. divorce, death. >> reporter: he still remembers the last night they spent together just weeks before his death. out to dinner with their wives. >> bob was everything i ever

wanted him to be. he listened. he was calm. he was interested. and it was one of those -- you don't think that it's going to be the last time you see your best friend. >> reporter: now getting a second chance at rewriting the story of his love life, too. stamos is nine years married to actress kaitlin mccue. in 2018, he became a first-time father at the age of 54. >> you don't look 60. >> reporter: son billy, now 5, already scene stealing. >> who's calling me? >> your wife. >> reporter: pausing our interview with a facetime call to dad. >> what are you watching, "full house"? >> no. >> why not? i love you. >> i love you love you love you to the moon and back, love you love you love you. >> i love you too. >> what's the best part of being a dad? >> oh, there's so much. i didn't think i could love that -- man, the love i have for him -- he's so funny now. that's one of the things. he's got saget's sense of humor. >> what do you hope when people

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>> juju: our next guest made history in 2015 as the first openly transgender male athlete in any sport to compete in ncaa division-i sports. now he is a fierce advocate for lgbtq+ rights. schuyler bailar joins us to discuss his new book and why the way we talk about gender and pronouns matters so much. thanks for being here. >> thanks so much for having me, i'm very excited to be here. >> juju: first, congratulations on your marriage. >> thank you so much. >> love at first sight with sarah? >> you know, we hit it off very quickly. we knew -- we actually had an online relationship, started on instagram. she had reposted something that i posted about pronouns, actually. talking about pronouns today. and we just started talking. it was very clear we were interested in each other quickly, even though we started about work. >> juju: you share a lot in your book about your life. especially the part that we talked about the fact that you

were this harvard swimmer, the first ncaa division-i male athlete. what was that like sort of coming to terms with your teammate? you were given the option of competing on either team. >> yeah, yeah. you know -- coming out as trans was i think a momentary relief. because it explained a lot about my childhood, why i never fit in, why gender had been complicated and difficult and painful for me. at the same time, it was something that, because i was an athlete, discovering i was trans was terrifying. maybe i'm going to lose the thing i love the most in the world, i've been recruited to swim for harvard women's swim team, did i want to lose harvard, did i want to lose swimming by coming out as trans? it was very scary to name my identity, to declare to the world, to tell my coaches, to say, i don't know what to do with this part of myself, but i know i want to swim and i know who i am. >> juju: you wrote "he/she/they." you talk about why the way we talk about gender matters so much.

first take a look at a clip of you at a ted talk. >> in korean culture, daughters take care of their parents. your mother has no more daughters. it is still your duty, to take care of your parents. i said, okay, i can do that. that was such an important for me that i got those words, "take care of your parents," tattooed underneath my mastectomy scar in my grandmother's handwriting. she does know about it. as my eternal vow to my origins, to my parents, to my grandparents. >> juju: i happen to know how conservative korean culture can be at times. what was that conversation like with your grandmother? >> yeah that was terrifying. i mean, i told the entire world before i told her. and i was so afraid of her reaction, i blocked her on facebook. i told everybody not to tell her. i really labored over how to tell her as well. as you know, there's no word for "transgender" in korean. it's "transgender" with a korean

accent. i felt i had to explain so much. my grandmother's very catholic. quite conservative in many ways. i was very afraid she was never going to talk to me again. when i told her, i read her this long letter because i didn't know how else to say it. the first words out of her mouth were, "okay, so i have two grandsons from your mom." there was this overwhelming relief that my mom was immediately in tears. she was so ready to accept me. and her one stipulation was that -- was a reminder of korean culture and the responsibilities that daughters have to take care of their parents. >> juju: tell me about the book, "he/she/they." where does the book fall in the land sdap when there are at least 500 anti-lgbt q plus bills introduced, many passed, many are going to come back. how does this enter into this conversation? >> everybody seems to be talking

about trans people and gender, debating trans people and our rights. most a transgender person. why it matters is really bring everybody into this conversation. give them a little bit more context. research, facts. and of course humanity. because if we don't start with that, i think we're lost before we begin. >> juju: and "he/she/they." i've heard people of a certain generation saying, pronouns are pronouns, it should be binary. why what do you say to folks who have that confusion? >> language shifts and we can update ourselves. people say, he, she, they, pronouns are made up. all words are made up. we made up every single word we ever used to communicate, but we use them to communicate and we should update them to make sure we're being comprehensive of society.

>> juju: a lot of folks say, trans rights, i believe in that but trans women should not compete in elite sports. what do you say? >> i say a couple of things. first that is we need to understand the focus on trans athletes, specifically trans women in sports, not truly most of the time about women. it's not about sports. it's not about trans people. there's a very strong push for control for bodily autonomy in many regions. we can see the attack on reproductive rights, attack on different types of bodies. there's an attack that isn't focused on sports. focus on the things that actually impact fairness in sports, which are not trans people. two, we've seen a lot of research that supports that inclusion of trans women doesn't threaten anybody. the exclusion is what threatens because we're policing the women's category saying who is allowed to be woman enough. there's a lot of different types of oppression that impacts who gets allowed access to womanhood. excluding trans women is going to hurt all women. >> juju: good thing you wrote a book, there's a lot to talk about.

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♪ >> juju: welcome back. finally tonight, it made elsa, anna, and olaf household names and transformed the song "let it go" into an anthem for the ages. "frozen" celebrates its 10-year anniversary. here's abc's maggie rulli. >> no! >> reporter: it's hard to believe that "frozen," the movie that made us all fall for the true love of sisters, is 10 years old. a decade later, it's still getting laughs.

♪ when and a good time to stay in and cuddle ♪ ♪ put me in summer and i'll be a -- happy snowman ♪ >> reporter: this scene still makes me cry. ♪ it doesn't have to be a snowman ♪ >> go away, anna! ♪ ♪ okay bye ♪ >> reporter: an entire generation and their parents growing up knowing how to let it go. ♪ let it go let it go ♪ >> reporter: finding comfort in the words of queen anna, even in the darkest times. ♪ >> reporter: this little girl singing in a bomb shelter in ukraine when war broke out. "frozen's" legacy cannot be overstated. 76% of children have seen the film more than once. 40 "frozen" dolls are sold every minute. norway saw a 40% increase in tourism after the movie came out.

the name "elsa" doubled in popularity the year after "frozen" was released. hong kong disney is giving fans arendelle in first life. >> the world of "frozen" has come to life. the castles, the clock tower, the ice palace nestled into the beautiful mountains of hong kong. >> reporter: we got a behind-the-scenes look at how disney brought arendelle manic to hong kong. >> it's the only park with the mountain backdrop and works perfectly to create the world of "frozen." >> reporter: taking us on the park's exclusive experience. >> this is your first time? arendelle? >> reporter: it is. >> so happy to have you. >> reporter: wandering in sliding sleighs roller coaster. next up, "frozen ever after," a ride with some sing-along. ♪ let it go ♪ >> reporter: and some thrills.

now time for an arendellian feast. >> chocolate! >> reporter: and a snowman's souvenir to take home. >> olaf, how are you doing? >> living the dream, my friend. >> reporter: here in arendelle, parkgoers never know who they may bump into. christoph takes us to queen anna. >> right here. >> thanks, thanks. hi! oh my gosh! ♪ into the unknown ♪ >> reporter: elsa makes her grand appearance and the superpower sisters show me their magic. learning how to let it go and make some snow. >> the cold never bothered me anyway. that's "nightline." watch full episodes on hulu. see you back here tomorrow. thanks f