De Bruyn was born in 1914 in
Erembodegem,
East Flanders,
Belgium with both male and female
sex organs. He was officially inscribed as the daughter of his parents, and raised as a girl, but he soon was considerably taller and stronger than other girls his age, and by the age of fourteen he realised that he was not like other girls. This deeply upset and troubled him, even contemplating suicide. After De Bruyn finished his schooling in 1928, he started working in a cigarette company, before working in his parents' café a few months later. In the evenings, he secretly began reading about his condition in medical literature by e.g.
Magnus Hirschfeld as well as mythological and anthropological studies. Eventually, he became convinced that he was a
hermaphrodite. However, he felt more and more uncomfortable racing and winning against women due to feeling "like a man, never like a woman". He continued racing to earn money but deliberately finished second or third instead of winning. De Bruyn learned about
Zdeněk Koubek, a Czech athlete who after being a champion woman athlete had become a man. He died in 1989 in
Antwerp. A street was named after him in Brussels in July 2019. ==Major results==