What We Talk About When We Talk About Jazz Jennings

The problem with reading "I Am Jazz" to children

For as long as she could remember, Jazz Jennings’ favorite color was pink. That’s what she tells us in the opening of I Am Jazz, her autobiographical children’s picture book about her early childhood (she was 13 when it was first published). Jazz also likes silver and green. She likes makeup, soccer, drawing, singing, and pretending she’s a pop star. She wears a mermaid tail in the swimming pool, and her best friends are girls, with whom she enjoys dressing up in princess outfits and pearls.

All of this feminine mundanity and stereotypicality paves the way for her eventual revelation: She has a girl brain, but a boy body. This, she tells us, is called transgender. And she was born that way.

I Am Jazz is now read in elementary schools as part of a “Welcoming Schools” curriculum, which suggests it’s appropriate for grades K through five. Kids will learn “the true story of a transgender girl named Jazz Jennings” and “important vocabulary related to gender.” Of course, it’s also one of the most-banned books in America. (Lest you think just the Right bans books, two slots down on the most-banned books list is To Kill a Mockingbird.)

While I don’t want to ban books, I believe it’s fine, important even, for us to debate what’s age-appropriate. And when it comes to I Am Jazz, it’s not just age of readers that matters. Rather, the issues are the claims the story makes, how the story ends, and what’s left unsaid about what happens to a socially and then medically transitioned child later. That is, I contend that this is not really the true story of Jazz.

Very young children generally don’t have the capacity to distinguish between sex and sex stereotypes, but, per gender schema theory, they learn to intuit and internalize those stereotypes by preschool. If they know that women wear makeup and dresses, they’ll believe that anyone in makeup and a dress is a woman. If they are drawn to what’s associated with the opposite sex, or find themselves much more like those kids than the ones of their own sex, they’ll assume they should be in that category, too. It takes about 7 or 8 years to achieve gender constancy, the understanding that your sex category is not based on what you like or do or how you are in the world, but on which kind of body you have—and that it is immutable.

Jazz writes that when she was little, she would correct her mother when she said Jazz was a boy. That is, before she understood gender constancy, she assumed that her proclivities meant she was a girl, and her differences from boys caused her to feel that she was a girl. Her evidence for this claim is that she has always preferred mermaids and princesses to trucks and tools, and her brothers told her those things were for girls. She could only wear her sister’s dresses in the house and had to dress “as a boy” in public. And she assumed she would grow up to be a girl, and longed to do so.

Nowhere in the story has anyone informed Jazz that tiaras and tutus are not just for girls and that donning them doesn’t make anyone a girl. No one says that very, very feminine boys who like these toys we market toward girls exist and are totally acceptable, and that she can wear and play with whatever and whomever she wants. In fact, until recently, most liberals would have objected to teaching children that mermaids and princesses and dresses and pink are only for girls. Those of us raised in the 1970s, who binged on Free to Be You and Me, learned that boys can play with dolls (as a 19th century study of dolls found was very common) and girls can become firefighters.

The story also accepts as fact the idea that there is such a thing as a girl brain—a claim that, just a few years ago, most progressives and feminists would clamor to squelch. The biggest difference in male and female brains is size—shocker, men’s are bigger. Some say differences are big and innate, others that they are small and likely shaped by experience, courtesy of the brain’s plasticity.

This book teaches that girls brains are a given, and that membership in the category of girl is dependent on adherence to stereotypes. If anyone read this book to young kids I’d want it to spark a discussion about what girl stuff is, who decides, and why. (If you want to know more, well, pardon the plug, but that’s what the first third of my book is about.)

As for the claim that she was born this way—that’s complex. By all accounts, Jazz emerged organically, very young, as stereotypically feminine. Many children like her show these nonconforming behaviors while they’re still toddlers. Research shows that gender nonconforming children are more likely to become gay adults. Historically, the majority of those with gender dysphoria (severe discomfort with one’s biological sex—not all extremely gender nonconforming young kids are dysphoric) grew out of it by the end of puberty. If not socially transitioned—a psychological intervention which is “fraught with conflicting perspectives and limited research”—many such kids are later gay or bisexual, too.

So Jazz was clearly born to be feminine, but was she born transgender? I think of transition as something one does, an action one takes in response to discomfort or desire or difference. It’s a pathway. As Dr. Hilary Cass pointed out in her Interim Report, which led to the closing of the Tavistock’s Gender Identity Development Service, there are multiple pathways one can take from gender dysphoria.

But Jazz wasn’t given many pathways. She went to a doctor who introduced the word transgender to her. The doctor gave her a name to explain her differences and distress, which provided an explanation and resulted in the kind of psychological relief conferred by taxonomy. With that word came what she’d previously been missing: permission for Jazz to express herself and wear and do what she wanted to. She could only have this permission as a transgender girl, not a feminine boy. Thus, the doctor foreclosed on other possibilities, other explanations for her differences and other ways to navigate them.

It wasn’t all a walk in the park after. The school was less supportive than her family was, insisting she use the bathrooms and lockers rooms consistent with her sex, not her sense of self. Some kids were still mean. But the naming of her experience allowed her family to soften their stance and announce: “We understand now. Be who you are. We love you no matter what.”

What would happen if we gave more kids this permission to be gender nonconforming without linking it to the notion of gender identity? What would have happened if someone had said, “Jazz, there is a kind of boy who is very much like a girl, and you can wear what you want, and play with the girls. Your body is different, and that’s okay—your body is perfect the way it is, and so is your love of pink and mermaids”?

We can’t know. The book ends with Jazz saying that what matters most is what a person is like inside, and that she is happy, having fun, and proud. And if a child reads only this, they’ll think that social transition was a success, and that when a child conforms to the stereotypes of the opposite sex, this is called transgender and transition is the appropriate pathway.

But what about what happened to Jazz after that story ends? Like about 60 percent of the kids who were socially transitioned in one study, Jazz went onto puberty blockers, followed by cross-sex hormones; that is, social transition is thought to concretize what would have been a transient phase, to create a need for later medical intervention. Eventually she had vaginoplasty. The latter was supposed to happen when she was 16 (in case anyone is still believing the line that “kids don’t get gender surgeries,” please see the piles of evidence that they are), but she had become too obese, which may be a side effect of cross-sex hormones. Later she admitted to an eating disorder, which had led to weight gain of almost 100 pounds in less than two years.

As Abigail Shrier reported, when Jazz was finally ready for the operation, her “penile inversion” surgery was complicated because the puberty blockers she went on at 11 meant she had a micro-penis, not enough tissue to work with. The surgeon, Marci Bowers, used some stomach lining.

Shrier continues:

At first, Jazz’s surgery seemed to have gone fine, but soon after she said experienced “crazy pain.” She was rushed back to the hospital, where Dr. Jess Ting was waiting. “As I was getting her on the bed, I heard something go pop,” Ting said in an episode of “I Am Jazz.” Jazz’s new vagina  — or neovagina, as surgeons say — had split apart.

She had to have several corrections to the surgery; the operation has a high complication rate. Later, Jazz revealed “that she had never experienced an orgasm and may never be able to.” As Bowers later admitted, she’d never seen boys able to orgasm who were blocked at Tanner stage 2 of puberty. We don’t know much about sexual function for these socially-then-medically transitioned kids who’ve gone through the full gender-affirming medical protocol, because there has been no research (as far as I know—please correct me if I’m wrong). Shrier reports that Jazz underwent three further surgeries, and delayed her entry to Harvard because of depression.  

None of this is in her children’s book, of course. When kids read I Am Jazz, they believe that social transition solved her problem. While it clearly quelled her distress at the time, it also created many other problems, both psychological and physical. And her story should cause us to rethink this approach, to debate and discuss what’s best for kids like Jazz, who really are born to express gender differently than the vast majority of their same-sex peers. Instead, kids learn, as Jazz told them in a video reading of her book, “You can be like Jazz … you will be able to live your life as your true and authentic self.”

Jazz doesn’t regret her path, which is a good thing. But of course she has never known another path, in which she could have kept the body she had and been herself. What if Jazz had been taught she was like most girls, which was perfectly normal, but that she could never fully be one biologically? What if her family and medical and mental health providers told her hat her body was perfect and beautiful, and different from the other girls’ bodies, and that’s okay? Because, in the end, her body will always be different, no matter how many surgeries she has. I’m not sure that when the doctor helped her understand herself as transgender, she understood that fact. Jazz likely believed that doctors would make her into a girl, not a medical patient whose body simulates a girl’s. And if what matters is what’s on the inside, why so much concentrating on changing her outside to conform, to pass, to fit in?

If this book is removed from curricula, it shouldn’t be because it introduces kids to the concept of transgender people. They exist, and deserve respect like everyone else. Rather, we should consider the ideas it is actively marketing to children about stereotypes, gender, and social transition.