Jazz Jennings

Commentary by Susan Brinkmann, OCDS

A new show intended to shed a positive light on the story of a young teenaged boy who believes he’s a girl will debut on TLC on Wednesday, July 15, at 10:00 p.m.

The Associated Press (AP) is giving glowing coverage to the next cause celebre – transgenderism – which will reach a new milestone tonight when TLC airs a new reality show named I Am Jazz. The story is about 14 year-old Jazz Jennings (not his real name) whose parents say he believed he was a girl from the age of two.

Typical of the kind of sympathy his “cause” will receive from the mainstream media, the AP says that he was “assigned” male at birth and that he was “sure” at the age of two that he was a girl. He then “transitioned into Jazz at age 5.”

The article does not clarify who “assigned” Jazz’s sex at birth, nor does it explain how a child who can barely speak in full sentences can possibly be “sure” of his gender.

Understandably, the family was initially confused by their son’s behavior but were told by a doctor not to worry - he's “just” transgender. In other words, he was suffering from gender dysphoria, a very treatable condition that he probably would have grown out of (most children do) if given the chance. Instead, his parents chose to allow him to grow up while dressing as a girl.

The 11-episode series will give a candid view into the life of a transgender, which is shared by Jazz’s parents, Jeannette and Greg and three other children; Ari, 19, and 17 year-old twin boys Griffen and Sander.

The difficulties Jazz faces in being a boy who is trying to hide his male body will include episodes in which he struggles with his situation, such as while shopping for, and wearing, bathing suits.

"I have to look at it a little bit differently because of 'my area’,” Jazz says, referring to his genitalia. “Also, when I'm swimming I have to make sure I'm wearing skirts or shorts over the bikini bottoms so that no one will see anything."

The AP says Jazz has come to terms with what will be the audience’s most pressing question – such as how he handles the reality of his obviously male body - but goes on to call those questions “misguided”!

Instead, the hoops this child is made to jump through in order to live like a girl are described in the most matter-of-fact fashion.

“Jazz started hormone blockers about three years ago to ward off male puberty, and two years ago began estrogen treatments,” the AP reports. “It's a delicate drug regimen that, in the first episode, Jeanette acknowledges is ‘experimental stuff. I am messing with my kid's body’."

She’s also messing with the mind of her child - as well as the minds of many other children because her son authored a children's book about his experience entitled I Am Jazz. The book caused outrage in Horace Mitchell Primary School in Kittery Point, Maine when a guidance counselor read it to a class of first-graders. Parents were shocked when their children came home asking all kinds of questions about whether or not they were in the wrong body.

As one parent complained: "I feel like my thoughts, feelings and beliefs were completely ignored. ... My right as a parent to allow or not allow this discussion with my child was taken from me. It is very upsetting to me that I didn't have an option at all.”

The school later apologized - not for allowing the reading of the book - but for not notifying parents before it was read.

In other words, we’re now headed down the same path taken during the fight for “gay rights” when schools, liberal lawmakers and the press colluded in order to make homosexual relations seem “normal”. Now that same-sex relationships have been foisted on the American public, here come the transgenders. We will all be forced to accept them eventually, even though this means allowing men who think they’re women to occupy the stall next to ours in the ladies’ room. But face it we must, or risk being called a “hater”.

Indicative of what we will be hearing ad nauseam in the future, Jazz insists (and the AP is only too happy to quote) that: “We're just the average family, being ourselves. We love one another. But it also shows how we handle the fact that I'm transgender — how we embrace it and move forward.”

The world has truly turned upside down!

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