The Modern Invention of the Transgender child.
Jazz Jennings' gender identity and the creation of the transgender child.
I Am Jazz is a well-known reality show airing on the TLC television network television in the United States since 2015 Producers: Taylor Garbutt; Jared Goode.
Historians may wonder in the not-too-distant future how gay-rights organizations went from defending homosexual rights in the 1990s to pushing in 2022 for lesbian women to date people of the opposite sex – that is, biological men who merely identify as women. Should gay men date individuals of the opposing sex based only on the person's identification or be motivated by "social bias" and "sexual racism"? While historians are at it, they might consider how our culture has progressed from the admirable goal of depathologizing homosexuality to widespread acceptance of chemical castration of confused homosexual youth under the pretense of "transitioning." This fate is eerily similar to the one meted out with such vindictiveness in regimes such as Iran. These are intriguing future historical questions that will not be addressed within the corporate-friendly walls that surround today's corporate media.
What will be the response of future historians to this question? They will be concentrating on the establishment of an innate transgender soul. Traditionally, A transgender person is someone who is unable to cope with their gender condition, called gender dysphoria, and feels the need to adapt their appearance and live as the opposite sex. However, in order to make transgender identity as real and palpable as possible, we have reified it as an essential component of human nature, just as real as blue eyes and red hair. The gender soul of the transgendered child is seen as a cornerstone of this widespread belief.
Through television and the Internet, the clergy of the transgendered movement will be introduced, and show star Jazz Jennings will be the real-life celebrity to teach us about being born with a gendered soul that differs from the sex assigned at birth. All of the nuanced jargon and customary definitions of words have been altered. As an example, I was born male and was assigned male at birth. These changes are needed so that the person who is watching can be indoctrinated and have faith in the gendered soul.
TLC’s I Am Jazz promotes the false belief that all children are born with a hidden gender that they will proclaim and that we should accept as if they were delivered with the foresight and wisdom of an adult.
Jazz Jennings is the star of the show, which launched when Jazz was 15 years old. Jazz was diagnosed with gender dysphoria at the age of six, and over its seasons, viewers have watched as Jazz Jennings’s family and friends witness her transition through hormone therapy and surgery and discuss the social implications of her gender-affirming care. Jennings remains one of the youngest people to have undergone transition.
In the first episode, a montage of Jazz as a child provides proof that Jazz was born with a girl’s identity in a boy’s body. She has wanted to dress up like a girl, play, and do girlie things since she could speak. Viewers are shown superficial, clichéd images of what it means to be a girl. They learn that a child's gender identity is like a play or even a TV show.
Jazz’s girlish behavior was observed by a gender therapist to evaluate if she might be a child born in the wrong kind of body. Yet so much air-time is dedicated to the single-minded portrayal of Jazz as unquestionably a girl, with a girl’s gender identity but a boy’s anatomy, that it would appear that a transformation of Jazz Jennings’ body would bring her inner feelings about gender into perfect harmony with her body. Throughout the first two seasons before complete indoctrination, both Jazz and her mother are concerned that she is evolving into a "facsimile" of a girl. As you watch Jazz interact with her girlfriends, you cannot help but feel compassion. Jazz is at ease as a woman, but she wants something that surgery cannot accomplish. Indeed, a scene with her friends and family before her vaginoplasty reinforces the idea that she is making a "life-changing medical transition for the better." Both the viewers and Jazz are encouraged to think that after a short hospital stay, her gender identity and physique will match. Indeed, the underlying premise of the entire I am Jazz television series is over-simplification.
When people watch reality TV, they see real-world things mixed with fantasy. People who don't know much about dysphoric people and gender medicine can easily be fooled into thinking that Jazz's identification and treatment plan is a medical fact.Jazz’s girlish behavior was observed by a gender therapist to evaluate if she might be a child born in the wrong kind of body. Yet so much air-time is dedicated to the single-minded portrayal of Jazz as unquestioningly a girl, with a girl’s gender identity, but a boy’s anatomy that it would appear that a transformation of Jazz Jennings’ body would bring her inner feelings about gender into perfect harmony with her body. Throughout the first two seasons, both Jazz and her mother are concerned that she is evolving into a “facsimile” of a girl. As you watch Jazz interact with her girlfriends, you can not help but feel compassion. Jazz is at ease as a woman, but she wants something that surgery cannot accomplish. Indeed, a scene with her friends and family before her vaginoplasty reinforces the idea that she is making a “life-changin”g medical transition for the better. Both the viewers and Jazz are encouraged to think that after a short hospital stay, her gender identity and physique will match. Indeed, the underlying premise of the entire I am Jazz television series is over-simplification. Reality television combines real-world conditions with fantasy, and viewers unfamiliar with the lived reality of dysphoric children and adults and the great complexity of gender medicine can easily be misled into accepting Jazz’s identification and treatment plan as a medical fact.
The Human Rights Campaign defines transgender as "when your gender identity (how you feel) is different than what doctors/midwives assigned to you when you were born (girl/boy, she/he pronouns, or sex assigned at birth").
There is a lot of jargon in this definition, as well as confusing concepts. This new paradigm replaces the medical term "gender dysphoria" (literally, gender discomfort) with an identity term, "transgender".
Jazz discusses transphobia in many episodes, and she uses incidents of misgendering and ordinary homophobia as examples. There is no distinction between acts of personal cruelty, like approaching Jazz and declaring she is a male while chanting homophobic insults, and other cruel acts. It’s tough to differentiate between personal attacks and criticism of the consequences of accepting gender identity as an immutable truth. Transphobia is a rebranding of homophobia, expanded to include criticizing any language usage or skepticism about our underlying assumptions about gender identity. Suppose a parent of an adolescent girl notices their daughter experimenting with harmful breast binding devices, using a confusing set of pronouns, and declaring herself non-binary. Should a parent question whether any of these behaviors might have other underlying causes, someone may accuse them of being transphobic and hateful. Activists have restricted schools. counselors from discussing gender with adolescent girls because what they describe as "conversion therapy" might prevent a person from thinking they are transgender. Conversion therapy is an old homophobic practice that aims to change somebody’s sexual orientation.
'Social transition isn't reversible because what we tell our children for years can't be reversed,' she wrote.
Several episodes of Jazz Jennings’ television series depict her continuing visits to her pediatrician. In one scene, Jazz and the pediatrician review Jazz’s hormone test findings, as well as the prospect of top and bottom surgery. Jazz seems uneasy with her mother’s frequent attention. How much of this was staged for the camera and how much of it was a real interaction between a patient and their doctor? Jazz becomes entangled with the desires of both her family and the television audience.
This is because she has captured the ideal of transgender youth and fully embraces her transition. She has made money and gained a lot of fans.
The pediatrician also offers a case history. Jazz began taking puberty blockers when she was 11-years-old, which was early enough to stop her development of masculine sex traits. These same blockers also prevented her gender dysphoria from naturally resolving itself, but this is not said. Her pediatrician subsequently prescribed estrogen, causing Jazz to develop female sex traits.
The show never mentions the negative effects of gender-affirming surgery (cosmetic surgery) or puberty blockers (which inhibit sexual development), yet these procedures and medications are so new as to rightly be called "experimental." Throughout the entire series, however, Jazz’s mother expresses distrust toward her daughter’s doctors and believes her daughter is being used as a guinea pig: "The doctors are experimenting on my daughter" (see above). Jazz herself also displays apprehension about the impending gender-affirming surgery.
Because only a basic understanding of how gender-affirming treatment works is shared with viewers, these very real, relevant, and poignant concerns seem silly.
As the series progresses, Jazz’s mother reveals that she is frightened that should Jazz’s testosterone levels be too high and she develop facial hair, she might threaten to commit suicide. Herein lies the strongest case for confirmation surgery and gender-affirming care presented to the audience: intrusive treatment surgeries and medications are the only way to save this child’s life. The grooming of Jazz Jennings is complete.
Activists often misappropriate the transgender suicide rate among adults as evidence that a trans person’s failure to transition to their "true" gender at a young age leads to suicide. "If I had transitioned sooner, I would not have been suicidal, and my transgender friends would not have committed suicide." This type of projection has become orthodox in gender medicine.
The rainbow reality TV shows, such as Jazz Jennings, have an underlining purpose to teach, calm, nurture, "handle uncomfortable debates," protect, or inspire. The tone is warm, comforting, and responsible. It's time for tea and cookies, not chemsex, castration, or irreversible surgeries. There is also a favorable attitude throughout the show toward laws and regulations, just as there is with media outlets all over the world. It is critical to understand what words and phrases to use, what badges and necklaces to wear, what transgender holy dates to mark, what petitions to sign, what bake sales to host, what mantras to repeat, and what items to purchase. The television show producers have a strong legislative instinct. If a standard is adopted, a law will be enacted to put it into effect.
Mermaids, a website featuring Jazz Jennings, exemplifies this homogeneous side. This site, which is targeted at assisting minors, has a straightforward goal: to advocate for medical and social transitions to be made easier for them. The website even tells children that it will plot against any parents who resist. After all, Jennings' parents are supposed to exemplify the ideal parent. The show is meant to follow past groundbreaking shows such as Will and Grace and Ellen DeGeneres to make the viewer believe that this is a natural and seamless progression of already established rights.
Everything we thought we knew about gender dysphoria, biological sex, and transgender has been turned on its head in the last decade. The reality television show, I Am Jazz, portrays both the indoctrination and the consequences of gender identity as a separate, unchangeable trait. Furthermore, it portrays acceptance of the immutability of gender identity as a prerequisite for belief and creates an imaginary category called a transgendered child. Not a complex social psychology problem to be treated, but a person to be protected and a category called transgendered child to maintain.
“Categorizing is necessary for humans, but it becomes pathological when the category is seen as definitive, preventing people from considering the fuzziness of boundaries, let alone revising their categories. Contagion was the culprit. If you selected one hundred independent-minded journalists capable of seeing factors in isolation from one another, you would get one hundred different opinions. But the process of having these people report in lockstep caused the dimensionality of the opinion set to shrink considerably—they converged on opinions and used the same items as causes.” -The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
TLC’s I Am Jazz promotes the false belief that all children are born with a hidden gender that they will proclaim and that we should accept as if they were delivered with the foresight and wisdom of an adult. In other words, the program not only presents a misleadingly simplified case to demonstrate that any child whose gender and sex do not match must undergo gender confirmation surgery or risk suicide, but also labels and shames anyone who questions these claims as transphobic. As a result, parents whose children face these unique challenges as well as the professionals paid to help them are stuck in the prison of belief. The tragic consequences of this false ideology unfold before our very eyes. References
The End of Gender: Debunking the Myths About Sex and Identity in Our Society