RR Phantom
Location : Wasted Space
Job/hobbies : Cayman Islands Actuary
 |  Subject: The Transgender Children’s Crusade  Mon Apr 24, 2023 6:22 pm | |
| With its vision of autonomous young people in touch with their innermost desires, gender identity negates all we know about growing up.
If you’re unfamiliar with Jazz Jennings, you’re missing one of the paradigmatic characters of early-twenty-first-century America. Jazz—this isn’t her birth name, for reasons that will become clear—was a boy born to a southern Florida couple in 2000. Nothing was unusual about his infancy; but by the time he was two, he was showing a marked preference for clothing and toys ordinarily chosen by girls: mermaids, princesses, all things pink—the whole shebang. Soon, he began insisting that he was a girl. His mother remembers him asking when the good fairy would come and turn his penis into a vagina. His “gender dysphoria,” as the medical world calls an emotional alienation from one’s sexed body, continued to trouble him until his parents decided to let him adopt a new name and pronoun, wear girl’s clothes, and present himself as a girl, a process known as social transition. At his fifth birthday, he debuted his new identity: “I got to wear the sparkly bathing suit for my party. I was a girl,” Jazz recalled later.
Transphobia in the United States is said to be ubiquitous and deadly, but for Jazz and family, transition presented extraordinary opportunities. In 2007, Jazz and her mother were interviewed by Barbara Walters. After that, a documentary, I Am Jazz: A Family in Transition, aired on the Oprah Winfrey Network. A best-selling book, I Am Jazz, was next; it has a place on the shelves of school libraries around the country and an award from the American Library Association, and it has been the occasion for public readings in schools, churches, and other community centers. In 2015, Jazz’s career reached its pinnacle. The TLC network launched a reality-show series starring Jazz and her family; it’s now in its eighth season. That year, Johnson & Johnson also named Jazz a spokesmodel for its Clean & Clear skin-care line. In 2018, she designed a bra in partnership with Knixteen, a teen underwear company. She is a much-in-demand LGBTQ influencer, with millions of followers on Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube. She was signed by Creative Artists Agency, representatives of Anne Hathaway, Sandra Bullock, and other A-listers. The coup de grace in her rise came when she received an acceptance letter to Harvard. We don’t know how much she has earned from some of these seemingly lucrative enterprises, but it’s safe to say that her Harvard tuition shouldn’t be a problem.
Still, throughout this heady time, the shadow of puberty loomed over Jazz and her brand. At 11, the soon-to-be reality-show star started “puberty blockers.” An implant was placed in her arm to block the testosterone that would naturally deepen her voice and grow her facial hair. A few years after that, she began what will likely be a lifetime regimen of estrogen to feminize her features. The culmination of her transition came in 2018 as she prepared for her gender confirmation surgery, colloquially known as “bottom surgery” but more technically called vaginoplasty. During the procedure, doctors would castrate the 17-year-old, and create an artificial vagina. In celebration of the impending operation, Jazz’s mother threw a “Farewell to Penis Party” for friends and family. Everyone cheered as Jazz cut the cake. And yes, it was a penis cake.
The party was partly an escape from serious worries. Surgeons generally use tissue from the penis to sculpt a new vagina. But because Jazz had started puberty blockers at such a young age, the penis in question remained too small for the job. Doctors planned to take tissue from her stomach lining to complete the vaginal construction. The surgeon conceded that the surgery involved some risks, including internal hemorrhaging and damage to the intestine; sure enough, four days after the operation, Jazz experienced “crazy pain.” It seems what surgeons call her “neovagina” had split apart. To fix the problem, she would need two corrective surgeries.
.https://www.city-journal.org/article/the-transgender-childrens-crusade?fbclid=IwAR2BYiskZ6hN2PTDtKq-xphw29nNbQE_Z0O57wa4uAXV3JIgGKYHrakr-LU&wallit_nosession=1 |
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