jazz jennings is finding her voice (2/2)
Josh Ritchie for BuzzFeed News
Of course, the most famous trans person in the world also has a reality show. I Am Caitpremiered this summer, on E!, where the rest of the Kardashian dynasty reigns (the similar name is a coincidence, according to TLC). If I Am Cait is the high-gloss Broadway musical, then I Am Jazz is the summer camp play. Caitlyn has a studied indifference to the cameras, honed by years of having them in her face. I Am Jazz is full of obvious setups, like when Jeanette and Greg have an intimate talk in bed with all the lights on. But there’s something endearing about the Jennings’s awkwardly staged family outings, their blushing faces around the dinner table. The effort they put into playing themselves makes them oddly more relatable.
Jazz hadn’t seen I Am Cait but, when the subject comes up at the selfie social, she calls Jenner “beautiful, brave, and a role model.”
“People that might not have even heard of Jazz at all,” says Jeanette. “Then they’ll read a review of I Am Cait, and it’ll talk about Jazz. It’s a built-in audience right there.”
The I Am Jazz premiere pulled in 1.36 million viewers, but ratings dropped over the course of the season. Still, it was a top 10 show for TLC so far this year, consistently drawing more viewers than any other show on the network last summer except Little People, Big World and My Giant Life, a show about very tall women. Meanwhile, I Am Cait debuted at No. 1 with 2.7 million viewers, but ended with only 1.3 million. It was renewed earlier this week despite the underwhelming ratings and mixed reviews. A third reality show about transgender families, ABC Family’s Becoming Us, tanked.
These less than stellar performances suggest that people aren’t getting hooked on trans-related series that look too much like educational programming. On widely watched, Emmy-winning fare like Orange Is the New Black and Transparent, the transgender characters’ plotlines never feel like lectures. The characters are more flawed, their story arcs are less neat, and this makes them seem more real than their reality show counterparts. But what makes for good TV can be perilous for real people. Unlike Jazz, Jenner, or Laverne Cox herself, Cox’s Orange character, Sophia, doesn’t have to worry about her privacy, reputation, or public perception. Transparent’s Maura doesn’t have to navigate respectability politics. Anyone with even a shred of an instinct toward self-preservation can imagine this trap.
Josh Ritchie for BuzzFeed News
The Jennings’s South Florida neighborhood is gated with a guard onsite 24 hours a day. Their house has an alarm system built into the door. Jeanette and Greg ask the media not to reveal the name of their town or Jazz’s school, which Jeanette picked out when Jazz was still a toddler because “they have 60-something hidden cameras, a strict uniform policy, and a no-tolerance bullying policy.”
There seems to be a hurricane happening when I visit in late July, but the Jennings assure me it’s normal rain in those parts. Their house looks like a sitcom set, meticulously decorated with a Mediterranean vibe and lots of beige. In the bathroom, a heart-shaped wall hanging spells “Oochie Goochie Love Smoochies” in charm-bracelet capital letters. Family photos take up almost every surface and the walls. One section showcases Jazz with some of the famous people she’s met: Bill Clinton, Jennifer Lawrence.
Jazz appears from upstairs and gives me a quick hug, then leads me through the laundry room, past the litter boxes (“You probably want to not breathe for a second”) to a back room where a mermaid tail lies drying. “This one is taking a really long time because I’ve been so busy,” she says. Then she brings me into the garage where she’s made all her tails, seven so far. She sells them online for up to $2,300 and donates half the proceeds to the foundation her family runs, TransKids Purple Rainbow. They’re stunning. With an expert air, she explains how she buys silicone in big buckets, mixes in the paint, and pours it into custom molds.
“It takes a while but it’s really fun,” she says matter-of-factly.
Jazz has a friend over that day - her best friend, she clarifies. They’re editing a new video for Jazz’s YouTube channel. Jeanette had ordered pizza and chicken wings, and Jazz and her friend grab a couple slices and some wings before rushing to the computer upstairs. After three months with a camera crew in the house and two weeks of press stops in New York and L.A., she seems set on having a normal Saturday afternoon.
“When Jazz is her authentic self, she’s like, ‘I’m not going to sit here and pretend that I’m in a good mood and try to answer questions,’” explains Jeanette while we fill our paper plates with food. “She puts pressure on herself, but then she gets to a point sometimes where she shuts out.”
I say that seems like pretty typical teenage behavior.
“I think a teenager that’s on estrogen can make you worse,” says Jeanette, laughing. “She’ll just all of a sudden not be very nice.”
“She gets the same questions a lot, so it’s a little bit redundant,” says Greg.
“It’s even hard for us,” says Jeanette. That was partly why they wanted to do the show, she explains. “When she’s doing her advocacy work, she’s on this pedestal. You don’t see the vulnerability. She has her ups and downs and it was important for people to see that.”
Three episodes of I Am Jazz had aired at that point, and messages had been flooding in through Jazz’s Facebook page, most of them positive. Her Instagram account had jumped from 50,000 to over 100,000 in less than two weeks. Her Facebook page had gone from 12,000 to over 30,000 likes. Boys were writing to Jazz saying they’d date her in a second.
“A 65-year-old grandmother wrote the other day,” says Jeanette. “She was like, ‘I didn’t even know what a transgender person was. I’ve never wrote a letter to anybody before like this, but I have to tell you that I was moved by Jazz’s story.’”
Given that TLC’s core demographic is middle-aged women in Middle America, it’s not surprising that Jeanette gets as much if not more screen time than Jazz. She’s an every-mother: genuine, charismatic, and fiercely protective. Her couch confessions are some of the most affecting parts of the show.
She’s also been the target of much of the criticism. In online forums, people have accused her of hurting Jazz by letting her transition and exposing her to public scrutiny at such a young age.
“It’s not like, ‘Oh, Mommy and Daddy are making me do this thing,’” says Jeanette. “She was never one of those kids who didn’t know what was going on.”
“We give her the last call on this stuff before we consent to it,” Greg says. “It’s a family sacrifice to take the time to do these types of things. It should be appreciated rather than criticized, because we’re really just trying to make a difference.”
Jeanette and Greg say they feel safe here, though they haven’t been home much since the show started airing.
“When we were running all over L.A., I was definitely more aware of people and things around me,” says Jeanette, as the sound of teenage whispers drift from upstairs.
Greg says he worries more about Jazz’s siblings. They’re driving now, going to parties with people he didn’t know.
“I tell them, ‘There may be people that don’t necessarily agree with the show. You just need to be keep your eyes open.’”
Greg also monitors Jazz’s social media activity, approving photos and videos before she posts them online. Jazz hasn’t started dating yet, but if someone expresses interest, the rule is she has to tell them she’s transgender right away. Her parents call it “dating with disclosure.”
“If you think about it,” says Jeanette, speaking generally, “you’re a 15-year old transgender kid and you go on a date. You’re in a car and you’re making out, then you’re like, ‘By the way, I just want you to know that I’m transgender.’ Somebody can beat the crap out of you or kill you.”
In 2014, over half of LGBT murder victims were transgender women, according to the National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs. Nineteen transgender and gender nonconforming people have been murdered so far this year, almost all of whom were women of color. One of the youngest, Mercedes Williamson, was 17. She was stabbed and buried in the woods an hour from home. One episode of I Am Jazz centers around Jazz seeing a death threat on her YouTube channel. In the episode, Jeanette becomes consumed with worry, but in reality it happens all the time.
“You have to have thick skin to be able to go out there,” says Greg. “No matter what you say, somebody’s going to disagree, somebody’s going to comment on YouTube, somebody’s going to comment wherever they can make their comments. We just forge on.”
Josh Ritchie for BuzzFeed News
It’s getting late and the rain is still falling in sheets outside. I follow the sound of teenage laughter upstairs to find Jazz and her friend huddled around the family computer, a desktop PC in the hallway, the screen intentionally visible to parental eyes. Greg had given the OK to the video, and it’s uploading. In the clip, Jazz smiles underwater in her mermaid tail while fairy-tale music plays. It’s her most professional-looking video yet.
“Does the pool look too dark?” she asks. “Dad said it looks bad. Ugh, look how big my belly looks.”
Suddenly Jazz seems more 14 than ever - young enough to wear a mermaid tail, old enough to judge her body in it. She laments that the estrogen made her gain weight.
Via youtube.com
Her phone buzzes in her lap. A friend is upset because an episode of I Am Jazzmade her seem like a bad friend.
“I feel bad,” says Jazz. “I tweeted about her saying that people are stupid, and that we’re still friends.”
In general, she says, online criticism doesn’t bother her. Most of it comes in the form of comments on her YouTube videos and Facebook and Instagram posts. People have accused her of lying about her gender and brainwashing kids. She’s been called every imaginable slur.
“Sometimes I read the comments just to learn a little bit more about what they don’t understand. Seeing them motivates me to share my story and educate those people.”
She admits that filming I Am Jazz has been disruptive, causing her to miss some soccer practices and most of her tournaments, but things have gone back to normal now. Normal for Jazz, anyway. She met President Obama earlier in the summer at a Pride Month reception at the White House.
“That was cool,” she says. “And in L.A. we got to meet [the host of Big Brother] Julie Chen as a family. It was a lot of fun.”
She sometimes gets recognized in public, which didn’t happen very often before. And some kids who’d never talked to her wanted to be friends.
“It’s a little bit strange,” she says. “But I know who my real friends are, right?” She turns to the girl next to her and they exchange secretive, teenage girl smiles. In that moment, she doesn’t seem a single bit worried about starting high school as the girl with the TV show.
“Right now I’m just hanging out with my friend, being normal, not having to worry about any expectations or anything,” she says. “I’m definitely going to make sure that I just continue to live my life authentically.”
I ask if she thinks I Am Jazz captured that authenticity, like Jeanette had said. Jazz is trying to come up with a caption for her video before it finishes uploading. Her fingers hover over the keyboard.
“Sometimes I’m not very relatable as a person because I just don’t care what people think about me,” she says, eyes on the screen. “But it’s important that people see that side of me, someone who is more vulnerable.”
“To make a story arc?” I say.
“Yeah,” she says. “It’s not about me, but more about the message that I want to live on eternally, even after my time.”
Maybe this is why Jazz was so quick to gloss over the issues that came up on the show. Acting out puberty for a national audience sounds like an actual nightmare, but maybe it works like exposure therapy, desensitizing you to past traumas, widening the gap between then and now. Maybe, just then, Jazz did have high school and boys and puberty figured out. And maybe, if I Am Jazz is renewed, we’ll hear about what she’s going through now.
Before I leave her at the computer, I ask if she ever gets tired of being a role model, of turning her life into a series of teachable moments on behalf of the trans community. She seems pretty over it then, with her publicist listening from one room, her mom listening from another, and her best friend waiting politely for me to be done.
She turns to me brightly. “I feel like I’m meant to share my story, because it’s a happy one,” she says. “It’s really just a message that it’s all about love, and loving yourself, loving others, finding happiness, and finding strength to live your life authentically.”