Jazz Jennings Opens Up About What It Means to Be Transgender in 2016

June 22, 2016

Our own Shira Lazar sat down with Jazz Jennings, star of TLC’s I Am Jazz, creator of her own popular YouTube channel, and writer of bestseller Being Jazz: My Life as a (Transgender) Teen, to talk about love, acceptance, and trans rights in the wake of the Orlando shooting and the resulting outpouring of support for the LGBTQ community. Jazz has identified as a girl since she could speak. She was one of the subjects of a 20/20 story in 2007 about trans youth, in which she was named as one of the youngest known cases of someone identifying with a gender outside the one she was assigned at birth. Since then, she has been named a Human Rights Campaign Youth Ambassador, featured on Out Magazine’s “Out 100,” and appeared as a guest at the GLAAD Media Awards. Behind all her accolades, though, is a normal teen girl whose corner of the world accepts her for her. She isn’t forced to use the wrong bathroom; she plays on the girls’ soccer team, and, like any teen girl, she’s figuring out a lot of stuff about her life. How she finds the time to be an advocate for trans rights, star in a TV show, and write a whole book about it I’ll never know — but we here at What’s Trending are glad that she’s speaking up and standing out for the rights of this marginalized community. What do you think? Did Jazz inspire you? Let us know in the comments below or @WhatsTrending on Twitter!