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.
