Matt Walsh
2023-05-01 18:11:08 UTC
Jazz Jennings is a name you probably recognize. He is now a 22-year-old man
who identifies as a woman or, I should say, was identified as a woman. We
know that this was not a path Jennings chose for himself as we know so many
other details about his life because his parents not only chose to make him
trans from a very young age, but also chose to make him a public figure from
a young age. We are told that Jennings was first diagnosed with gender
dysphoria at the age of four, though his mother insists that he identified as
a girl before he was even old enough to talk. By six years old, the child was
already doing the media rounds. His mother shuffled him from one interview to
the next. He was featured on 20/20 and The Rosie O'Donnell Show. By the
age of seven, Jazz's parents had established their own foundation, the
TransKids Purple Rainbow Foundation, so that they could assist trans youth,
and also, as it happens, receive donations. Barely into middle school, Jazz
starred in his first documentary. I Am Jazz: A Family in Transition
premiered on the Oprah Winfrey Network in 2011. A couple of years later, Jazz
had another 20/20 interview. Two years after that while still a child
Jazz co-wrote a children's book about his life titled I Am Jazz. It was
in that same year that Jazz Jennings began receiving awards and accolades
from organizations like GLAAD and Time Magazine. A year later, the Jazz
Jennings reality TV show debuted on TLC, followed by the Jazz Jennings
memoir.
And while he was being constantly filmed and documented, with this spotlight
shining on him, he was also being led from one step in the medical transition
process to the next. Starting with the chemical castration drugs at the age
of 11, followed by hormones, and then genital mutilation at the age of 17.
Yes, we are told that nobody is performing actual surgeries on kids, and yet
one of the most prominent trans-identified people in the country had surgery
when he was a kid. And that was just the first surgery. By the age of 20,
Jazz had undergone three gender confirmation surgeries. He was still not
old enough to legally purchase a beer Bud Light, presumably and yet he
had been taking drugs for nearly a decade at that point, and had been getting
one gender transition surgery after another for the past three years.
Jazz's mother was there, every step of the way, helping him along. And that
help would often take on a very aggressive and horrendously disturbing
form. Listen to this clip from the reality show a few years ago:
twitter.com/Timcast/status/1648730116447428609
Yes, that is the mother of Jazz Jennings talking about how she forcibly
dilates her son's fake neo-vagina in the middle of the night. You know, just
normal mom stuff. And this never-ending process of dilation and lubrication
is necessary to prevent the vagina from closing up, because it's not a
vagina. It is an open wound, carved into the place where the male genitalia
used to be. This is what was done to Jazz Jennings at the age of 17. He was
butchered, turned into a lifelong medical patient, in pursuit of something
that he can never attain, searching for a female identity that will always be
out of reach. And this explains why, most recently, Jazz was on camera
expressing deep and profound despair and telling his mother that he doesn't
feel like me:
That is terrible to watch. Unfathomably sad. And I feel nothing but sympathy
and compassion for him. He was subjected to a lifelong brainwashing campaign,
which began practically from birth, and which led to permanent physical
changes in his body long before he could have possibly had any chance to
realize what was being done to him. He is a victim. Though like many abuse
victims, he is at this point not able to see it, or at least not able to
accept it. That's what came through this week when Jazz published a video on
his own YouTube channel responding to a number of conservative commentators,
including me. Jazz reacts to a segment of this show where I am responding to
that clip we just watched of Jazz expressing despair and apparent regret. He
says that I have misconstrued it and insists that the surgery brought him
happiness and joy. And then we get to this part:
Now I was going to respond to this in general terms, but I think instead I'd
like to be more direct. Jazz has addressed me directly and asked some
questions, and I'd like to answer them. So, Jazz, first of all I understand
why you are frustrated that people are talking about you and, from your
perspective, involving themselves in your private life. You are absolutely
right that your conversation with your mother about your own deep emotional
and psychological pains should not have been a public spectacle. But I didn't
make them a public spectacle, and I didn't make you into a public figure.
Your mom did that. She did it way before you could have possibly chosen this
chosen any of this for yourself. She had you on 20/20 and starring in
Oprah Winfrey specials. She had a camera in front of your face, she was
parading you around as a mascot for transgenderism at an age when I was
spending my time watching cartoons and playing outside in the woods. I wish
that you had a childhood like that. You deserved to have that kind of
childhood. But your mom was more interested in monetizing you and using you
as a vehicle to promote her ideology. And it has proved to be an effective
vehicle, which is why I have to respond. You want to be left alone. I get
that. I wish that you were left alone, way back when you were a child. Left
to simply be a child. That's the life you should have had. You had a right to
it. It was taken from you. And I'm sorry that it was taken from you. I truly
am. Listen, even if it was somehow true that you really are a female and you
need to go through this necessary process of becoming your true self which
it isn't true at all, it just simply isn't that still would not justify
your mom's decision to turn you into a public figure, a symbol for a cause,
from such a young age. Even if we accept the logic behind transitioning
children which, again, I do not accept and never would it still would be
unforgivable for a parent to make it into a public exhibition.
You also accuse me of wanting to hurt you and make you miserable. I don't.
I'm not out to hurt you. I see that you are hurt. You said it yourself. You
don't feel like yourself. And you don't feel like yourself because you have
been led, since childhood, down a path of self-rejection. You say that
everyone deserves to be their authentic self. I could not possibly agree
more. Deserve is an apt choice of words, in fact. Every child deserves to
be shown the way towards truth and their own true selves. Every child
deserves to grow up in the light, surrounded by adults who are sources of
clarity and guidance for them. You did not have that, and you still don't.
And that is not fair. You have been fed lies. One lie after another. They are
the worst kinds of lies. Lies that deprive you of the recognition of your
true self. This is the deepest form of abuse, and I can't imagine what it
does to a person to live with it every day since the earliest moments of
childhood.
Nobody in your life will tell you the truth. Nobody in your life has ever
told you the truth. They all are incentivized to keep up the deception. I
have no incentive other than my love of the truth and my concern for you as a
person, and my concern for everyone else in your same situation. I don't
stand to gain anything when I tell you this, but I will tell you it anyway.
You are a man. That is who you are. There is nothing wrong with who you are,
who you actually are. Your maleness was never a problem that needed to be
fixed. The adults in your life told you that you were sick. They diagnosed
you and labeled you and defined you with those labels. They introduced
horrific confusion into your life and then they profited off of that
confusion. They exploited you. All of them did. The doctors, your parents,
the activist groups, the media, the TV networks. They all swarmed around like
vultures, taking pieces of you. And now those same people want you to live a
lie for the rest of your life, because if you don't it will embarrass and
potentially impoverish them. Well, if we're talking about what people
deserve, they deserve that. You deserve the truth. And I'm telling it to you.
Even if it hurts to hear. Still you need to hear it, at least once in your
life.
who identifies as a woman or, I should say, was identified as a woman. We
know that this was not a path Jennings chose for himself as we know so many
other details about his life because his parents not only chose to make him
trans from a very young age, but also chose to make him a public figure from
a young age. We are told that Jennings was first diagnosed with gender
dysphoria at the age of four, though his mother insists that he identified as
a girl before he was even old enough to talk. By six years old, the child was
already doing the media rounds. His mother shuffled him from one interview to
the next. He was featured on 20/20 and The Rosie O'Donnell Show. By the
age of seven, Jazz's parents had established their own foundation, the
TransKids Purple Rainbow Foundation, so that they could assist trans youth,
and also, as it happens, receive donations. Barely into middle school, Jazz
starred in his first documentary. I Am Jazz: A Family in Transition
premiered on the Oprah Winfrey Network in 2011. A couple of years later, Jazz
had another 20/20 interview. Two years after that while still a child
Jazz co-wrote a children's book about his life titled I Am Jazz. It was
in that same year that Jazz Jennings began receiving awards and accolades
from organizations like GLAAD and Time Magazine. A year later, the Jazz
Jennings reality TV show debuted on TLC, followed by the Jazz Jennings
memoir.
And while he was being constantly filmed and documented, with this spotlight
shining on him, he was also being led from one step in the medical transition
process to the next. Starting with the chemical castration drugs at the age
of 11, followed by hormones, and then genital mutilation at the age of 17.
Yes, we are told that nobody is performing actual surgeries on kids, and yet
one of the most prominent trans-identified people in the country had surgery
when he was a kid. And that was just the first surgery. By the age of 20,
Jazz had undergone three gender confirmation surgeries. He was still not
old enough to legally purchase a beer Bud Light, presumably and yet he
had been taking drugs for nearly a decade at that point, and had been getting
one gender transition surgery after another for the past three years.
Jazz's mother was there, every step of the way, helping him along. And that
help would often take on a very aggressive and horrendously disturbing
form. Listen to this clip from the reality show a few years ago:
twitter.com/Timcast/status/1648730116447428609
Yes, that is the mother of Jazz Jennings talking about how she forcibly
dilates her son's fake neo-vagina in the middle of the night. You know, just
normal mom stuff. And this never-ending process of dilation and lubrication
is necessary to prevent the vagina from closing up, because it's not a
vagina. It is an open wound, carved into the place where the male genitalia
used to be. This is what was done to Jazz Jennings at the age of 17. He was
butchered, turned into a lifelong medical patient, in pursuit of something
that he can never attain, searching for a female identity that will always be
out of reach. And this explains why, most recently, Jazz was on camera
expressing deep and profound despair and telling his mother that he doesn't
feel like me:
That is terrible to watch. Unfathomably sad. And I feel nothing but sympathy
and compassion for him. He was subjected to a lifelong brainwashing campaign,
which began practically from birth, and which led to permanent physical
changes in his body long before he could have possibly had any chance to
realize what was being done to him. He is a victim. Though like many abuse
victims, he is at this point not able to see it, or at least not able to
accept it. That's what came through this week when Jazz published a video on
his own YouTube channel responding to a number of conservative commentators,
including me. Jazz reacts to a segment of this show where I am responding to
that clip we just watched of Jazz expressing despair and apparent regret. He
says that I have misconstrued it and insists that the surgery brought him
happiness and joy. And then we get to this part:
Now I was going to respond to this in general terms, but I think instead I'd
like to be more direct. Jazz has addressed me directly and asked some
questions, and I'd like to answer them. So, Jazz, first of all I understand
why you are frustrated that people are talking about you and, from your
perspective, involving themselves in your private life. You are absolutely
right that your conversation with your mother about your own deep emotional
and psychological pains should not have been a public spectacle. But I didn't
make them a public spectacle, and I didn't make you into a public figure.
Your mom did that. She did it way before you could have possibly chosen this
chosen any of this for yourself. She had you on 20/20 and starring in
Oprah Winfrey specials. She had a camera in front of your face, she was
parading you around as a mascot for transgenderism at an age when I was
spending my time watching cartoons and playing outside in the woods. I wish
that you had a childhood like that. You deserved to have that kind of
childhood. But your mom was more interested in monetizing you and using you
as a vehicle to promote her ideology. And it has proved to be an effective
vehicle, which is why I have to respond. You want to be left alone. I get
that. I wish that you were left alone, way back when you were a child. Left
to simply be a child. That's the life you should have had. You had a right to
it. It was taken from you. And I'm sorry that it was taken from you. I truly
am. Listen, even if it was somehow true that you really are a female and you
need to go through this necessary process of becoming your true self which
it isn't true at all, it just simply isn't that still would not justify
your mom's decision to turn you into a public figure, a symbol for a cause,
from such a young age. Even if we accept the logic behind transitioning
children which, again, I do not accept and never would it still would be
unforgivable for a parent to make it into a public exhibition.
You also accuse me of wanting to hurt you and make you miserable. I don't.
I'm not out to hurt you. I see that you are hurt. You said it yourself. You
don't feel like yourself. And you don't feel like yourself because you have
been led, since childhood, down a path of self-rejection. You say that
everyone deserves to be their authentic self. I could not possibly agree
more. Deserve is an apt choice of words, in fact. Every child deserves to
be shown the way towards truth and their own true selves. Every child
deserves to grow up in the light, surrounded by adults who are sources of
clarity and guidance for them. You did not have that, and you still don't.
And that is not fair. You have been fed lies. One lie after another. They are
the worst kinds of lies. Lies that deprive you of the recognition of your
true self. This is the deepest form of abuse, and I can't imagine what it
does to a person to live with it every day since the earliest moments of
childhood.
Nobody in your life will tell you the truth. Nobody in your life has ever
told you the truth. They all are incentivized to keep up the deception. I
have no incentive other than my love of the truth and my concern for you as a
person, and my concern for everyone else in your same situation. I don't
stand to gain anything when I tell you this, but I will tell you it anyway.
You are a man. That is who you are. There is nothing wrong with who you are,
who you actually are. Your maleness was never a problem that needed to be
fixed. The adults in your life told you that you were sick. They diagnosed
you and labeled you and defined you with those labels. They introduced
horrific confusion into your life and then they profited off of that
confusion. They exploited you. All of them did. The doctors, your parents,
the activist groups, the media, the TV networks. They all swarmed around like
vultures, taking pieces of you. And now those same people want you to live a
lie for the rest of your life, because if you don't it will embarrass and
potentially impoverish them. Well, if we're talking about what people
deserve, they deserve that. You deserve the truth. And I'm telling it to you.
Even if it hurts to hear. Still you need to hear it, at least once in your
life.