I am not the first person you’d think of to be writing a children’s book about a transgender girl. I am not a member of the LGBT community myself, nor do any of my three daughters identify as LGBT, as far as I can tell. But something changed for me when I became a mother: I began to feel a primal protective instinct over all children, and I became profoundly aware of what a huge undertaking it is to raise children in such a way that they grow up to be decent adults. For me, that meant teaching my girls from a young age to be aware of their societal privileges – namely, our presumed privilege as white, straight, cisgender, able-bodied people – and what responsibilities come with those privileges.
I Am Jazz was written as much for my own kids as it was for transgender kids. For trans kids, it was an opportunity to finally see themselves reflected in, and validated by, a book. But for kids like mine, it was a chance to expand their empathy repertoire. That my friend Jazz Jennings would allow me to take part in sharing her amazing story was an extraordinary honour.
As soon as the book came out, and we started receiving letters of gratitude from children around the world, I knew we’d made the right decision: suddenly kids struggling with gender had some vocabulary to articulate what they were feeling. We hoped that, by giving those children words to describe their feelings, we could spare them what might have otherwise resulted in years of confusion, self-doubt and even self-loathing.
The reception was also – at first – quieter than I expected. I’d been concerned about hate mail and death threats (which Jazz’s family continues to receive), but there was virtually nothing. Then came the incident in Mount Horeb, Wisconsin last year: an elementary school with a transitioning first-grader announced to parents its plans to read the book to students. The Liberty Counsel – of Kim Davis fame – aggressively threatened to sue [PDF], so the school panicked and agreed not to read the book.
A group of concerned parents decided they were going to hold a reading of the book anyway, in a public library. One of those parents emailed me and less than 48 hours later I was on a plane from California to Wisconsin to personally show my support. I showed up at that library completely unnerved and not knowing what to expect.
The parents had set up about 40 chairs, but we ended up with an astonishing 600 people packed into that tiny room. When I finished reading our book aloud, the entire room applauded – and I knew at that moment that censorship is bound to fail. Ideas cannot be contained. The answer to hate speech is more speech; intellectual freedom will always find a way. That experience was profoundly empowering, and it made me more determined than ever to get our book into every school and library in every corner of the world.
People have been trying to censor books probably for as long as books have been around. Commonly “challenged” titles in 2015 included Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, To Kill a Mockingbird and even the Bible. But now, with the rise of Donald Trump and the wave of xenophobia, racism, misogyny, and Islamophobia that has accompanied his campaign, the sharing of stories has never been more crucial. Without the authentic stories of immigrants, women, LGBT people, and Muslims, people will become more entrenched in their view of those groups as the Other. What we need now is more information, more voices; otherwise the diversity that has long been one of our greatest strengths will end up tearing the US apart.
