Jazz Jennings

Jazz Jennings (October 6th, 2000–) is an American YouTuber, and transgender activist from South Florida. She is a pansexual woman, and has been making videos from as early as 2009. She has been known for being one of the youngest documented cases of being transgender. Her YouTube channel has about 537,000 subscribers as of September 2018.[1]

We're so glad you came
Sexuality
Reach around the subject
v - t - e

She has appeared in multiple media outlets including ABC News[2], Mashable[3], Cosmopolitan[4], and Glamour[5].

Trans activism

Jazz has been involved in trans activism since age 6 when she went on ABC News to share her story of being a transgender girl and it made big waves in American culture when it came to LGBT+ visibility. She also wrote a children's book, which her mom Jeanette helped create, which sparked controversy among conservative parents. During middle school, Jazz was once banned from playing girls soccer due to her being assigned male at birth, despite the fact that she started her medical transition at age 11. Eventually, her parents got the ban rescinded through effective lobbying efforts with an LGBT+ advocacy organization. Jazz has effectively utilized media to promote LGBT equality through social media, and television through guest appearances and her own reality TV show titled I Am Jazz.[6]

New age spirituality and Judaism

Throughout her TV show, Jazz has discussed her spiritual beliefs. In one episode, Jazz sees a hypnotherapist that tries to induce hypnosis to a "past life" and has said that she believes in past life regression, even though there has been no evidence to prove that past life regression is actually effective. In addition, in an episode of her reality TV show Jazz seeks a psychic fortune teller to tell her that she will one day have gender confirmation surgery, and Jazz believes it even though many people have heard of her. Jazz has also said in a video that was taken down that she believes in psychics even though she claims that she "is a skeptic and that there are a lot of fakes out there".

In terms of familial upbringing, Jazz is Jewish since her mom Jeanette has said that the family's actual last name is a "very Jewish, long last name". It can be deduced that Jazz is probably a Reform Jew, since Reform Judaism tends to be the Jewish sect that is the most affirming of LGBT people. Despite having Jewish heritage, she doesn't seem to talk about it that much on her TV show or on her YouTube channel. It might be because she may not be a religious Jew, or it might be the fact that she doesn't want to alienate LGBT people who had a negative experience with religion, or perhaps she just prefers to remain private about her religious beliefs. In a recent video she made in sponsorship with Womaze, Jazz talks more about her spiritual beliefs. When it comes to the meaning of life, she makes the claim that our purpose is to "enjoy all that is around us". In addition she believes in the concept of "Heaven on Earth", that humans are "non-physical beings" living in "physical bodies".

gollark: And only 224KB.
gollark: It's still *recognizable*, I'd say.
gollark: I'll see if I can get it to be transparent, but I can get it to downscale at least.
gollark: Do you want me to just half the resolution or something? I can run it through ffmpeg and do that.
gollark: You can't really shrink that GIF further without losing quality in some way, if you want it to remain a GIF.

References
  1. https://www.youtube.com/user/jazzmergirl/about
  2. https://abcnews.go.com/Entertainment/tlcs-jazz-jennings-speaks-derick-dillards-transgender-comments/story?id=49034486
  3. https://mashable.com/2016/09/19/lgbtq-media-social-good-summit-2016/
  4. https://www.cosmopolitan.com/entertainment/tv/a40068/jazz-jennings-internets-most-fascinating/
  5. https://www.glamour.com/story/jazz-jennings-penned-a-powerful-letter-to-her-5-year-old-self
  6. See the Wikipedia article on I Am Jazz.
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