Transgender teen gets unscripted TLC series

By Frazier Moore

AP Television Writer

NEW YORK

Like many 14-year-old girls, Jazz Jennings goes to school, plays soccer, hangs out with friends, has a thing for mermaids and lives life feeling good about herself.

She’s also transgender. She was assigned male at birth yet was sure as young as 2 years old that she was a girl. She transitioned into Jazz at 5.

Since being interviewed on ABC’s “20/20” by Barbara Walters at age 6, Jazz Jennings has emerged as a leading advocate, role model and explainer for the transgender community. She wrote a children’s book about her life. She makes heart-to-heart YouTube videos that get hundreds of thousands of views.

Now she’s opening the door to her everyday routine on “I Am Jazz,” an 11-episode unscripted series premiering on TLC on Wednesday at 10 p.m.

“I think it’s going to be a great thing,” says Jazz, a remarkably poised young woman with big brown eyes and a dazzling smile, during a recent interview. “We’re just the average family, being ourselves. We love one another. But it also shows how we handle the fact that I’m transgender — how we embrace it and move forward.”

Family includes Jeanette and Greg, her parents, sister Ari, 19, and her 17-year-old twin brothers Griffen and Sander, with whom Jazz shares a comfortable home in South Florida.

The series doesn’t soft-peddle the challenges the family has faced.

Jazz started hormone blockers about three years ago to ward off male puberty, and two years ago began estrogen treatments. It’s a delicate drug regimen that, in the first episode, Jeanette acknowledges is “experimental stuff. I am messing with my kid’s body.”

With admirable grace, Jazz has settled, early on, what likely is the audience’s most pressing question, however misguided it may be.

“Everybody thinks it’s what’s between your legs that matters,” she says during the interview. “But what really matters is what’s between my ears. It’s my brain that makes me a girl, makes me feel like a girl, makes me know that I’m a girl.”

Yes, surgery is an option down the road.

“But it’s not about the medical stuff,” Jazz says. “It’s about knowing who you are and embracing that.”