America's first "trans kid" got created and castrated on national TV. Why did so many Americans watch, and say nothing? Part One.
By: Maia Poet
Published: Apr 11, 2025
When I began to find myself swimming in a sea of trans content at the age of 12 in 2012, one of the first stories of "trans kids" I saw was the story of Jazz Jennings. I watched grainy, low-quality footage from his 2007 special. Even though Jazz is only one year younger than me, I thought he was much younger—because I was seeing him at six years old when I was already 12. It didn’t occur to me until months later, when I saw one of his more recent media appearances, that I had been watching a video from five years ago. That was my level of life perspective at the age when I declared my trans identity— I didn’t understand that the change in video image quality was a sign of how old the video was. When I realized that Jazz was around my age, I was stunned.
From there, I consumed every video I could find about "trans kids." There were only a handful of documentaries and talk show appearances. Once I’d exhausted those, I moved on to watching content created by adult transitioners. I began studying the intricacies of hormonal and surgical “sex change.” I watched hours of footage of women ten years older than me binding their breasts, and vlogging about ‘top surgeries’. Within two years, many of them had full beards and were talking about their mastectomies the way I talked about going to the trampoline park with my family— as a joyous, gravity-defying liberation of the Self.
When I finally got my own phone and was old enough to make a Facebook account, I even messaged a few of these adult women whose gender transitions I had watched play out over the course of my adolescence. If I had more understanding of how the world works, I would have known that I could have lied about my age to get onto the platform earlier. I was that naive. In retrospect, as a young adult myself I’ll never understand why those adult transitioners chose to respond to the messages sent to them by a 14-year-old. But that’s beside the point.
The point is, that as a pre-teen, I became so obsessed with understanding this phenomenon that by my early adolescence I memorized all of the information available to me online at the time. And because I already had a habit of being an elementary-aged kid who read parenting books and researched niche medical conditions, it was easy for me to convince myself that I, too, was a "trans kid" who in the absence of experimental medical treatments, would very well die.
Far before most people had even heard of this issue—and long before it became a teenage identity trend—I knew almost everything there was to know about transgenderism. It’s odd now to see adults twice my age acting as though this phenomenon came out of nowhere. I didn’t just see it coming. As a 12 year old who adopted a trans identity in 2012, I predicted it. I grew up immersed in all things ‘trans’. I watched this phenomenon morph in real-time from the narrative of old-school transsexualism into the invention of the "transgender child," and finally as it pervaded into the dominant youth culture of my ‘non-binary’ generation.
Many times during my detransition journey, I’ve asked myself the same haunting question: Where was everyone when Jazz Jennings got castrated?
In order to answer this question, I will publish this piece in two parts. Part one will focus on the ways in which mainstream media and medical authorities partnered to create the “transgender child” within the Western collective consciousness. Part two will focus on how collective shifts within parenting trends and attitudes about child-rearing amongst middle and upper middle class families, in combination with rapid shifts in the availability of internet-connected technologies— created a perfect storm of factors which culminated in the ‘transgender tipping point’.
I hope these papers will inform the public about how trans issues have gone from an unknown obscure topic, to the subject of a raging culture war— seemingly in the blink of an eye. I believe that trying to dissect the culture itself through the case study of Jazz Jennings, readers will come away from these essays with a greater understanding of the complex sociocultural and medical underpinnings of today’s trans phenomenon. After reading this paper, let me know how I’ve done!
The Jazz Jennings Phenomenon
[ Barbra Walters interviewed six year old Jazz Jennings in 2007. The “trans kid” narrative had just been born. ]
In 2007, America was introduced to the story of Jazz Jennings, a six-year-old boy from Florida whose parents had decided to raise him as a girl and share his story publicly. Cameras followed Jazz and his family as he grew up, chronicling his transition for an audience captivated by what was presented as a courageous and heartwarming journey of self-discovery.
But beneath the uplifting narrative was a far more troubling reality. At age 11, Jazz was chemically castrated to halt his male puberty. In high school, he was prescribed cross-sex hormones, which, when paired with early puberty suppression, rendered him permanently sterile. By 14, he was the star of the reality show I Am Jazz. In 2018, at age 17, the cameras followed him, hugging a teddy bear, into the operating room as surgeons attempted to construct a simulacrum of female genitalia from his underdeveloped male anatomy—an operation so experimental that multiple follow-up surgeries were needed to address serious complications.
[ 17 year old Jazz held a teddy bear as he waited to be wheeled into the operating room for his penile inversion procedure, aged 17. ]
Despite the fact that every stage of this boy’s process of being indoctrinated, exploited and maimed—was filmed and broadcast for national and international audiences, widespread concern over what was happening to Jazz did not surface until about 2021—far too late to intervene or prevent the damage. With millions watching I Am Jazz, no prominent voice broke through the mainstream media to question what was unfolding before America’s very eyes.
So again we must ask: Where was everyone when Jazz Jennings got castrated?
The Creation of the “Transgender Child” Was Televised.
The short answer is that we were all sold a story. We were led to believe in the existence of a new category of person—the “transgender child.” Most Americans were familiar with the concept of a transsexual, which in the schema of the 2000’s-era adult, was either a gay drag queen who “took the next step” or a middle-aged, married crossdresser with a wife and kids. The transsexual wasn’t an adult female on testosterone. The transsexual certainly wasn’t a child.
Jazz’s case was the first to introduce this idea to the English-speaking world, featured prominently on 20/20 with Barbara Walters. His parents claimed they had always known Jazz was “different”—even pointing to behavior as early as 15 months old, like unsnapping his onesie, as evidence of a cross-gender identity. Unlike Jazz’s older twin brothers, Jazz did not grow out of his ‘girly’ phase by the time he was a pre-schooler. He continued to be a gentle boy, not a rough and tumble one. So, his parents decided to see an “expert” gender therapist in 2003— while the child was probably still in diapers.
The documentary featuring Jazz Jennings, alongside a few other “trans kids” called My Secret Self presented gender dysphoria as an innate, intractable condition detectable in small children and treatable with a medical protocol we today know was imported from the Netherlands. While it acknowledged the experimental nature of these treatments, this fact was easily obscured by the narrative that without such extreme, irreversible interventions being done on young children- that these children were doomed to end their lives. Viewers were reassured: no permanent changes would occur until Jazz was older and better equipped to make informed decisions.
But this was a lie of omission. Social transition in childhood, especially when paired with puberty blockers, is not a neutral intervention—it entrenches a cross-sex identity and all but guarantees progression to cross-sex hormones. We now know that over 98% of children who begin puberty blockers proceed to further medical transition.
The idea that blockers merely “buy time” has been thoroughly debunked– but only after a generation of children were sacrificed. What’s even worse, is that the Dutch clinicians who created this child transition treatment protocol, themselves advised against the early full social transition of a child prior to the early stages of puberty.
A Story That Subverted Our Common Sense
[ Jazz instilling his childhood passion of creating mermaid tails into another little boy whose parents are raising him as a girl ]
Jazz’s story was compelling because he was photogenic and looked feminine: he had long hair, princess dresses, a love for Disney songs and mermaids. His mother even speculated that Jazz’s love of mermaids was related to their lack of genitalia—a theory she picked up from other parents of gender-nonconforming boys on internet forums. But many kids, both boys and girls, in the early 2000s loved mermaids because of The Little Mermaid. It wasn’t because of a pathology. It was a trend.
This shows a broader trend of how the parents of “trans kids” have a tendency of scrutinizing their child’s every behavior as evidence of some problem just itching to be solved. They are superimposing their own adult analysis onto a child’s behaviors, in order to derive meaning from them.
An adult who has tons of kids and is working multiple jobs to support them wouldn’t fixate so much on which fictitious character their child is obsessed with– nor would they have the time to construct an elaborate fairytale about why the kid wants to become that thing. But if you’re like Jazz’s parents, who are wealthy enough to have four kids living in a big house, who were really on the cutting edge of child-centered parenting, and who happened to have a kid who was very gender non-conforming– you’ve got yourself a perfect storm to find yourself as the parent of a “trans kid.”
Many young boys go through phases of dressing up as princesses. In Jazz’s case, what might have been a passing interest, or one that evolved into a career in dance, theater or fashion design— became a diagnosis. His parents, like many of those who now champion their young “trans kids,” were not initially ideologues. Most began as concerned, bewildered, or overwhelmed—struggling to soothe their distressed child and feeling inadequate in the face of it.
In today’s climate, these parents are swiftly ushered into the world of gender medicine. Pediatricians refer them to gender clinics, where experts frame early social transition as harmless and reversible. The same experts falsely claim that puberty blockers are reversible interventions which “pause” development so a child can consider whether they wish to proceed to cross-sex hormones, and that blocking healthy puberty in its early stages is something which must be done urgently, as a form of suicide prevention. Out of love and fear, parents hand the reins to medical professionals—believing they’re doing what’s best for their child. Importantly, all of these life-changing psychosocial and medical interventions are framed as neutral, harmless opportunities for self-exploration. Even as a child’s puberty is being actively suppressed, parents are lead to believe that no permanent, life-altering decisions have been made yet. They are given a false illusion of having ‘more time’ to decide upon the future opportunities which will be available to their child, not understanding one basic truth:
The first permanent decision regarding a child’s gender transition is often made much earlier than parents realize. Social transition in early childhood initiates a path that almost always leads to medicalization. Puberty blockers interrupt natural developmental processes necessary for resolving gender distress. By the time cross-sex hormones are introduced, the child’s trajectory has already been firmly set for years.
How the Dutch Protocol Created the Market for Trans Children
[ Jazz Jennings and the doctors who removed his genitals ]
The widespread belief that pediatric transition was a response to an existing and urgent medical need ignores a crucial reality: the existence of medical interventions for children with gender dysphoria has itself created the demand for those very interventions. The Dutch Protocol, which introduced the use of puberty blockers followed by cross-sex hormones in carefully selected adolescent patients, did not emerge in response to a large population of children begging for medical transition. Rather, it introduced an entirely new treatment pathway that shaped how gender dysphoria was understood and managed—one that was soon exported across the Western world.
Developed in the Netherlands in the early 1990s, the Dutch Protocol was initially presented as a compassionate innovation for a small group of carefully screened adolescents whose gender dysphoria was severe, persistent, and began in early childhood. These adolescents were described as psychologically stable, supported by their families, and free of major comorbid mental health issues. The protocol’s authors claimed that, for these specific patients, early medical intervention could reduce distress and improve quality of life. Mostly, these clinicians seemed concerned with the ability of these young (mostly) boys to “pass” as women in adulthood, as a way to correct for the difficulties faced by adult transsexuals who attributed their mental health and life difficulties following transition— to their inability to pass as the opposite sex in adulthood.
But the Dutch studies that laid the foundation for this protocol were small, lacked control groups, followed participants for only a few years, failed to keep rates of loss to follow up within a clinically negligible level and were deeply methodologically flawed. Despite this, the model was rapidly adopted internationally as the gold standard for pediatric gender care. Before any outcomes were published on the Dutch kids, the practice of transitioning kids was adopted with full confidence in countries like the United States, where the cautious gatekeeping of the original protocol was largely abandoned. Screening criteria were loosened, psychological evaluations were fast-tracked, and transition timelines were compressed. What began as a narrowly defined intervention for a rare group of patients became a mass treatment pathway for any child who expressed discomfort with their sex.
As more clinics adopted the protocol, more children were referred for treatment. As more children were referred, more clinicians trained to meet the need. As medical infrastructure for youth transition expanded, so did public awareness—and with it, parental anxiety that they may not be doing ‘enough’ to ‘help’ their gender non-conforming children, by simply allowing them to grow up without psychosocial or medical intervention. Suddenly, any child questioning their gender could be perceived as a ticking time bomb. The narrative of “better a trans kid than a dead kid” spread, not because the risk of suicide had been proven to be high in non-transitioned children, but because it had become a rhetorical tool to justify medicalization.
In this way, the existence of a medical treatment pathway for gender dysphoric youth created the perception of a crisis of “trans kids not getting the healthcare they needed.” The “trans child” was no longer an anomaly but a potential reality for any child who failed to conform to gender norms, and then– a reality for any kid no matter how gender-conforming they were in childhood, to declare themselves as trans in adolescence, and to find themselves on an operating table where a surgeon carves away at their healthy bodies in a futile attempt to create for their patients, a new metaphysical reality.
Where once clinicians waited for children with intractable dysphoria to emerge from adolescence before prescribing interventions, they now trained parents, educators and pediatricians, to look for signs of gender nonconformity in children—converting ordinary developmental exploration into medical red flags.
Jazz Jennings became the poster child of this new paradigm. His transition was held up as proof that early medical intervention could be a success story. But what was never mentioned was that Jazz’s transition was not done by the criteria of even the Dutch Protocol. He was socially transitioned in early childhood, long before the onset of puberty, and he began puberty blockers at age 11. Because his male genitals never developed, surgeons later struggled to construct even a functional approximation of female anatomy. Jazz’s experience exposed the flaws in the protocol’s logic: puberty suppression might prevent unwanted physical changes, but it also stunts the very development needed for later surgeries. In trying to erase male puberty, clinicians created new medical challenges—ones Jazz paid the price for.
Almost a decade before Jazz had his penile inversion procedure, the Dutch clinicians already knew that boys with suppressed pubertal development would need a more invasive procedure involving tissue from the colon to make up for the lack of genital development. Yet, for some reason, it doesn’t seem that any of the clinicians treating him were aware of these findings, nor did they make him or his parents, or the public whom they were actively propagandizing to, aware that a more complicated surgery is the inevitable, well-known outcome of early pubertal suppression in juvenile males.
Today, the Dutch Protocol is being re-evaluated even in the country where it began. Dutch clinicians have acknowledged that their original research cannot justify the global expansion of pediatric gender medicine as it has come to exist. Will that stop them from justifying their protocol on other grounds? No. Definitely not. But, systematic reviews in Europe have found that the evidence base for youth transition is weak, and that the risks may outweigh the benefits. The world is beginning to wake up to the harm inflicted upon children in the name of ‘compassion’ and ‘mercy.’
Pediatric social and medical transition protocols were not a response to rising rates of gender dysphoria, nor an ‘uncovering’ of a dysphoric population of kids who always existed but were finally receiving the “‘life-saving” treatment they deserve—it just created lifelong medical patients out of healthy children. Gender medicine, both for kids and for adults, offered solutions that promised to resolve complex psychological distress through medical means, while failing to address the root causes of that distress. And it created an illusion of necessity, when in truth, what had changed was not the metaphysical nature of the children, but the treatments made available to them.
Norman Spack & Ken Zucker: Two Different Treatment Protocols
[ Norman Spack describes “salivating” at the pediatric transition protocols of the Netherlands ]
The rapid shift toward medicalizing childhood gender distress did not happen spontaneously—it had architects. One of the most pivotal was Dr. Norman Spack, a pediatric endocrinologist at Boston Children’s Hospital, who helped bring the Dutch Protocol to North America. After learning of the work being done in the Netherlands, Spack was reportedly so eager to adopt puberty suppression protocols for children that he later described himself as having “salivated” at the idea of blocking puberty in gender dysphoric youth.
Spack opened the first major pediatric gender clinic in the United States in 2007, the same year Jazz Jennings’s story went public. He was not alone in his enthusiasm. By the time Jazz was a toddler, his parents were already being told that puberty blockers would be available to prevent their son from developing into a man. This promise was made long before Jazz reached puberty, long before he had even learned to tie his shoes, and more importantly, long before there was any robust, long-term evidence showing that the Dutch cohort fared better than their non-medicalized peers. The idea that “doing nothing” was cruel—and that intervening medically was compassionate—had already taken root.
[ Ken Zucker— the man, the myth, the legend. ]
This marked a dramatic departure from the predominant therapeutic model of the prior decades, as practiced by clinicians like Dr. Ken Zucker. Zucker, a psychologist at Toronto’s Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH), focused on helping children explore and potentially resolve their gender distress without affirming them as the opposite sex. His approach—common throughout the 1990s and the 2000s after being practiced in earlier decades—emphasized watchful waiting, play therapy and parenting strategies aimed at reconciling the child with his biological sex—rather than socially transitioning or medically affirming the gender distressed child. Zucker recognized that the vast majority of gender-dysphoric children would ultimately reconcile with their natal sex if left alone, and his research showed this to be true.
His approach was grounded in the simple fact that, at the time, there was no medical intervention to offer these children. Puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones for minors were not yet part of mainstream medical practice. This therapeutic orientation existed not only because it was cautious, but because it was all that existed. Because medical transition was off the table, clinicians were forced to understand gender dysphoria as something that could evolve—and often resolve—over time.
The emergence of puberty blockers as a tool for interrupting development radically altered that framework. Once medical interventions were available, the question was no longer, “How should we help the child learn to accept their body?” but “When do we start altering the body to match the child’s stated identity?” The very presence of a medical option redefined the ethical terrain—and subtly, but powerfully, redefined what was seen as “affirming,” “progressive,” or even “life-saving.”
This shift did not occur because new evidence demanded it, but because a new possibility existed. And it was this possibility—not a genuine explosion in a new strain of particularly intractable childhood gender dysphoria—that drove the ballooning rates of pediatric transition. Once clinicians could prescribe blockers, more parents began to seek them. Once parents began seeking them, more clinics opened. Once clinics opened, more children were diagnosed. And once children were diagnosed, the cycle reinforced itself—bolstered by an uncritical media, ideological activism, and a medical community eager to innovate before fully understanding the consequences of the past experiments done on earlier cohorts of adolescents and adults.
Jazz Jennings was swept into this current at the very beginning. His journey, far from being an organic expression of his inborn “gender identity,” was shaped at every turn by the availability of interventions that had only recently entered the medical arena, and by the burgeoning American obsession with reality TV shows centered around extreme variations within different parenting styles. By the time Jazz’s trajectory was cemented with an early social transition, he no longer fit neatly within the original Dutch Protocol criteria. The practice of early childhood social transition showcased a new ethos– not that many of these kids would naturally grow out of their distress, and that caution is required, but that these children were doomed to never outgrow it. That is, at least, the bold-faced lie which Jazz’s parents allege was told to them by the therapist who diagnosed their toddler with Gender Identity Disorder in 2003.
He had not even reached puberty when the path of medical transition was laid out before him. He never had to contend with the fact that someday he would become a man. By the time he was five, he was fully convinced that his (or his mother’s) childhood fantasy could continue forever.
The story of the “transgender child” is not a story of new, emerging science responding to a medical need that has always existed. It is the story of medicine creating a new patient population—and a society that eagerly embraced it, blind to the harm it might cause– because the “experts” who stood to gain so much in profit by recommending intervention over non-intervention, would begin to develop a bias in the way they approach medicine: to prioritize the short term happiness of a child over his long-term well-being.
Reflections
As I look into Jazz’s story, with an understanding of the way that medical interventions for pediatric gender dysphoria spurred a cultural shift in how we understand the nature of children, I am left with so many more questions.
What really did Jazz Jennings’s parents know about the pathway they were signing their son up for? I know that the Jennings’s were aware of how experimental these interventions are. But, I often wonder whether they even knew that this treatment protocol they were signing their son up for, was pioneered by clinicians in the Netherlands, who had been doing these treatments for less than a decade by that point. I wonder if they were even aware that there were non-medicalized models for treating pediatric gender dysphoria which showed promise, and had been practiced for far longer than the medicalized ones. Were they even made aware that they had options other than “a dead son or a living daughter?”
What exactly did their toddler’s gender therapist tell them about the nature of their son’s condition? I wonder why Jazz’s parents were told by the gender therapist who diagnosed their toddler son with Gender Identity Disorder in 2003, that it was unlikely that their son would outgrow his distress and reconcile with his sex— when everything in the literature of that time suggested the opposite. If this was what the therapist indeed said, this isn’t just a spiritual belief in a gendered soul passed off as medical advice— this is a clinical pathway sold to parents of a toddler on the basis of a bold-faced lie. The dogma that “kids know who they are” would not emerge into popular culture until after Jazz’s social transition as a kindergartener had commenced. Something about this arc of the story is fishy.
Were Jazz’s parents not told that early gender non-conformity is more indicative of a later homosexual outcome than a transsexual one?
Did Jazz Jennings’s endocrinologists not know that early pubertal suppression in juvenile males stunts genital growth and necessitates an even riskier “gender reassignment” surgery? Because the Dutch clinicians who had been suppressing boys’ puberties for about 20 years by the time Jazz got his puberty blocker implanted— certainly did. This ‘side effect’ of pubertal blockade was reported on in a Dutch newspaper. Did no one think to communicate this to…. anyone???
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Don't underestimate the willingness of his mother - because, let's face it, it's never the father without the mother - to sacrifice her child for fame, money, attention and particularly applause at how virtuous she is.
