Yes, Being Jazz: My Life as a (Transgender) Teen Is Banned!

Jazz Jennings has been one of the most visible transgender people in America since she was six years old, when she appeared on a Barbara Walters interview in 2007. Being Jazz is her memoir, written at age 14, covering everything from her earliest memories of knowing she was a girl to her legal battles, her reality TV show, and the ordinary teenage stuff (friends, crushes, soccer) that doesn’t make headlines. The book is disarmingly straightforward. Jazz writes with the confidence of someone who’s been explaining herself to strangers her whole life and has gotten very good at it. What makes it work is that she treats her trans identity as a fact, not a debate.

Being Jazz has been challenged 8 times across Florida, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, and Texas, targeted for LGBTQ+ themes. The challenges are part of a systematic effort to remove books about transgender youth from school and public libraries, particularly in districts where dozens of LGBTQ+ titles were pulled simultaneously. Jazz’s memoir isn’t provocative or edgy. It’s a teenager talking about her life. The objection isn’t to content but to existence: challengers don’t want trans kids to see themselves in library books, and they don’t want cisgender kids to learn that their trans classmates are real people with real stories.