What I Am Jazz Doesn’t Tell Kids
My perspective as a detransitioned educator, by Claire Abernathy
I’ve always loved kids. I have a gift for seeing the world through their eyes, getting down to their level, making them laugh, and helping them feel safe. For much of my life I imagined a future working with children in a creative or therapeutic way. But after coming to terms with my own experience of pediatric gender transition and detransition, I realized I needed to be in the classroom for a very different reason.
I need to be a sane voice in a field consumed by ideology.
I was transitioned as a child. I was indoctrinated into gender ideology as a preteen — a time when I was struggling with discomfort in my developing body, sexual trauma, and a desperate desire to belong. I was told by adult activists, therapists, and doctors that these feelings meant I was trans. I was affirmed, medicalized, celebrated, and never questioned. Now, as a detransitioned adult living with the permanent consequences of that path, I know how vulnerable kids are when the adults around them believe in this ideology more than they believe in child safeguarding.
Too Young to Know
Here’s the terrifying part: I was convinced as a middle schooler. Today, this ideology is being pushed in elementary schools, preschools, even daycares to children in crucial stages of cognitive and emotional development.
Developmental psychologists like Jean Piaget and Erik Erikson have long recognized that children under the age of seven are still developing what’s known as "gender constancy." That is the understanding that biological sex is fixed and doesn’t change based on behavior, clothing, or preference. Children in the preoperational stage (roughly ages 2–7) are extremely literal and concrete in their thinking. They confuse appearance with reality and struggle with abstract concepts. This means that when an authority figure tells a five-year-old boy that he might actually be a girl because he likes dolls or dresses, that child is likely to take it at face value. He doesn’t have the cognitive maturity to critically assess that idea, he accepts it as truth.
This is why I’m entering early childhood education. Because I’ve experienced what happens when adults abandon their responsibility to protect kids, especially during vulnerable stages of development.
In recent years, gender ideology has crept into education under the banner of inclusion. But this isn’t about “being kind,” it’s about embedding a worldview into children before they’re fully capable of understanding it.
Tales Told to Children
Take the book I Am Jazz, which is read in classrooms across the country to children as young as five. It tells the story of Jazz Jennings, a boy who began socially transitioning at age three and was put on puberty blockers at Tanner Stage II, just before adolescence. The book is framed as uplifting and inspirational. It paints a rosy picture of the truth: that Jazz was chemically castrated before puberty and is now sterile, anorgasmic, and has publicly said, “I don’t feel anything down there.” He struggles to maintain intimate relationships, and has undergone numerous surgeries and suffered horrific complications attempting to construct a body that aligns with an identity he allegedly claimed before he could speak in full sentences, let alone comprehend gender identity theory.
This is not a feel-good children’s story. It’s a tragedy packaged in a picture book.
In one viral video, transgender activist and Senator Sarah McBride reads I Am Jazz aloud to a group of elementary school students, praising Jazz’s “authenticity” and encouraging the children to be true to themselves. But what exactly are these kids being taught to emulate? A path that ends in permanent sterility and being a lifelong medical patient?
In some kindergarten and early elementary classrooms, children are now asked to declare their pronouns during morning meetings. This seemingly simple question asks a child to reflect on their gender identity: a concept that, developmentally, they are likely not even able to comprehend. Children typically don’t attain gender constancy until age six or seven. Asking a kindergartner to choose their pronouns is simply developmentally inappropriate.
In one California school, a teacher led a gender transition reveal in a kindergarten class — informing students that a peer had changed names and pronouns — without notifying parents beforehand after reading I Am Jazz to her class. There are reports across at least 10 different states of schools adopting “gender support plans” that explicitly instruct staff not to disclose a child’s identity exploration to parents. This trend of normalizing keeping secrets from parents in the minds of children sets an obviously dangerous precedent that makes children vulnerable to other forms of abuse
The Reality of Childhood Fantasy
Children are not miniature adults. They don’t have the capacity to understand abstraction. A boy putting on a princess dress is not declaring a gender identity, he’s playing. But gender ideologues interpret innocent behavior through a rigid lens, burdening children with ideas they’re too young to process.
It happened to me! I didn’t hate myself because I was trans, I hated myself because I was a struggling preteen girl and no one helped me work through it. Instead, they gave me a label and a prescription. They told me I was brave for rejecting my body and I believed them.
I’m not alone. More and more detransitioners are speaking out. But while adults begin to wake up, the ideology is reaching kids too young to understand what’s being done to them, and too trusting to push back.
I’m going into early childhood education not just to say “no” to this but to offer something better. Children need to develop a strong, grounded sense of identity rooted in reality. They need adults who understand child development, not activists looking to validate their own actions by pushing their beliefs on kids.
I want to help kids develop real resilience. I want them to know that it’s okay to be different, to feel out of place, to question who they are without jumping to conclusions that could destroy their future. I want to be the kind of adult who tells the truth gently, but firmly: you don’t need to change your body to be yourself.
There are a lot of loud voices in education today, but not many sane ones. Gender ideology has become ubiquitous, and our youngest children are being swept up in it. I’ve seen what happens when that ideology takes root in a vulnerable mind, I’ve lived it. And I won’t stand by and watch it happen to others. I may not be able to undo what was done to me, but I can fight like hell to make sure it doesn’t keep happening to more kids.
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This is so powerful. It should be published in every major newspaper's Oped section.
The kids need you, for sure. They need a counterbalance to Queer Theory for kids, presented as fact to those who can't discern in an environment where they are praised for accepting it and punished for rejecting it.