Teens Beware — Reality- TV Bites
MOVE over, Caitlyn Jenner. Here comes Jazz Jennings.
The 14yearold transgender gal is getting her own reality show on TLC later this month. According to the network, Jazz “is your typical young girl, learning to balance school, her friends, her family and everything in between. But in addition to dealing with the chaos of being a teenager, Jazz has another obstacle to face: Shewas assigned male at birth.”
Actually, there’s another way inwhich Jazz isn’t typical. She’s going to go through adolescence in front of a national audience.
There’s no mystery why TLC would want her: The same reason theywanted “Jon& Kate Plus 8,” “My 600lb. Life,” “Little People, Big World” and “19 Kids and Counting.”
Americans love to watch freak shows, and while TLC can cloak these programs in the veil of following families struggling with the ups and downs of life, the truth is we’re just ogling people on the edges of society.
What’s more puzzling is why any parent in their right mind would agree to let a child participate in such a spectacle.
Howmany of us would like to relive eighth grade in front of millions of viewers? It’s a time in our lives when we’re trying, for lack of a better phrase, to find ourselves.
The problem is that once you’ve said something on TV, it becomes much harder to take back. It’s not that the audience won’t forgive you for changing your mind. It’s that reality television creates a kind of polished version of your life, giving your coming of age a clear timeline. But growing up is rarely so neat.
No one’s told Jazz that, however. In a recent YouTube video, she explained, “I wouldn’t change anything about myself. Not because I’m being cocky or anything, but because this is who I am and I’m proud of who I am. This is me, and I’m transgender, and that’s OK. It makes me a stronger person, a more confident person, and it just makes me myself.”
You can admire her confidence while at the same time noting that there are few things many of us believed strongly at 14 that we still believe today. ( Indeed, a significant percentage of young people who identify as transgender eventually determine that they are not.) And for most of us, that’s fine. But then again, we’re not having our every move recorded by a camera crew.
This is not the first time Jazz has been thrown into the spotlight. She appeared on “20/ 20” at age five and told Barbara Walters that she was a girl. She has published a children’s book on the subject, participated in a documentary and done interviews with major media outlets about her sexuality. ( Most recently she told Cosmo that she was upset she wouldn’t be able to get pregnant so she planned to ask her sister to bear one of her children using Jazz’s future husband’s sperm.) She participated in Johnson& Johnson’s Clean & Clear “See the Real Me” campaign and has been named one of Time’s mostinfluential teens.
Jazz clearly sees herself as an activist on behalf of the transgender cause, but it’s her parents’ job to draw a line. They are the ones who are supposed to put her wellbeing before the good of the cause.
The reality show is another big step down the road to a weird kind of celebrity.
Audiences who watch week in and week out think they genuinely know the cast members. And teenagers who have trouble distinguishing what should be private from what should be public are exactly what those audiences are looking for in a reality TV subject.
Which is precisely why parents should be doing more to stop their kids from appearing on these shows at all.
Of all the things the Duggar family did wrong in failing to deal with their son’s proclivities and protect their daughters, for example, the one mistake that seems most preventable was putting the family in the public spotlight.
There are some parents who probably don’t know better. Honey Boo Boo’s mother seems to have a hard enough time figuring out how to keep her children from her sexual molester exboyfriend that it’s hard to imagine she would think twice about the harm of becoming a reality star.
But some of these parents really should know better.
While Jazz’s mother and father have been guarded about some things — Jennings is a pseudonym and we don’t know exactly where in South Florida this family lives— it won’t take long for the Internet to find out.
They seem to be solidly middle class, and Jazz’s $ 18,000 annual hormone shots are covered by her father’s health insurance. Which probably means they don’t need TLC’s money to get by. Too bad, then, that they’ve sold their daughter’s childhood to the highest bidder.
Twitter: @NaomiSRiley