IAJWN: Dragnet

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Jazz Jennings is a survivor of one of the most horrific and public cases of coordinated, ritual sexual abuse since David Reimer - all of which is aimed at using surgical and pharmacological interventions as a series of trans rites to transform a male into a female, in an attempt to proof John Money's theory of gender identity. John Money believed that little boys wouldn't want to wear dresses if they didn't want to be little girls, with his alternative explanation being that little girls act the way they do because we tell them to wear dresses. He believed that abusing a child was a way to find out which one of these pseudoscientific hypothesis was true. To this day, his true believers cite his "research" (abuse of the Reimer twins) as evidence that gender identity cannot be changed. Their "proof" is that David Reimer eventually hit peak-transed when he found out the nightmare Truman show he had been raised in. David Reimer and his brother, who had been photoraphed in sexual positions regularly by John Money as "therapy," both ended their lives as a result of the abuse. Yet they STILL cite him!

The hypothesis is that Jazz Jennings, like a young gender Buddha, showed through his possession preferences that his soul was a manifestation of the divine icon of Woman and that, in order to be happy, his physical form must be made to mimic that Platonic ideal. Now, at 22, Jazz Jennings is depressed, unemployed, unable to attend school, unable to work beyond performing for the show that rendered him thusly, with worsening mental illnesses that are giving rise to binge eating behavior, morbid obesity, anxiety, depression, and an unknown number of other transition-related complications and comorbidity.

In this episode, I explore how the Church of Drag, which is a branch of the Church of the Nonbinaries which believes in the nonbinary gender identities that flit about and. Not all drag performers are necessarily in or aligned with the ideology of the Church of Drag, however there is a subset of Drag that attaches a religious significance to the performance and the mindset that underlies it, and this subset has become increasingly organized over time as it has evolved via interaction within the community. This is the same Church of Drag that appears in Drag Kids are Kids.

In this episode, you are able to see that young people who identify as gender nonconforming in some way are being encouraged to participate in this subculture as a way to gain easy money to then use to fund these gender confirmation surgeries. As with many churches, adherents are encouraged explicitly to set aside their independent thoughts and derived beliefs in favor of groupthink and the social support that comes from being part of the church. You'll see that even interpersonal betrayal by church leaders is not enough to shake Jazz's faith.