Little mermaid, big message

“I Am Jazz” touches piano keys no other children’s book touches, but the last chord has a familiar ring: Be yourself.

A mermaid-loving Florida girl, 14-yearold Jazz Jennings is swimming into mainstream culture to become the smiling face of transgender youth. In her wake, a brightly hued book about her life is darting upstream into schools, libraries and stores.

Author Jessica Herthel, national director of the Stonewall Education Project, makes a stop at EVERYbody Reads bookstore tonight to talk about the book and its potential to get kids, parents and students to root for transgender kids and identify with their struggle to be themselves.

Not that Jazz is hurting for exposure. Time magazine dubbed her one of the “25 Most Influential Teens of 2014.” She has appeared on “20/20” with Barbara Walters several times, beginning when she was 5, and was the youngest person ever featured on the Out 100 and the Advocate’s “40 Under 40” lists. Sunday, she got a Voice for Equality award from Equality Florida at a gala dinner.

Media buzz is ephemeral, but “I Am Jazz” has the potential to nestle Jazz’s story into schools and homes for decades to come. It has already made her a hero to people several times her age. Rachel Crandall- Crocker, director of Transgender Michigan, a maleto-female transgender person and a Lansing psychotherapist who specializes in transgender issues, said “I Am Jazz” captures “how so many of us have been feeling for soooo many years.”

“When I was rooting for Jazz, I was root ing for a part of me,” Crandall-Crocker said. “Jazz has helped to bring together the transgender community of all ages.”

That is no exaggeration.

“I’m 58 years old and I feel like a Jazz groupie,” enthused Char Davenport, a decades-long activist and the first transgender professor of English at Saginaw Valley State University and Delta College. “Jazz and other children like her are what we have been working toward for decades. I’m going to buy a bunch of copies and give them out as Christmas presents to the House and Senate in Lansing.”

Herthel hoped and expected the book to inspire transgender people, but she had a bigger audience in mind when she started the project. After an unrewarding career as a corporate lawyer, she shifted gears to raise three young daughters in the 1990s. Herthel was surprised to hear her 6-year-old say it would be “weird” to change gender. Herthel considered herself a staunch LGBT ally and tried to raise her kids the same way.

“I realized that messages of inclusion must come from everywhere, including school, not only from parents,” she said. Herthel quit her job, helped Fort Lauderdale schools develop a handbook on LGBT issues and joined Safe To Be Me, a coalition of about 30 local agencies concerned with keeping LGBT people safe.

There she met Jazz’s mother, Jeanette, and struck up a friendship. (Jazz’s family asked Herthel to keep their location private, except to say they live in south Florida, because “they get a lot of hate mail.”) Herthel felt it was high time to bring diversity themes into elementary school instead of waiting until high school, when prejudices are ingrained.

She decided that upbeat, charismatic Jazz Jennings was the perfect face for the project. Jeanette and Jazz agreed. Herthel used her own daughters as a focus group. She was anxious to see “how young you could go (discussing transgender people) without being intimidated, freaked out or scared.”

She asked her kids if they wanted to meet Jazz. The visit went swimmingly, with ice cream, giggles and hugs all around. Afterward, Herthel’s daughters took pride in explaining what transgender meant.

“Most kids want to do the right thing,” Herthel said. “They felt like they were being very grown up. Why not let more kids feel empowered to talk about these things?” But a children’s book about a transgender kid was new territory, even in 2010. Books like “My Princess Boy,” by Cheryl Kilodavis got close, but didn’t put a real-life face on the issue and avoided the word “transgender.”

By contrast, “I Am Jazz” takes a first-person, no-nonsense approach. “I have a girl brain but a boy body,” the text reads. “This is called transgender. I was born that way!” The book follows Jazz’s brushes with confusion, bullying and feeling “crummy,” but the mood is overwhelmingly positive. Her parents let her grow her hair long and wear girl clothes. By the end, she’s still conscious of being different, but takes pride in herself.

Herthel pitched the book to several publishers, but got no takers and resigned herself to self-publishing. She recruited an art student from Craigslist to do the illustrations, started filling out a contract on Amazon and girded herself to “somehow move a garage full of books.”

At the 11th hour, a “friend of a friend of a friend” slipped her the name of a contact at Penguin Books. Herthel made a “desperate pitch” to Luari Hornik, president of Dial, the children’s’ division of Penguin.

“She decided to take a chance on it and the heavens opened,” Herthel said.

The two-year production wait was agonizing, but the payoff was big. For one thing, public schools and libraries don’t buy many self-published books. More important, Penguin hired a top illustrator, Britain’s Shelagh McNicholas, to bring Jazz to pastel-pink life. An earlier illustrator came back with sketches of Jazz with short hair and cleats.

“She’s a delicate, feminine child, and I wanted that unambiguously shown in the art,” Herthel said. When she saw the book with McNicholas’ illustrations, she cried.

In an email to City Pulse, Jazz wrote that she “loves” the way the book turned out. “The pictures are very vibrant and portray the love and happiness in my life,” she wrote. “They correspond with my story very well. I’m happy to have this book out for all people to understand what being transgender means in simple terms.”

Jazz is getting emails from around the country, many of them with deeply personal reactions to the book. One of her favorites is an email from a mother whose 7-year-old son read the book twice on the way home from the store, read it to his grandma when he got home, played school and read it to his “students” and fell asleep with the book under his pillow.

Jazz wrote that the response so far has lived up to her hopes for the book.

“I want to put smiles on the faces of little kids when they realize they are not alone,” she wrote.

Jazz gets farther from being a “little kid” each day. She’s a newly appointed ambassador for the Human Rights Campaign and makes mermaid tails to raise money for her charity, the Transkids Purple Rainbow Foundation. (Profits from “I Am Jazz” go to the same organization.)

“I look forward to expanding my business when I get older,” Jazz wrote.

Her most recent “20/20” appearance last spring found her at the threshold of puberty, taking hormone blockers to keep from developing facial hair. Surgery to complete her transition is an open question as she approaches adulthood.

She seems to be comfortable as a role model and activist.

“We are far from the day when being transgender is mainstream,” she wrote. “People are becoming more accepting and tolerant, but until being transgender is no big deal we will have to continue using media to educate the world.”

Herthel doesn’t know how many schools and libraries have picked up “I Am Jazz” so far, but she has received excited emails from people who found it in their local school library. In many cases, the local LGBT resource center bought copies and donated them.

Backlash to the book has been minimal so far.

“I was surprised there weren’t more negative reactions,” Jazz wrote.

Herthel is hopeful that the culture has simply moved on, but part of her is still waiting for that shoe to drop.

“Miraculously, and I’m knocking on wood, we haven’t been picked up by any right-wing bloggers, although that will probably happen in 10 minutes,” she said.

Jessica Herthel, author of “I Am Jazz”

Author talk and book signing 7-9 tonight EVERYbody Reads Books and Stuff 2019 E. Michigan Ave., Lansing (517) 346-9900, becauseeverybodyreads.com