Kindergarteners Learn Transgender Kids Are ‘Born This Way’ in NEA-Sponsored Event

Public schools across the country participated in an annual event to support transgender and gender-expansive students Thursday by reading I Am Jazz, a book that tells the real-life story of Jazz Jennings, who was a transgender child.

In some schools – like Ashlawn Elementary School in Arlington, Va. – the book was read to kindergarteners.

“I have a girl brain but a boy body. This is called transgender. I was born this way,” Sarah McBride, a transgender person and a spokesperson for the Human Rights Campaign, read to kindergarteners from the book.

The Washington Post covered McBride’s talk to the children.

“I’m like Jazz,” McBride told the children when done reading. “When I was born, the doctors and my parents, they all thought that I was a boy.”

McBride asked the students, “Can some girls have short hair? And can some boys have long hair?”

One girl responded, “Anyone can be anything.”

The fourth-annual “Jazz and Friends National Day of School and Community Readings” was sponsored by HRC, a gay rights group, and the National Educational Association, the nation’s largest teachers union. The event spotlights transgender and gender-expansive students. Other books on the list: Julián Is a Mermaid by Jessica Love and They She He Me: Free to Be!by Maya and Matthew Smith Gonzalez.

Jaim Foster, an openly…