Telling Jessie's story
The soul inside
By DEIRDRE FULTON | February 29, 2012
http://thephoenix.com/Boston/news/134795-telling-jessies-story/Julie Ross didn't always plan to blog about her experience as the mother of a 10-year-old transgender child named Jessie (who, until her 10th birthday in 2011, was known as George).
The blog,
georgejessielove.wordpress.com, grew out of an e‑mail list that Ross, who lives in Brookline, launched to keep friends and family updated on the big changes going on in her household (which includes her husband, Rich, and a teenage son named Harrison). She waffled about "going public," but when Hotmail shut her down as a suspected spammer, her decision was practically made for her. "I had so many things left to say," she recalls.
Ross's posts are brutally honest, funny, and occasionally tear-jerking. A single entry veers from amusing — Ross insists one morning that Jessie wear a shirt long enough that her penis wouldn't be obvious in leggings — to moving, when Jessie reminds her mom, at the end of that day, "It's not what the body parts are, it is the soul inside. I am a girl."
