Amanda Jetté Knox, a popular blogger and mother of a transgender child, shared insights from her life at the kick-off of the Centretown-based speakers’ series, Ask Women Anything.
Jetté Knox was the first in a planned lineup of prominent female speakers in this year’s series, which was launched on Jan. 28 at Pressed Café, on Gladstone Avenue, and saw dozens come to hear her speak.
The series was conceived with the intention of making “amazing women” in Ottawa more accessible to the greater community, says Media Action Média president Amanda Parriag.
“What we were finding is that we were saying, ‘My gosh, each of us can name 10 to 20 amazing women and how come when we look around our community, we don’t hear from these amazing women?’” says Parriag. “It seems like women were not very accessible.”
Through the AWA series, MAM has given women in Ottawa the opportunity to speak about what makes their lives unique, followed by a 45-minute question period, giving the audience a chance to interact.
The theme of Jetté Knox’s speech was finding her voice and the coming out of her transgender daughter.
“I once had a voice, when I was a little girl and knew how to use it, I lost it and found it again,” says Jetté Knox. “I think that is the story of my life. What got me there is a story in itself.”
Jetté Knox had been brutally bullied as a young girl, put in rehab by the time she was 14 and was living on the streets at 16.
But things got better.
“While I don’t believe everything happens for a reason, when I look back now at the things that have happened to me, I think that they gave me the skills that I needed to cope with today,” says Jetté Knox, now 39 and known in the Ottawa community for her popular blog The Maven of Mayhem and recent media appearances for her transgender advocacy.
“I would describe my life as pretty typical in a lot of ways… I ended up with a spouse and pretty great kids who are now 19, 13 and 9,” says Jetté Knox. “We ended up moving to Kanata about three years ago, bought a cute house, everything was great and I thought, ‘This is it! My life is normal now!’”
Normalcy didn’t last long though, as shortly after their move to Kanata, Jetté Knox’s middle child sent her an email coming out as transgender.
“It said, ‘I have something to tell you. I’m a girl trapped in a boy’s body. And more than anything I need your help, I need your support,” explains Jetté Knox.
Her daughter’s bravery inspired her recent million-hit blog post, “World, Meet My Daughter,” introducing her daughter to Jetté Knox’s readers and the Ottawa community.
“That was almost two years ago and we have a daughter now,” says Jetté Knox. “She is amazing. Her name is Alexis. She’s 13. That was the moment that changed everything.”
With Alexis in the lead, Jetté Knox and her family have spread Alexis’s story nationwide, with interviews with CBC Ottawa Morning and posts on Jetté Knox’s blog, including a plea to Justin Trudeau asking for federal laws to protect her transgender daughter.
“We had many conversations as a family and ultimately decided as a family with Alexis in the lead that we would tell this story,” says Jetté Knox. “We did it because if nobody does, it never gets normalized.”
With speakers like Jetté Knox in the AWA lineup, MAM’s ultimate goal is to also normalize the portrayal of women in media.
“I feel like we’re getting better and I feel like Jetté Knox said, and I can’t reiterate this enough, if we don’t talk about it, if we don’t make it normal, it won’t be normal,” says Amy Johnston, a MAM volunteer and originator of the AWA series.
The next event, with radio host and producer Sabine Daniel, will be at Pressed Café on March 8.