"This Is Jessica" Documentary Film Screening

From her earliest years, when Jessica Bair was being raised as a boy named Jonathan, she knew she was a girl. But born into the Mormon church, she also knew that admitting this out loud could cause her to lose everything – her family, her faith, her life on earth and her eternal soul.

Terrified to reveal her true self, young Jessica instead set about creating the perfect life of a young Mormon man, becoming a missionary, marrying young and starting a family. Serving in the Army, hiding from the Don’t Ask Don’t Tell policy even as she enforced it as a military policeman and special agent, Jessica grew despondent about the chasm between whom she was and who she was merely pretending to be.

This is Jessica paints an intimate, emotional portrait of a woman forced to make a heart-wrenching decision in order to save herself. When Jonathan finally comes out as Jessica, it’s a leap off the edge of life as she knows it. Will her family reject or accept her? Will the church to which she’s given her life cast her out? This is the story of a woman faced with an impossible choice between the life into which she was born, and the one she was born to live.