GSA Meets Jenny Devolt

Ace Smith

Jenny+Devolt+takes+picture+with+members+of+GSA

Ace Smith, Editor

On Nov. 3, GSA gets to meet music artist Jenny Devolt. Jenny Devolt is a friend to Miss Hodge and met through SIUC in their earlier years. She played songs and spoke with the members of GSA about her life as a closeted and not closeted transgender woman.

As a high schooler, Jenny would experiment with her gender by looking up the definition of “transgender” and what that all meant. She grew up in Harrisburg, a small town, and expressed how there weren’t many resources for her as a teenager to understand the concept. She, at the time, didn’t have organizations like GSA to help her discover herself and so she did what she could in the late 90’s. By age 30, however, she knew who she was and realized that she was a woman. Before her transition in 2014, Jenny was in a band and wore drag and fully expressed her gender in music. She expressed how she wasn’t comfortable at the time about her friends and family finding out, and how she used drag in music to distinguish the two sides of herself. She talked about how it’s never too late to transition and encourages the members to express themselves.

Jenny Devolt gets out her guitar to play some songs