HELLO, WIKIPEDIA. IT'S ME, JENNY.

 

Within a few days of my coming out as trans, someone had changed my Wikipedia page to JENNY BLAKE ISABELLA. It was a surprise, but not an unwelcome one. Mostly, I was astonished it had been changed so quickly.

However, of late, I’ve become less than enchanted with the page still displaying a photo of my former self. Since Wikipedia doesn’t allow the subject of a page to make changes to it, I was trying to figure out how to get it changed.

My friend Nat Gertler, the publisher of so many cool and quirky books of historical comics, tells me he can fix this for me. He wrote:

Post the image as a blog entry or page with the following text:

Image by Jenny Blake Isabella hereby released under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license, readable at

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

He added:

Then send me the blog entry address and I’ll carry the ball from there. (Please realize that once you do this, anyone will be able to use this image for just about anything. But that can be a good thing, because people can quickly get this updated image of you more easily than past images.)

I had a long comics career as Tony Isabella. I don’t consider it a dead name. I wrote a lot of good stuff as Tony. I helped a lot of people as Tony. But Jenny is who I am.

It’s not an easy transition, but I’m committed to it. I know it will come with loss and nigh-terror. But it also comes with more joy than I could have imagined.

I’m only writing as Jenny Blake. I have no problem with my older work being credited to Tony Isabella. But Jenny is who I am. I’ll even be attending comics conventions and other events as my authentic self, starting with November’s Akron Comicon.

I look forward to meeting old friends and new...and introducing them to Jenny. I hope you’re one of them.