Academy Award-winner Charlize Theron recently revealed that her 7-year-old daughter is transgender. Jackson, who was assigned male at birth, told her mom several years ago that she was a girl.
“Yes, I thought she was a boy, too. Until she looked at me when she was three years old and said: ‘I am not a boy!’” Charlize revealed to the Daily Mail .
The 43-year-old says that she just wants to support her two daughters and that the decision about who they are is not up to her.
“So there you go! I have two beautiful daughters who, just like any parent, I want to protect and I want to see thrive,” she said. “They were born who they are and exactly where in the world both of them get to find themselves as they grow up, and who they want to be, is not for me to decide.”
She went on to say that she loves her daughters and wants to help them be the person that they are meant to be.
“My job as a parent is to celebrate them and to love them and to make sure that they have everything they need in order to be what they want to be,” she said.
She also said that she would do everything in her power to protect her daughters’ rights to explore their sexual identity.
Theron adopted Jackson in 2012 and then added her second daughter, August, to the family in 2015. She has long advocated for LGBTQ+ rights. Most famously, in 2009, she announced that she wouldn’t marry her then-boyfriend Stewart Townsend until everyone within the United States, regardless of gender, had the right to get married.
She said that she wouldn’t be able to sleep at night knowing that she was able to marry when her friends aren’t able to.
Theron went on to say that she credits her strong mother, Gerda, with helping her develop her sense of right and wrong. Her mother, she says, taught her to speak up and live your truth. The actress is famously close to her mother, and her traumatic childhood has been well publicized.
When she was young, her father beat both her and her mother. That all ended one day when her father came home with a gun threatening to kill Theron and her mother. Instead, Gerda shot him dead in self-defense, perhaps cementing the idea in her daughter’s mind that you have to do what is necessary for you and your family.
