Charlize Theron, the Academy Award-winning actor shared in April 2019 that her oldest child, Jackson is transgender. 

The rumors had been circulating that Theron has been raising her son as a girl and was dressing her child in skirts, dresses with long braided hair.

She detailed that her daughter Jackson Theron, born in 2011 and adopted in 2012, was assigned male at birth. But when her child reached four years old, Jackson said that he was not a boy. Charlize Theron, who is also mother to daughter August Theron, born in 2014, told The Daily Mail,

“I thought she was a boy, too. Until she looked at me at 3 years old and said, ‘I am not a boy!’. So there you go! I have two beautiful daughters who, just like any parent, I want to protect and I want to see thrive.

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.

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. And I will do everything in my power for my kids to have that right and to be protected within that."

The actress is well known for her support of the LGBTQ community and marriage equality. In 2009, she announced that she would not marry her then-boyfriend, Stuart Townsend until same-sex marriage is legalized in the United States.  She had said,

“I think it would be exactly the same if we were married, but for me to go through that kind of ceremony, because I have so many friends who are gays and lesbians who would so badly want to get married, that I wouldn’t be able to sleep with myself.”

Family History

The actress lived most of her days in South Africa with her parents. Her father Charles ran a construction and was an alcoholic and abusive father. He viciously beat Charlize's mother, Gerda. 

When she was 15 years old, her father came home drunk, carrying a gun, and threatened to kill both  Charlize and Gerda. In self-defense, her mother Gerda shot him dead, in front of Charlize's eyes.

After her father’s death, the family owed a lot of money and her mother paid it all in five years and took over his construction firm. Even now, Charlize Theron considers her mother her role model heroine.

She speaks greatly of her mother,

“You know, I grew up in [South Africa] where people lived with half-truths and lies and whispers and nobody said anything outright, and I was raised very specifically not to be like that. I was taught by my mom that you have to speak up; you have to be able to know that, when this life is over, you’ll have lived the truth you’re comfortable with, and that nothing negative can come from that.”