Charlize Theron has revealed her child, 7, is transgender

Oscar winning actor Charlize Theron has revealed in a rare interview that her seven-year-old child Jackson identifies as a girl.

Charlize Theron has revealed that her eldest child is transgender.

The Academy Award-winning actor said her child Jackson, 7, was born a male but confessed to her four years ago that she was actually a girl.

“Yes, I thought she was a boy, too,” the 43-year-old Atomic Blonde star admitted to The Daily Mail.

“Until she looked at me when she was three 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.”

Theron adopted Jackson in 2012 and her second daughter, August, in 2015.

Charlize Theron. Picture: Franziska Krug/Getty Images for Carl F. Bucherer

“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.”

She credits her mother for teaching her how to be a tolerant and accepting person.

“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,” Theron said.

“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.”

Theron, who founded her own organisation CTAOP that campaigns for HIV awareness, has been an LGBTQ activist for many years.

In 2009, she announced on The View that she wouldn’t get married to her then-boyfriend Stuart Townsend until everyone in the United States had a right to marry.

“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,” she said while on the show.

This article originally appeared on Fox News and was reproduced with permission