Charlize’s son turns out to be a daughter

FOR years there have been rumours, and now the truth is finally out: Charlize Theron has been raising her eldest child, Jackson, as a girl.

Seven-year-old Jackson was adopted as a baby and introduced to the world as a boy.

Then photographs appeared of Jackson wearing skirts and dresses and with long braided hair. Tongues have been wagging and Hollywood wondered just what Theron was up to.

But in a recent interview, Jackson’s mother revealed all.

“Yes, I thought she was a boy, too,” Charlize told Mail Online, “until she looked at me when she was three years old and said: ‘I am not a boy!’” Theron’s other child, August, was also adopted and is a girl.

“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 to be what they want to be,” the Benoni-born actress said.

She said her mother, Gerda, had an influence on how she is raising Jackson.

“You can blame my mom for the fact I don’t know any better! You know, I grew up in a country 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,” she said.

Theron’s troubled childhood has been well documented. She grew up in Crystal Park, east of Joburg, and her alcoholic and abusive father would regularly beat her mother.

Then when Charlize was 15 her father came home in a rage, carrying a gun and threatening to kill both Charlize and Gerda.

Instead Gerda shot him dead, in an act that was ruled self defence.