Just two weeks after making news by publicly challenging men to “grow a pair” and ask her out, actress Charlize Theron is back in the headlines for revealing that she has been raising her adopted seven-year-old son as a girl since he was just age three, allowing him to wear dresses and frequently referring to him as “she.”
“Yes, I thought she was a boy, too,” Charlize recently told 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,” she continued. “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.”
The “Atomic Blonde” actress then defined parenting as simply celebrating her children as they wish to be, rather than as being a guide to direct children.
“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. “And I will do everything in my power for my kids to have that right and to be protected within that.”
The article later delved into some of Charlize Theron’s childhood wounds that may have influenced her permissive approach to parenting. Tragically, she grew up with an abusive father whose death she witnessed at the hands of her mother in self-defense. From the report:
The drama of Charlize’s early years is well-documented. The tough life on a remote farm outside Johannesburg, South Africa, tormented by an alcoholic and abusive father who would regularly and viciously beat Charlize’s mother, Gerda.
Then the last tragic day when Charlize was 15 and her father, Charles, who ran a construction business, returned home in a rage, carrying a gun and threatening to kill both Charlize and Gerda.
Instead, in front of Charlize’s eyes, in what was later ruled an act of self-defense, Gerda shot him dead.
Theron recently caused a stir by lamenting in an interview with Entertainment Tonight that she had been single for about a decade and wishing aloud that men would just “grow a pair” and ask her out. “I’ve been single for 10 years, it’s not a long shot,” she said. “Somebody just needs to grow a pair and step up. I’m shockingly available.”
Theron’s social circle likely leans left, given her Hollywood career and her history of abortion advocacy, which spans all the way back to the late-1990s. Since she starred in the pro-abortion film, “The Cider House Rules,” she has been a vocal supporter of Planned Parenthood and has attended multiple pro-choice rallies.
This article has been revised for tone and clarity.