What Happened to the Transgender Child on National Geographic?

Featuring a boy dressed as a girl on the cover of a magazine was considered provocative in 2017. Now that kind of content is routinely discussed in kindergarten classes and on the pages of dozens of children’s library books. It’s astonishing how much the culture has become warped on this issue in just a handful of years!

But where is that little boy now? In 2017, nine-year-old Avery Jackson was a budding trans activist with bright pink hair, sharing things like “the best thing about being a girl is, now I don’t have to pretend to be a boy.” In videos, he shared that doctors said he was a boy when he was born but he “knew in his heart” he was a girl and “that is okay.” Now he’s 17, and a group called Restore Childhood published a thread documenting what’s happened to him since he was featured on National Geographic.

Avery has been on a regime of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones that have rendered him sterile. And he no longer looks like the “girly girl” of National Geographic fame, nor does he identify as a girl—now he believes he’s nonbinary with they/them pronouns. In a 2022 post, his trans-activist mom wrote,

They’ve always described themself as “a tomboy trans girl” because while knowing deep down that they are *not* a boy, they also didn’t always fit what people expected a girl to be. They are a fabulous, swirling, cosmos of all genders but also no gender at all.

In other words, children’s subjective feelings about self change over time, and who knows what his parent’s affirmation of his feelings at four years old, and his subsequent activism and time in the limelight, did to enshrine his identity as a girl in his young mind?

In one of her posts, his mother talked about how she allows her child to lead, a common parenting strategy when it comes to so-called “gender non-conforming” children. I wrote in detail about this idea in a blog post where I reminded parents,

You are leading your children. You are either leading them toward life by teaching them what is right and good and true, or you are failing to teach them, and by default, allowing them to make up their own minds and form their own worldview from the world around them. In doing so, you are leading them toward death and destruction.

In a fallen world, some children do genuinely struggle with their identity—it seems Avery was confused from a very young age. But the answer is not to allow impressionable, foolish, immature children to lead parents around wherever they want to go (this path leads to broken bodies and, despite what activists will tell you, a higher risk of suicide). The answer is for parents to gently, lovingly, and wisely lead their children in truth, helping them ground their identity in something concrete: God’s Word and his design for us as males or females made in his image.

The answer is for parents to gently, lovingly, and wisely lead their children in truth, helping them ground their identity in something concrete: God’s Word and his design for us as males or females made in his image.

And it’s important to know that the solution to this issue is for people to have a heart and mind change in regard to God’s Word and the saving gospel. Only then will someone understand they can’t trust their feelings because they have sinful hearts. As Jeremiah 17:9 states, “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked” (KJV).

If you’re looking for resources to help ground your children’s identity in God’s Word and design, I encourage you to check out Why Did God Make Me a Girl? and Why Did God Make Me a Boy? for young children (also available in Spanish), and Who Am I? for high schoolers and adults (we have a middle-school version coming soon). These resources teach what it means biblically to be a male or a female and why it’s a good thing—these are desperately needed resources in our day and age!

Get More Answers on Answers News

This item was discussed Monday on Answers News with cohosts Dr. Georgia Purdom, Dr. Tim Chaffey, and Dr. Jennifer Rivera. Answers News is our weekly news program filmed live before a studio audience here at the Creation Museum, broadcast on our Answers in Genesis YouTube channel, and posted to Answers TV. We also covered the following topics:

• 80% of churchgoers want their pastor to take a stand.
• Is abortion more important than religious freedom?
• Are evolutionists ditching cosmic inflation?
• And more!

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Thanks for stopping by and thanks for praying,
Ken

This item was written with the assistance of AiG’s research team.