At 16, this girl became the youngest in the world to have a life-changing operation… can you guess what it was? Jackie Green, 19, was born a boy named Jack After seven attempts to kill herself and two years on suicide watch her parents let her become a girl On her 16th birthday she became the youngest person in the world to have a gender reassignment surgery Many little girls dream of growing up to be someone like Jackie Green.
An aspiring model, the 19-year-old’s cascading chestnut hair, porcelain complexion and aquiline nose are reminiscent of a pre-Raphaelite muse, or maybe one of the Downton actresses. Today, the former Miss England finalist is dressed in this season’s Seventies-style prints and a statement necklace. ‘Topshop,’ she smiles when I ask about the designer. Her adoring boyfriend of two years, also 19, is with her when we meet at a gastropub in North London – and she exudes confidence, which no doubt helps in her job as a hostess at the Burberry store in
Bond Street.
Yet the road to becoming the self-assured young woman she is today has not been easy – for Jackie was born male. Happier than ever: Jackie Green, now 19, became the world’s youngest person to undergo gender reassignment surgery at the age of 16 Aged just four, and then named Jack, she told her mother Susan: ‘God has made a mistake, I should be a girl.’ Trapped in a body she hated, Jackie first overdosed aged 11 and made six more suicide attempts before she was 15.
Medicines were locked in a safe and knives had to be hidden away. She threatened to mutilate her Cores. And so, aged 16, Jackie Green became the youngest person in the world to undergo transgender surgery. ‘Without that surgery, I wouldn’t be here now,’ she says bluntly. ‘I’m a girl, I always have been – there’s never been any doubt in my mind about that. It’s just that my body didn’t match because, as far as I’m concerned, I had a birth defect.
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