DALLAS – Evan Singleton is like many 12-year-old boys in Dallas. He rides scooters and roughhouses with his friends. But unlike most boys, he’s biologically a girl. Evan’s parents had only recently permitted their daughter, Evie, to openly identify herself as Evan, a boy. They were desperate and didn’t know where to turn.

Evan, 9 at the time, was severely depressed – and even sometimes felt suicidal. He was a boy trapped in a girl’s body.

“Nobody would listen to me,” he said. “I would even yell, ‘I’m a boy!’ But they wouldn’t listen.”

His parents attempted to explain his odd behavior as that of a tomboy. Then, when he was 9, his mother, Mela, got into an argument with him about a new bicycle they got for him.

“It was too girly,” Evan remembered. “I didn't want it, because it was pink with flames on it.”

It wasn’t until he screamed about the bike again that it finally dawned on her what he’d been trying to communicate for years.

“It was like, ‘Poof! I get it,’” she recalled, sobbing. “He'd been saying it for five years…I kept trying to make him not be a boy.”