Some parents are preparing to transition their children from one gender to the other as early as pre-school. National Public Radio interviews one Oakland, Calif. family with a young child who started life out as “Jack” but became “Jackie” by age four.

Mary Carter described to NPR the day “Jackie” told her he wanted to be a girl.

“Jackie just looked really, really sad; sadder than a 3-and-a-half-year-old should look,” Carter says. “This weight that looked like it weighed more than she did, something she had to say and I didn’t know what that was.”

“So I asked. I said, ‘Jackie, are you sad that you’re not going to school today?’ And Jackie was really quiet and put her head down and said ‘No, I’m sad because I’m a boy.’”

According to NPR, the child was already his older sister’s dresses on regular occasions liked wearing pink boots.

Carter then asked, “You’re really not happy being a boy?”

“I thought a little bit longer and I said, ‘Well, are you happy being you?’ And that made Jackie smile,” she says. “And I felt like for that moment, that was all that really mattered. That was ‘The Day.’ ”

At that point Carter went to a drug store and found elastic bands to pull Jackie’s hair into small ponytails.

“And I’ve never seen such a happy child,” Carter recalls. “To go from maybe an hour before this, this child who looks so sad, to that, I felt like I’d done something right by her.”

However, Walt Heyer, an author and activist who underwent a sex change operation decades ago, regretted the surgery, and returned to identifying as a male again, says children cannot be born as one gender and identify as another by accident.

“There’s a lot of questions here. Kids are not born transgender. Childhood developmental disorder that comes out of some event or series of events or abuse or neglect or trauma or overbearing mother or father or someone or a lot of times its sexual abuse,” Heyer told The Daily Caller, referencing his reaction to a documentary about transgenders, where a little boy, who now identified as a girl, asked his mother if she would still love him if he was still a boy.

“The reason I jumped off the couch is because that’s what happened to me. My grandmother kept cross-dressing me and loving on me as a girl and not as the boy God made,” he said.

Although both of Jackie’s parents are supportive of the child’s decision, Jackie’s older sister, Chloe still refers to her younger sibling as “Jack” from time to time and James Christian, Jackie’s father admitted he sometimes misses his little boy.

“I look at the old clothes and the old pictures and I will miss Jack. And that’s probably never going to go away. That’s just going to take some time,” he told NPR.