KANSAS CITY, MO. —It didn’t take long for two public reactions to erupt on the announcement last week that Avery Jackson, a 9-year-old girl from Kansas City, would be the first known transgender individual to be pictured on the cover of National Geographic.

The first and most overwhelming reaction to her appearance on one version of the magazine’s January cover continues to be an outpouring of support.

The second: hate —scorching and violent messages. One suggested that the only way Avery would be safe is if her mother were “exterminated.”

“It’s a bunch of internet trolls,” said Debi Jackson, 42, Avery’s mother. “And what they do for fun is find people to make fun of and start threads. This one particular group likes to target the trans community —a lot of them try to target people and harass them so, so much so that they’ll commit suicide.

“They’ve started a thread about me, (describing me) as a horrible and abusive parent who is using my child for fame and fortune, and obviously I have a twisted sexual deviancy issues to make my boy act like a girl ...

“They found information (about our family) and put it out there. People later commented, ‘Yeah, she’s definitely one who needs to be cyberbullied until she commits suicide.’”

To be sure, over the last three years, the Jacksons have come to realize that advocating for their transgender daughter invites harsh criticism.

It began not long after Avery and her family received what was mostly an outpouring of positive support as the focus of a story headlined “I am a girl” on transgender children that appeared in February 2014 in The Kansas City Star.

Avery’s name and the name of her parents were kept anonymous in that story out of concern for the effect any criticism might have on the girl, then 6. Avery began her transition from male to female when she was 4.

In the story, Avery was referred to as A.J. Parents Debi and Tom Jackson were referred to only as A.J.’s mother and father.

In the weeks and months that followed, Debi Jackson —who was raised Baptist with strong conservative Republican roots —gradually began to talk publicly about how she came to realize her child was transgender. She spoke both to dispel myths about what transgender meant and to express her support for her child.

On the heels of the newspaper story, Jackson wrote a blog post on being the parent of a transgender child. That post garnered her an invitation to speak at a conference at Unity Temple on the Plaza. Her Unity speech, before about 200 people, was recorded on video and months later, in July 2014, posted on YouTube. It quickly went viral.

“I had hundreds of messages and they were pretty much from every continent except Antarctica,” Jackson said.

The video has amassed more than 625,000 views. The reaction was emboldening for the Jacksons.

“It had a really positive impact,” Jackson said. “It was both youth saying, ‘I want to show this to my parents, so they can understand,’ to parents saying, ‘Wow, thank you. I needed this. I felt alone and now I know I’m not,’ to adults saying, ‘If your daughter can have the courage to be who she is at that age, I don’t know why I’m holding myself back. This is encouraging me to transition.’ And some of the people were up in their 80s.”

As Jackson’s public advocacy grew, so did criticism of the family —reaching a threatening pitch this week after the National Geographic announcement.

“It’s the amount of threats,” Jackson said. “It’s gone from, ‘You’re an abusive mom and people should call child protective services,’ to ‘You should be killed immediately —the only way your kids will be safe is if you are exterminated.’ ”

Jackson also wonders whether the vitriol has intensified as transgender issues have begun to occupy a greater part of the social spotlight.

The Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks hate groups, has been documenting violent acts against individuals who are transgender. In August, it released a piece detailing rising violence in the wake of “culture war” debates such as whether transgender individuals should be allowed or legally prevented from using bathrooms aligned with their gender identity.

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On Wednesday, a supposed bipartisan deal in North Carolina to repeal House Bill 2 —a law that, among other provisions, required transgender people to use public bathrooms that align with their sex at birth —collapsed when Republicans and Democrats could not reach an accord.

On its Facebook page, the American Family Association posted about the National Geographic cover:

“BE WARNED PARENTS AND GRANDPARENTS!!! National Geographic shakes a fist at God and biblical authority on their radical mission to advocate gender confusion in upcoming issues.”

A conservative Christian organization, the nonprofit was originally known as the National Federation of Decency and says it has been on the “front lines of America’s culture wars” since its founding in 1977.

Avery, her long hair colored in streaks of pink and blue, said this week that she has never had any doubt about her gender identity.

“What would I say to people who would say I’m a boy and not a girl? I don’t care. It’s your opinion. I’m actually a girl,” Avery said as she sat in her room, dominated by a pink canopy bed but also decorated with scary posters, a nod to her love of the Goosebumps series.

She knows that some people are critical. She, too, has been trolled on Facebook, but she does not at all regret making her name and face public.

“That’s helping other people,” she said. “And it’s showing we exist. Transgender people do exist. And they’re there, and you can’t ignore them, because they’re there. It also shows that I’m proud to be transgender. I don’t care if I’m transgender. I’m just out there, a normal human being changing the world.”

Although Avery’s portrait is used for the cover of the National Geographic being delivered to homes (the newsstand issue has a different cover), the content of the “Gender Revolution” issue covers a variety of matters related to gender across the globe.

Avery appears in a piece, titled “I Am Nine Years Old,” for which the magazine traveled to 80 homes on four continents to ask boys and girls how gender affects their lives. Other topics in the issue include “Making a Man,” about that changing rite of passage around the globe.

As for how Avery feels about being on a cover that invites greater notoriety:

“I don’t feel much,” she said, “’cause it’s just helping people. That’s the only thing I should feel —good to be there. I don’t care about fame or anything. I just care about being there to help other people.”