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When little Paddy McGuire decided she would rather live as a girl, the 10-year-old's parents faced a stark choice.

All too aware of the soaring suicide rate among transgender young people, mum Lorna told her husband: “You can support your daughter or you can bury your son."

Paddy was just three when she started asking her parents if she could wear a dress. At first they told her: "No, boys wear trousers, girls wear dresses."

But two years later, when Paddy was still begging to wear a frock, and wanting to do things usually associated with girls, they relented, and let her be who she wanted to be - a girl.

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“It was a bit of a struggle at first,” admits dad Patrick. “When you have a kid you have this picture in your mind of what the future is going to hold."

But he approached the subject with level-headed logic.

“It just meant rethinking my expectations," he says.

“If someone had said to me when she was born, ‘You’ve got a daughter’, I wouldn’t have had any issue with it. So what difference does it make five years on being told, ‘You’ve got a great little daughter’?”

Now, Paddy is the girl she wants to be. The 10-year-old has grown her brown hair long, and dresses in clothes she has picked herself.

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She has a penchant for “lots of pink”, says her mum.

A study released earlier this year by equality charity Stonewall suggested nearly half of transgender people aged from 11 to 19 have attempted suicide, while eight out of 10 have self-harmed. Lorna felt that those bleak terms were a clear indicator of what her and her husband needed to do.

Lorna and Patrick, who live in Eyres Monsell, Leicester, were not willing to risk their child adding to those figures.

“There have always been signs, since before she could speak," says Lorna.

“She was always playing with girls’ stuff.

“She’d play with her sisters and want to have her nails painted. Then she’d walk around with a tea towel on her head and want long hair, or she’d be wearing hand bags and necklaces."

When she reached three, Paddy started to be more obvious about how she felt, instead of just slipping on girls' clothes or makeup while she was playing.

"Between three and five, she was asking me for a dress," says 45-year-old Lorna.

“After she kept asking, I finally bought her one. I thought, ‘If it’s a phase, she’ll grow out of it’.

(Image: Barcroft Media)

“When she put that dress on, I knew it wasn’t a phase.

"It fitted her not just size-wise, but it fitted her personality.

“There was a little girl in there.”

Friends and family have, on a whole, have been "completely positive" about the situation - so much so, says Lorna, that there has not really been any situation at all.

“I was worried about telling my 86-year-old grandma, you know, because she’s of a different generation," says Lorna.

"She just said, ‘Well I’ll just buy girl presents at Christmas then’, and that was it.

“In our normal everyday life, we just get along.

“Someone asked, ‘What do you do when you go out?’. And I just said, ‘We put our coats on’."

Little obstacles do come along once in a while. Although society is gradually catching up with the concept of being "transgender", official paperwork can lag behind.

(Image: Barcroft Media)

When Lorna was signing Paddy up for secondary school, she had two options for gender - male or female. Wracked with guilt, due to Paddy’s physical attributes her mum ticked the box for male.

“I felt guilty filling it in like that, because she’s not a boy,” says Lorna.

Paddy will not be able to undergo gender reassignment surgery until she is older.

She will be able to start taking hormone 'blockers' to delay the onset of puberty when she reaches the age it starts. Then, at 16, she will be able to begin taking female hormones.

It will then be a few more years, when Paddy is well into adulthood, before she can choose to have an operation.

Lorna admits that before Paddy started telling her how she felt, she was completely unaware that transgender children even existed - and because of that she understands why some people cannot grasp the situation.

“I didn’t know anything about transgender," she says.

(Image: Barcroft Media)

Now, she wants to make sure more people do know about it. She feels that being open and talking about it makes the whole situation easier.

And being engaged with how Paddy feels, and supportive of her, is helping her be a positive, healthy, balanced little girl.

“She’s got a very wide network of support," says Lorna. "She’s very happy and very confident because of all the love and support she gets.”

Lorna, Patrick and Paddy herself want to give support to anyone facing similar circumstances.

Being a girl when you are born with a boy's body is "not a choice", says Lorna.

“Paddy has said before, ‘I don’t want to be a girl, I am a girl. I’ve always been a girl, you just didn’t know it then’.”