A FIVE-YEAR-old boy in the UK is living as a girl after he was identified by doctors as one of the youngest ever children to have Gender Identity Disorder (GID).

Zach Avery, from Essex,  has been living as a girl for over a year having being diagnosed with GID – defined as being a conflict between a person’s actual physical gender and the gender that they identify himself or herself as - by doctors when he was four.

The Telegraph reports that he had first refused to live as a boy when he turned three.

According to his mother, Theresa,  Zach used to like Thomas the Tank Engine but then one day suddenly decided that he wanted to live like a girl and started watching Dora the Explorer as well as dressing in girl’s clothes.

“He just turned round to me one day when he was three and said ‘Mummy, I’m a girl,’” she is quoted as saying in The Sun.

Theresa, 32, says she thought her child was going through a phase until it “got serious”.

She said: “He would become upset if anyone referred to him as a boy,” adding that she wanted to raise awareness of the disorder by going public about it.

The primary school that he attends has even changed the children’s toilets to unisex in support of Zach since his official diagnosis.

The local health authority told TheFamilyGP.com that last year 165 chuildren were diagnosed with GID of which only seven were under the age of five.

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