When she was just two years old, Jazz Jennings knew she had a girl’s brain locked in a boy’s body – she loved dressing up as a mermaid and did not feel she belonged in boys’ clothes.

This confused her family until they took her to a doctor who diagnosed her as transgender. Years later, she wrote a book, which will soon appear on Maltese school shelves.

Called I am Jazz, the book by Ms Jennings and Jessica Herthel is one of 14 publications the Malta Gay Rights Movement donated to the Education Ministry yesterday to be distributed in schools.

Some 150 resources have been bought using leftover funds from an EEA/Norway NGO grant programme that started in November 2013 and will finish at the end of this month.

The books are mainly about diversity in families, including same-sex relationships, and are being donated to start normalising the concept within schools, MGRM chair Gabi Calleja said.

The donation includes three publications about trans children, another three about coming out and audiovisual material for primary and secondary school teachers.

Asked why children were being introduced to family diversity in kindergarten, Ms Calleja said children could encounter the realities of LGBT families at any age.

Education Minister Evarist Bartolo said the donation fit within the “education for all” approach and the books could also be useful for parents who did not know how to approach the subject.

The values of diversity and inclusion should reach all children and even if there were just a handful of trans children in schools, their needs had to be addressed, he said.

Asked why the ministry had not embarked on a similar initiative before MGRM’s donation, Mr Bartolo said there were already a few similar books in schools.

The role of NGOs and civil society was to incentivise and push for such initiatives and it was now up to the ministry to build on this collection and increase the number of such books available to schoolchildren, he said.