Growing up in Dublin in the late 1970s Stella O’Malley knew exactly what she was. She was a boy. She had been certain of this since she was four years old and, being a “confident” and “assertive” child, she made sure other people knew it too.

Her siblings would buy her boys’ clothes and when children asked, “Are you a girl or a boy?” she would always say “boy”.

“And then I’d look them in the eye,” she says with a laugh. “I was basically challenging them: want to make something of it?”

Today O’Malley, 44, is a psychotherapist and married (to a man); they have two children. She is happy to be a woman. By the age of 16 she had changed her mind.