Friends and family tried to help. She told her parents how unbearable she found life and they were supportive, just as her best friend was, but no one understood. Irene is only grateful she was never bullied. “I don’t think I could have stayed alive,” she says. But the difference between her and other women at the point of adulthood was now stark.

It was during the summer of 2015, just after university had finished, when Irene was 22, that she found herself lying in bed unable to sleep one night, bored, clicking on YouTube to pass the time. As she refreshed the page, the intersex video came up.

“I was like, OK, I guess I’ll give it a watch.” One of the first people on the video is an intersex woman called Emily. “She talks about having testes. It was absolutely mind-blowing.”

One of the other facts conveyed in the video is that people can appear as one sex but have the chromosomes associated with another: A woman can have XY rather than XX chromosomes.

Something clicked in Irene, as if all the uncertainty, the suspicions, and omissions suddenly collided, pointing in one direction.

As soon as the video had finished, Irene climbed out of bed. “I ran to my mum, because she was also not sleeping, and told her about it. ‘Oh my god, can you imagine, there is a word for those people; what if there is something different about me? We have to find out.’”

Shortly after, Irene was due for a general check-up at the doctor, so she decided to call her doctor and start asking questions. “What surgery did they perform on me? What did I have? What are my chromosomes? Did I have testes?”

The doctor knew some of the answers without even looking at the file. But before she started answering, Irene put the doctor on speakerphone so her mother, standing next to her, could also hear.

“My doctor said she wasn’t really sure what I had but that yes, they did a gonadectomy.”

The operation performed on Irene aged 15, about which she was told only that it was to remove part of her ovaries, was in fact the complete removal of the gonads, which usually appear in women as ovaries and in men as testicles.

Except that she hadn’t had ovaries. After talking to the doctor, Irene requested her medical records in full. What they revealed changed everything.

There was a testis on the right side and on the left a “streak gonad, which is like a piece of meat that didn’t develop into anything like testes or ovaries. But it also had a little bit of ovarian tissue in it. So I had both testicular and ovarian tissue.”

The report said something else: The operation also involved the removal of her fallopian tube. She had only had one. “At least they left my uterus,” says Irene. This means that she could still have children, through IVF and with a donor egg.

But there was another discovery: She has XY (male) chromosomes.