WE are mindful of a range of beliefs about the XXY karyotype – about being male, being female and being intersex – often warring with each other out there in the wider community, so we were very interested to come across the story of Juno, formerly Alejandro, recently.

A number of members of OII across the world have the XXY karyotype as do many of our friends and acquaintances. Each has a very different life story AND none seem to follow the kind of party line that medicine seems to want to impose on them, uniformly prescribing testosterone to “make a man you”, sometimes at terrible cost to their health.

Genetic testing revealed the cause: Alejandro, then 32, had Klinefelter syndrome. While males have an XY chromosome pattern and females have XX, Alejandro was born with an extra X, meaning he was XXY. He was, as some like to call it, intersex: a condition in which your gender cannot be simply defined as male or female, but is somewhere in the middle.

The story of Alejandro, now Juno , is a touching and encouraging one, and the writer has written about her friend with love and compassion.