The 53-year-old was born with a tiny male sex organ, the High Court in London was told. Mr Justice Charles accepted the claim by the transsexual — who cannot be named for legal reasons and was referred to in court as W — that she was legally a female.

Her ex-husband, who she divorced in 1997 and was referred to as Mr W, asked the judge to annul their marriage on the grounds that it was a same-sex union and therefore illegal. This was rejected — despite the fact that W used her ambiguous sexuality to get an earlier marriage annulled on the legal grounds that she was a man.

The judge said that W should probably have been regarded as a female since birth.He took the view that had she been born today, her physical condition would not have warranted her registration as a boy. In the light of the medical facts as he saw them, W was now entitled to be regarded as a woman.

W was born in the North, of indeterminate sex, having what was described in court as a “micro penis”. A doctor told the hearing in the High Court Family Division that he considered that W’s genetic sex had clearly been male. W was given a boy’s name and her birth was registered as male, but from an early age she played with dolls and chose to wear girl’s clothes.

At the age of 15 her stepfather considered something had to be done and persuaded a doctor to inject the teenager with testosterone. W had to be held down by her stepfather while the injections were administered.

After leaving home, W lived with a homosexual man but the relationship ended because he considered that W was too feminine. W had a sex-change operation in 1987 and married for the first time in 1990.

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