'I Cried Myself To Sleep': Woman Reveals How She Found Out She Was Intersex

Alyssa Ball's birth was just like any other.

"I was born a girl," Ball told Newsweek. "That's what they announced right when I came out."

Yet, Alyssa had a unique difference—one she wouldn't fully understand until a conversation with her mom at the dining table altered her perception forever. She was born intersex.

Intersex encompasses a spectrum of natural variations in human sex characteristics that defy conventional notions of male or female. Born with a combination of physical traits from both genders, intersex individuals often diverge from the traditional pathways of male or female development.

These biological variations can manifest in chromosomes, hormones, reproductive organs, or genitalia, challenging our binary understanding of sex.

Advocacy groups estimate that approximately 1.7 percent of the U.S. population is born intersex, amounting to around 5.6 million individuals.

"When I was about 3 weeks old, I had a hernia and my mom took me to the hospital," Ball recalled. "They went to look and realized it wasn't a hernia. It was internal testes."

In place of a uterus, fallopian tubes and ovaries, she had undeveloped internal testes, meaning they didn't fully develop into male genitalia or internal female reproductive organs. And by the time she was 11 months old, she had undergone surgery to remove the underdeveloped testes.

Now 27 years old, Alyssa remembers the exact moment she learned she was different. At 11 years old, her best friend got her first period.

"I was excited. I wanted to know when I was going to get my period," she recalled. "I go home, and I was asking my mom and she said alright, come to the dining room we're going to have a talk."

Her mom explained that Alyssa would not have a period because she did not have ovaries or a uterus.

"She said you're not gonna get a period, you don't have ovaries, you don't have a uterus, you're not going to be able to have children. And with this condition, you're biologically male," recalled Alyssa.

At 11, she was left stunned, and struggled to process what she had been told.

"I remember going to bed that night and just being like, Oh my god, what do I do?" she recalled. "My mom handed me these papers, but I was too afraid to even read them."

One thing really struck Alyssa—her mom told her she was to keep the news a secret.

"She said don't tell anybody. Nobody needs to know this. This is a secret. You do not tell anybody," Alyssa said.

"I cried myself to sleep that night," she remembers.

For years, the fact Alyssa is intersex remained a secret. Terrified to tell anyone, she was left feeling isolated. "[I was] so scared and overwhelmed that nobody was going to love me. My mom mentioned, this is something that maybe you wait to tell your future husband the night before your wedding or like, right before you get married—make sure they really love you first," she recalled.

Alyssa did tell her friends in middle school, but instead of relief this led to further hurt.

"By the first week of high school I wasn't friends with them any more and they told people, who told people, and my entire high school called me a hermaphrodite," she recalled. "The bullying was rough. It led to substance abuse and an eating disorder, and I realized the only path to healing was going to be to fully speak my truth to the world."

Today Alyssa has thrust herself into speaking that truth. One of her first TikTok videos recalling the moment she learned she was intersex has been viewed over 2.1 million times.

Instead of keeping the secret that left her feeling isolated and alone, she has thrust herself into sharing her story.

"Now I'm comfortable and I joke about it and it's great to speak out on it because I never want intersex kids to feel like they're alone," she said. "The biggest struggle for me growing up was feeling like I was probably going to die, never meeting anybody like me. And now I have a whole community of intersex friends and it's really great."

Alyssa has come a long way from keeping things hidden to sharing her story with the world.

"It just blows my mind because I went from having this secret that most of my best friends didn't know to now almost two million people knowing," she said.

Going forward, she hopes to continue to share her story and experiences, offering support to others in her situation.

"The more representation we have, the more people are going to realize that this isn't some taboo thing to be ashamed of, this is normal," she said. "There's like online support groups and…conferences, and there's so many things that I wish I would have gotten involved in as a kid.

"I just think that we need to be reminded that we're not broken, we're not defective. We don't need to be fixed. There are so many different resources for intersex people and non-intersex people."