WHY TRANSITIONED AT 68
WOMAN'S OWN|February 19, 2024
After decades in the wrong body, Petra Wenham found the courage to live as a woman
HELEN RENSHAW.
WHY TRANSITIONED AT 68

If you’d told me 10 years ago that I’d be a member of the Women’s Institute, travelling the country giving awareness talks about life as a  transgender woman, I wouldn’t have believed you. Back then I was still ‘masking’, hiding behind the gender society gave me. In the eyes of the world I was a family man, married for four decades, with two grown-up children, grandchildren, and having had a successful career as a cybersecurity expert. But beneath the mask, the painful feeling of living in the wrong body never left me.

BULLIED AND BEATEN

I realised I was different at the age of four. My father died when I was a baby and, as an only child living with my mother in rural Sussex, I didn’t have the slightest interest in the things other boys enjoyed. I made friends with the girls in my infant class at the village school, but was pushed out at the juniors stage because I was ‘a boy’. I wasn’t close to my mother and became a loner. I was called names and bullied, and I sometimes took a beating on my way home from school. It was the early 1950s, and there was no way of knowing about the transgender community. All I knew was I didn’t fit in.

At around eight years old, I started dressing in my mum’s too-big clothes. It gave me a sense of inner calm and relief, but I knew instinctively that it had to be a secret. It was very confusing and I coped by burying my feelings deep down inside. At 11, most of my fellow pupils went off to the local co-ed school. But I was sent to a boys’ school miles away because my mother wanted to make me more ‘boyish’. I still didn’t fit in.

هذه القصة مأخوذة من طبعة February 19, 2024 من WOMAN'S OWN.

ابدأ النسخة التجريبية المجانية من Magzter GOLD لمدة 7 أيام للوصول إلى آلاف القصص المتميزة المنسقة وأكثر من 9,000 مجلة وصحيفة.

هذه القصة مأخوذة من طبعة February 19, 2024 من WOMAN'S OWN.

ابدأ النسخة التجريبية المجانية من Magzter GOLD لمدة 7 أيام للوصول إلى آلاف القصص المتميزة المنسقة وأكثر من 9,000 مجلة وصحيفة.