Why I transitioned AT 68

After more than 60 years in the wrong body, Petra Wenham found the courage to live as a woman

- HELEN RENSHAW

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.

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 an immediate 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.

Instant connection

At 16, I left school and worked my way through various jobs before studying for a degree in electrical engineering. I did well academically, but life was lonely. I met Loraine when I was 25, and everything changed immeasurably for the better.