After decades in the wrong body, Petra Wenham found the courage to live as a woman
WORDS: HELEN RENSHAW. PHOTOS: GETTY, HOLLY REVELL
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.
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 for the better. We had an instant connection and were married just six months after our first date. Our marriage started with the strong bond of friendship we share to this day. Loraine is my everything. Love is love. She knew I cross-dressed before we married and understood it was for mental relief, not sexual stimulation, and in those early days we were the same size, so I ‘borrowed’ her clothes. Reading the occasional article about drag queens, we put my cross-dressing down to ‘transvestite traits’. But that never sat comfortably with me and I’m not
