by David Cohen

London Evening Standard 27/2/03

Also published in Candis - September 2003 as 'Together We Stand'

Throughout her life, Linda Packer had always been a highly conventional person. For 21 years, she was happily married to Martin - a man who did the things conventional husbands do. He was the main breadwinner, earning £45,000 a year as an IT manager. He mowed their lawns at the weekend, he tinkered with their MG Roadster whenever it broke down, and together they enjoyed a vigorous sex life.

Then five years ago, totally out of the blue, Martin dropped a bombshell. "I think," he told her, pausing to allow the weight of his words to sink in, "I may be transsexual"

With that devastating admission - the admission that her 51-year-old husband wanted to explore and pursue the weirdest thing imaginable, to change the physical sex with which he had been born - Linda's whole world began to fall apart uncontrollably.

"It was all the more shocking because I was so in love with Martin and I thought I knew him intimately, but this took me by surprise," explains Linda. There had been one aspect to Martin that was less than conventional, she admits - occasionally he used to cross-dress. He didn't do it very often, only about once a month and always in the privacy of their home after asking permission. "Although I was never 'okay' with it, I tolerated it as Martin's form of stress release," says Linda.

For his part, Martin had lived with a truly terrifying secret that he could repress no longer. And now, with the genie out of the bottle, he was faced with a terrible dilemma - should he go with his 'true nature' and seek a sex-change operation, or should he hope that it would all blow over and stay true to Linda, the woman he loved. He would learn, from a counsellor who specialised in gender identity disorders, that the relationships of around five per cent of couples who go through such an ordeal survive intact.

The story of how Martin Packer transgendered into Emma Martin and how Linda Packer somehow found it within herself to stand by him through his physical transition - and then forged an entirely new relationship with the woman who used to be her husband - is an extraordinary one.

For many years, transsexuals have been treated by society as freaks of nature, but now a new and sympathetic understanding is being forged. Just recently came reports of a new film in which Londoner Tom Wilkinson (the redundant steel worker turned stripper from The Full Monty) stars as a middle-aged American husband who breaks the news that he wants a sex-change operation to his wife, played by Jessica Lange. In the film Normal, Lange's character is somewhat disturbed by this revelation, but as the shock subsides she decides that she is in for the long haul.

So what is it that transsexuals -and their luckless partners - go through in real life?

For my part, I had arrived at Emma and Linda's cottage in Cambridgeshire feeling somewhat uneasy about the prospect of talking to a woman who used to be a man. Would she be hairy? Would her voice be deep? Would the handshake be manly? Would she be natural or affected? Emma showed me into the living room where she was joined shortly on their dusky-pink sofa by Linda.

Emma is wearing stockings (beneath her slacks), earrings, a necklace, is lightly made up - with lipstick and eyeliner - and sports a reddish coifed wig. We ended up speaking (and laughing) for four hours and within minutes my unease had been dissipated as I found myself captivated by their remarkable candour. I couldn't help but be charmed by the obvious warmth and comfort of their relationship.

Emma's voice is husky rather than deep, her deportment and handshake are distinctly female and there is absolutely no trace of body hair. Physically, she is not quite the finished product - elements of her former manliness still peep through in the form of her square dimpled chin - but she says that since her operation, she has never once been mistaken for a man. Later they will show me a video clip of Martin and I will do a double take because the man in that clip is gone. Instead, a new person - a vibrant, confident woman - is sitting here in his place.

It was during September 1998 that the reality of who Emma was really dawned on her. In addition to running his own software business, Martin worked part-time as a qualified counsellor. One day a client, who (like him) was also a cross-dresser, asked him why he did it. "Is it the clothes?" he inquired. And before Martin could censor himself, the words came out – "No, it's just right, it's natural. It's how things should be."

"In that instant," Emma says, "I suddenly realised that cross-dressing meant nothing to me. I realised that it went much deeper." Although Martin had an outwardly normal childhood with loving middle-class parents, he had hidden a secret wish to be a girl.

"When I was seven, I went to a school in which boys and girls were separate. At break the girls used to play on one side of the fence and the boys on the other. I used to stand as close to the girls' side as I could and literally wish myself through that fence.

This wasn't a result of being rejected by the other boys - this was a feeling that came from inside me." Too scared and ashamed to tell anybody his secret, Martin learned over the years to keep his gender confusion to himself. Occasionally it would surface, such as in his desire to play female parts in school plays and in his habit of donning his mother's clothes whenever she was out.

During his twenties, he became depressed and went to his GP who diagnosed him as a transvestite and put him into group therapy with cross-dressers and nymphomaniacs, in the hope that the latter group would 'cure' the former. Martin duly had affairs with the nymphomaniacs, but this didn't really solve anything - his gender incongruence went beyond sexuality. "In my own body, I was a heterosexual male with absolutely no problems about feeling attracted to women.

In my brain, I felt I was female," Emma says. And so it was that when Martin later met Linda on a blind date (they were introduced by a mutual friend) he thought she was the most gorgeous woman he had ever met. She was attracted to his sensitivity and the two of them would soon come to see themselves as soul mates, doing everything together and getting married in 1977. By mutual consent the couple never had children.

Martin was honest with Linda about his habit of occasionally cross-dressing and it found a minor place in their relationship. For the next 21 years they seemed like any other ordinary, unremarkable couple. But then came the bolt from the unconscious.

Telling Linda that he was transsexual was the most painful thing Martin had ever done. At first, Linda took the view that it would 'blow over' and Martin hoped so too. A counsellor warned him of the physical and emotional trauma he would suffer if he went ahead with a sex change - not to mention the financial cost. Martin resigned himself to seeing out his life as a man.

But one day Linda came home from work to find Martin punching the wall and lying on the floor, pleading with God to let him die. Weeks later he tried to commit suicide, repeatedly stabbing himself with a carving knife that was too blunt to inflict any serious damage. In the face of her husband's nervous breakdown, Linda decided to turn to their GP for help. Their doctor just didn't want to know. "We don't fund transsexuals." he told Martin bluntly, writing a prescription for sleeping pills and telling him to go away.

Linda's anger at the GP was only surpassed by her anger at Martin. "Why was he putting me through such complete torture?" she wondered. "Of course I felt sympathy for Martin, but I felt even sorrier for myself:'

In February 1999, Martin sought the help of a private specialist based in London. The treatment, which would physically turn him into a female and would cost £20,000 (to be funded out of their savings), involved a series of radical medical procedures.

At first, Martin had bi-weekly electrolysis sessions to remove hair from his face. Then he underwent tumultuous hormone therapy, taking oestrogen and progesterone as well as anti-androgens to stop the body producing testosterone. "It felt as though World War Three was happening inside of me," recalls Emma. Next Martin had to live 'in-role' 24 hours a day for a year - an essential step called the 'real life test', prior to the drastic no-return procedure of surgery. This was followed by a complex sex-change operation involving four hours of surgery in which Martin's testes were removed, an incision was made, the tissue of the penis was used to form the walls of the vagina and nerve-endings were used to form the clitoris.

"For three long years during the transition, I forgot how to laugh," says Linda. "Your partner is standing beside you, but it's not them. Eventually I came to realise that I had to mourn the passing of my husband."

In the meantime though, a new relationship evolved. As Martin became Emma, there was a new wardrobe to acquire and new skills to master. Linda found herself taking on the role of big sister, helping her little sister (with emerging breasts) through puberty.

It was still up for discussion whether Linda and Emma would stay together. Many tears were shed as they considered their options. Linda's best friend advised her to leave and Martin's business partner bailed out in disgust, but other friends and family were supportive. Support came from surprising quarters, like their bank manager who allowed Emma to open a joint bank account as Mr M A Packer and Ms E M Martin.

As time passed, Linda began to feel proud of Emma and the courage she had shown, but they faced the complex negotiation of a new non-sexual relationship. "Obviously Emma isn't my husband any more. But she isn't my partner either, because that has connotations of a lesbian relationship," says Linda. "We are more like a couple of friends."

"We have both realised that the nature of our bond goes beyond gender, sex, touch, everything," they tell me, with one finishing the other's sentence. "And despite all we have lost, we still gain more by staying together than by splitting apart."

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