By Meghan Serceki
Petra Wenham came out as transgender at age 68, began transitioning, and now in her mid-70s, is committed to educating people on what being trans really means. Her story is one of finding acceptance and of accepting herself.
She felt signs of her transness at a young age: she suspects between the ages of three and five when children develop a sense of self. When she started school, she recalls not “clicking” at all with the boys but rather with the girls. However, Petra recalls, “slowly the girls drop you because you’re seen as a boy. But you do not connect with the boys, therefore, you tend to become a loner.” She got bullied and called names, and when her mother got the sense that something was different about her she was sent to an all-boys school at age 11.
At the all-boys school, she felt even more isolated, struggling to find anyone she related to. She realizes now that others were doing the same. Although she wasn’t close with them, she says of the boys that she did get to know there, “it wouldn’t surprise me at all if some of them had been somewhere in the LGBT umbrella.”
Things got better for her when she met her wife, Loraine. After she got her degree, she started a successful career as a cybersecurity expert for British Telecom, where the two met. She is Petra’s support system, her soulmate. Even before they got married, Loraine knew that Petra would cross-dress and was comfortable with that. She still had not yet had her “egg-cracking moment” (that is, the moment when she realized she was transgender)and wrote off the cross-dressing as an occasional occurrence which could at other times be suppressed.
In 2001 she guessed she was transgender, but media coverage of LGBTQ+ individuals at the time was more focused on homosexuals, drag queens, and transvestites, not on transgender people like her. As a result, she still felt somewhat alone and unseen. Even though this thought lived in her mind, she says “what I did and what quite a few trans people do is you bury it; you try to ignore it and you sort of try and carry on.”
The stress of burying and suppressing a huge part of herself built up for years. When her home got broadband, she remembers realizing, “Oh, hang on, I’m not unique. There are other people out there like me.” Reading other trans people’s stories, she became more and more aware that she in fact is trans, starting to be more comfortable with her transness but still not accepting it.
It wasn’t until 2015 at age 68 when she was hospitalized with colitis, was in urgent condition, and was reevaluating her life that she had her egg cracking moment. While in the hospital, she came across an opinion piece by Jennifer Finney Boylan, “How a Sliver of Glass Changed my Life” in which Boylan compares hiding transness to a glass shard lodged in your foot, causing great pain and feeling almost instant relief when taken out. Petra decided then and there that she had to live fully as the woman she is.
Coming home from the hospital, she sat down with Loraine and told her that she is a transgender woman. She immediately recognized the “tremendous stress” that had been building up by keeping this from her wife, her soulmate, herself. Like the shard of glass, “trying to push it away only really caused it to fester,” and being open about it, removing that shard, provided the relief she had always needed. Loraine accepted her with open arms, and Petra references author Amanda Jetté Knox when she recounts it, saying “love is genderless, it’s sexless. It’s human being to human being.” Next January, the two will celebrate their 49th anniversary together.
Petra holds that “the trans community in (the UK) and, I suspect in America, we estimate we’re about 10 to 15 years behind where the gay community is, in terms of the public acceptance.” Looking forward after her transition, she has one simple goal: to educate people. She says, “What we’ve got to do is to show people that we’re not a subspecies, we are human beings. Women should be totally and completely equal with men. It is equality. And we as trans women, we do not want anything over and above anybody else. We want to be initially treated completely as women. We will then work with the women to lift us up to make sure that we are equal with the men.”
Petra’s story shows that it is never too late to accept yourself in your entirety, to live the kind of life you want to live and to make a truly significant impact on the world by being exactly who you are.