We’re just like any other couple in love

It was the week’s most remarkable story: the Army captain and the actor — who both say they were born the wrong gender — who have just got married. Here, the newlyweds give the first interview about their romance and insist ...

THERE was something touchingly traditional — even a little old-fashioned — about the wedding last week of Army captain Hannah Winterbourne and actor Jake Graf. Hannah, 31, elegant in a strapless, figure-hugging dress of ivory lace, was marrying the first man she’d ever fallen in love with; actually her first boyfriend.

‘She looked stunning. When I saw her I just welled up, she was so beautiful. I was mesmerised,’ says Jake.

‘And you looked very handsome, too,’ smiles Hannah, who still feels a sense of disbelief that she is now a married woman.

‘Just a few years ago the idea of ever being married was inconceivable,’ she says. ‘I never thought the day would come. For most of my life it wasn’t even a remote possibility.

‘I’d never even been on a date before when Jake asked me out in December 2015. I was terrified! I’d only just started to come to terms with the possibility that someone might one day want to love me. But by the end of our first evening together I’d told him I loved him — after a few drinks, admittedly.’

She smiles. ‘And we spent every weekend together for months after that. On that first date we knew we had a future together.

‘When I told my family and friends I loved him they were very wary for me, concerned that I wasn’t just caught up in the emotion of having my first boyfriend. But three years on he still makes me feel I’m the centre of his universe; that literally nothing else matters to him. I feel very loved.’

The chemistry between them crackles like an electric current. They are bonded not only by love and the formal commitment of marriage, but also by shared experience: both Hannah and Jake are transgender.

Hannah is the highest-ranking officer in the British Army to have transitioned from male to female.

Jake, 40, who directs his own films and acts, took a transgender role in the Eddie Redmayne film The Danish Girl. He began gender reassignment in his late 20s, having known with absolutely certainty that he was ‘a boy inside’ from the age of two or three.

Growing up in an affluent household in West London with his mum, who raised him and his younger sister while their father ran the family’s prospering theatrical costume business, Jake was a miserable child, ‘humiliated’ by the girl’s body in which, through some anatomical accident, he felt he’d been forced to live.

‘I have very curly hair and my mum thought I didn’t want it to be long and unruly, so she let me cut it short. But actually I wanted to look like a boy,’ he says. ‘My father thought I was an endearingly tomboyish little girl, but I knew I wanted to be a boy and for me it was just a medical anomaly that my male brain had been wired into a female body.

‘I hated being prinked and preened and put into dresses. It felt like humiliation. If I was mistaken for a boy, I’d revel in it. When my mother corrected people, my heart sank.

‘I faced puberty with dread. I felt as if my body was turning against me. I used to go to bed every night and pray to God I’d wake up as a boy. I’d strap down my breasts. I couldn’t bear to look in the mirror because my body disgusted me. I was so miserable and full of self-loathing.’

At his private secondary school in central London, Jake was alienated from both the boys and the girls. ‘I didn’t know which loo to use until a kind teacher allowed me to use theirs,’ he says. ‘I was introverted, anxious, rebellious. I was taunted and bullied for not fitting in.’

Meanwhile, Hannah, growing up in cardiff with her older brother Jeff and their parents Wendy, now 61, a teacher, and Brian, 63, a programme manager, did not feel the acute angst that assailed Jake. But she also felt alienated from her body.

‘I used to enjoy clothes shopping with my mum,’ she remembers. ‘I’d walk round the girls’ dresses section and wish I was a girl, but I didn’t tell my mum. Instead I developed a sense of shame about my identity which intensified with puberty. I coped by adopting a double life.

‘In public I embraced the strong, competitive, sporty side of my personality. Then secretly I’d sneak into Mum’s room and try on her clothes. I was meticulous about not being caught because I was afraid of the consequences.’

In that era, the transgender community was routinely vilified and mocked as freakish; the butt of jokes or cruel taunts. Neither Jake nor Hannah felt they had anywhere to turn; no recourse to counselling, help or empathy.

Today, Hannah speculates that her decision to join the Army might have been a subconscious effort to sublimate her feminine side.

‘I wonder if I was trying to “cure” myself of being transgender by going overtly down the masculine route?’ she reflects. ‘Perhaps I thought that if I threw myself into physical sports, this feeling would go away.’

AcTuALLy she proved to be an exemplary soldier, winning a ‘best cadet’ award on a week’s training camp before being awarded a place, at the age of 16, at Welbeck Defence Sixth Form college, in Nottinghamshire.

‘I threw myself into the physical, military life to hide the pain because I was so convinced that becoming a woman was unachievable,’ she says.

‘Mostly I coped — I worked hard and it was a decent distraction — but there were moments when, late at night on my own, I opened a little door onto my soul and despair crept in.

‘There were girls and boys at the school, and the girls would talk to me about their antics and I wished I was one of them.

‘I was always sexually attracted to men, but before I transitioned a relationship with a man never felt like a possibility. It didn’t feel right. It’s a very odd thing, but because you’re not able to embrace your true identity, the idea of sharing yourself with a man was difficult.

‘So I shut out those feelings. I withdrew from any kind of intimate relationships. It felt wrong imagining the boy me with a man when I wanted to be the actual me — a woman — with a man.’

If this logic seems convoluted, it is because Hannah’s emotional and physical confusion was intense. Desperate to be the woman she was suppressing, it did not occur to her then that she could possibly transition. Instead, when she was 16, she came out to her peers — though not her parents or tutors — as gay.

‘It gave me a point of reference. It allowed me to embrace more aspects of my femininity, and although I was at a military college with testosterone-driven teenage lads, they were pretty much all supportive,’ she recalls. ‘My fellow cadets reacted with courtesy. A lot of them remain good friends.’

From college she progressed first to Newcastle university — where she gained a masters degree in electrical engineering — and then to officer training at the Royal Military Academy in Sandhurst, Berkshire, where her anguish sharpened.

‘We’d have formal dinners in barracks and the girls would all be in their lovely dresses with hair and make-up done, and the boys would just chuck on a black suit and tie,’ she remembers.

‘On those Saturday evenings I would spend three hours locked inside my room doing a full face of make-up, putting on a wig, high heels and a beautiful dress, then I’d sit there alone for about half an hour, so I could savour a memory of getting ready for dinner as myself.

‘Then, 20 minutes before going down to dinner, I’d shower, take off all my make-up and put on my suit and black tie.’

There is an intense sadness in this revelation. Jake, who has heard it before, stretches his hand across the table and squeezes Hannah’s. He is a handsome man, neatly barbered, slim, fashionably dressed. She, bereft of make-up and with her blonde hair tied back, emanates an understated beauty. They are, as they say themselves, ‘just like any other couple’.

For both of them, of course, there was a moment when they knew they could no longer live in their misappropriated bodies. They had to become themselves.

Hannah realised this when she was a second lieutenant on a tour of duty in Afghanistan in 2011. Living in cramped quarters with seven other officers, she had no room for her ‘secret’ wardrobe.

With no privacy and no feminine clothes, there was no scope to be herself. ‘That was when I thought, not “should I change this?” but “I need to change this”,’ she says.

On her next posting back to the uK she mustered the courage to