I was overjoyed to marry the handsome love of my life Paul but after 22 years he dropped a bombshell that shattered our family – he was living a double life as a trans woman named Elizabeth… this is what happened next

When Una Jane-Winfield met dashing Paul she thought she had found the love of her life – and they soon married.

Then, for more than two decades, the couple appeared to have a normal marriage, raising two children in a pretty home by the Thames in west London.

But one day all that changed.

Paul abruptly told Una and their children that he now identified as a woman.

And after dropping that bombshell Paul – now using new pronouns and going by the new name Elizabeth – moved out of the family home, changing Una Jane’s life in a moment.

The experience led her to start a campaign group, TransWidows, to support women who find herself in the same difficult situation.

Elizabeth made her startling admission after her secret was starting to come out.

Una made the discovery about her then husband’s new identity one spring afternoon, where she found a Dorothy Perkins dress, a pair of size nine heels and two credit cards – one had Paul’s name while the other said Elizabeth, with the surname spelt slightly differently.

‘I brought them down and put them on the kitchen table and asked who do these belong to? I was thinking he had a girlfriend, as you do.

‘But instead he said “they’re mine” and nothing more than that.

‘And then, a few days later, we were walking past the Tube station when he just blurted out “It’s true, I’m a transexual”.

‘We had been walking side by side but I stopped. I was absolutly rooted to the ground. I had no idea what those words meant back then. I didn’t realise, in his mind, that it was a release, that it was an explanation.’

Sitting next to a half torn-up picture Elizabeth sent their ex-wife a year after they separated, Una said: ‘I ripped that up in anger but really there was no point because by then the deed was done.

‘I still get upset about it. The thing that makes me the most angry is all the secrecy, I felt completely deceived.’

After years of grappling with how her former husband’s bombshell revelation affected her, Una has now created the TransWidows group – for women whose husband’s have changed gender.

Una describes herself as a staunch feminist supporting the same gender-critical views that people such as JK Rowling and Maya Forstater.

She wants to see the Gender Recognition Act 2004, which recognises a transgender person’s acquired gender, to be removed claiming Tony Blair should ‘never have passed it’.

She also wants Gender Reassignment to be removed from the Protected Characteristics of the Equality Act.

The mother-of-two feels most strongly about children being told while still of school age that ‘they might be born in the wrong body’.

‘Sorry kids, you only have one body for the rest of your life,’ the campaigner said. ‘You can chop bits off but it will still be the same body every day because every single one of the cells in your body has either got XX or XY chromosomes.’

Her controversial views have, in the past, got her in trouble. Una had plastered pictures of a 13-year-old girl who had just undergone a female-to-male reconstruction, also known as top surgery.

After passersby reported the poster to Hammersmith and Fulham Council, she was handed a Community Protection Notice (CPN).

The Labour-run authority threatened the pensioner with a £2,500 and prosecution last year, however, eventually backed down instead just insisting Una removed the most graphic images.

Now the pinboard, which hangs on the front of her yellow door, is filled with news clippings highlighting wins for activists like Una, such as the Supreme Court ruling that legally the term ‘woman’ means a biological woman.

It was after seeing the power of campaigning from activists groups like For Women Scotland, who pushed for the definition to be clarified in court, that Una decided to set up her own group.

At 69-years-old, Una told MailOnline, almost two decades after the separation she finally has the courage to speak out about how her husband’s changed identity affected her.

‘Women are the bedrock of life and this trans-agenda is destroying all that makes women special or different to men,’ she said.

Una had met Paul, a budding architect who was 19 years her senior, through mutual friends at their well-to-do sail club.

Paul had been married twice before but Una, then in her mid-30s, had not yet had a serious relationship.

When she met Paul she felt she had finally met her match.

‘He was lovely from the first moment I met him,’ she said as she looked back on those first hopeful years.

‘I met him through sailing friends and Paul was a good handsman and had a part share in a yacht with a childhood friend.

‘I wrongly believed at the time that if you met someone who behaved well, who had the same interests of you even if they were impoverished, he had excellent prospects. I did not see any reason not to marry him.’

The first four years of their marriage had been a happy one. Being an older couple, they rushed to have two children, a boy and a girl, within three years.

During those first years of marital life, Una was puzzled as to why Paul’s first marriage, which lasted 11 years ended, as well as his second marriage, which last four years.

Paul had always said his second marriage had ended after his ex-wife ‘threw plates at him’ in a fit of rage.

She said: ‘He was physically very attractive to me and we fitted together well so I was very puzzled as to why his previous marriage had failed.

‘Four years into my marriage with Paul I know exactly why she threw plates at him.

‘He had control over his emotions, he was inherently irresponsible in close personal relationships but couldn’t sustain them.’

As the years passed, Una and Paul’s relationship became more distant, with the campaigner saying he would relentlessly ‘taunt’ her and degrade her feelings.

Una said: ‘He changed gradually over the years into a totally different person from someone who teased gently into really taunting words that were really hurting me.

‘It was like he was trying to drive a wedge in between us and to destroy my thoughts of myself.’

Despite this Una said she wanted to strive to make their marriage work.

‘I was very patient with our marriage and I wasn’t going to give up until it became absolutely impossible to continue,’ she said.

Una claims during most of the final 10 years of their marriage, Paul spent locked away in the dining room on the computer, claiming he was watching pornography.

She claims he would refuse to help pay for various bills around the house and he stopped wanting to do ‘normal’ things as a family.

‘He was just so mean and so hostile at the end,’ she said. ‘His behaviour towards me was absolutely unbearable. No confidence, no explanation as to why he wanted me out of his life.’

Then suddenly that fateful afternoon in March 2006 where Una stumbled upon her husband’s female clothing she finally got an explanation to what had been causing the ongoing, unexplained rift in their marriage.

Three months later, Paul moved out of the family home.

I was in total shock for about a year, a year and a bit,’ Una said. ‘At first he answered the phone, then didn’t. I hesitated to use emails because it was even more of a distance.’

Grappling with the separation, which eventually took four years as Una fought to keep the family home she inherited in her name, the mother-of-two had a few run-ins with her ex-husband.

On one occasion she turned up with the children on Paul’s doorstep in hope of catching a picture of him dressed in his new identity on camera.

Paul, at that time, was still dressing as a man but Una rummaged through his house to find female clothes and took pictures of them.

Whilst she was there, Una begged Paul to cut his now long hair, reaching for a pair of small scissors that were in the sink, however, her former husband saw this as a threat.

‘I foolishly thought I’d give him one last change and asked him to please get your hair cut,’ she said.

‘There was a small pair of scissors in the sink and I lifted them up and showed him. I was not threatening him but he flung into an absolute rage, that I had never seen before, from across the room.

‘He pushed me against the wall, caused me actual bodily harm, ripped my trousers and said he was going to call the police.

‘I said we are going, we are going and I thought I had calmed things down.’

But three weeks later, Una was called down from London to a police station by Sussex Police where she was held in custody accused of assault.

Una said that Paul, a few days after the incident, had gone to the police and filed a report while identifying as Elizabeth.

She said: ‘I turned up unprotected in a total state of bewilderment, anger, abandonment, not knowing the first thing about the severity, so they arrested me.

‘I was extremely angry as it was a Wednesday afternoon and I had to get back to London to pick the children up from school.

‘But they put me in a cell. I had no police record and I thought what the f*** are Sussex Police doing prosecuting the oinly person keeping these kids safe.

‘Eventually they arrested me for domestic assault, common assault and forced me to take a caution.

‘What I should have done was ask if he could come to court and prove it. Now I have the courage and strength to fight it. It felt like a 10 tonne rock had been dropped on me by Paul.’

A few years later Paul recieved his interim gender recognition certificate to identify legally as Elizabeth and the couple finally legally divorced in 2014.

During the proceedings, Elizabeth had sent Una the copy of the gender recognition certificate along with some harrowing childhood memories.

Elizabeth said they had been sexually abused as a child by a headteacher while attending an all-boys school and that his aunt had told her to dress in his mother’s clothes as a child.

She also spoke of the painful, acrimonious divorce, her parents had and how her mother had been kicked out of the family home.

‘There were a lot of strong emotions in his life but to say nothing about this. In the years we were married. I had no idea about any of this,’ Una reflected.

At age 70, Elizabeth underwent gender reassignment surgery and moved to Brighton, having very little contact with the two children from her marriage to Una.

In 2022, Elizabeth, who had now remarried his second wife in a civil partnership, died at age 84 after falling out of a second-floor window headfirst after cleaning a window.

The coroner ruled it had been an accidental death after Elizabeth’s partner and son from second marriage argued she had been cleaning insects from a dangerous window.

Una, however, submitted a letter to the coroner detailing why she believed it had been suicide.

In a final twist of the knife, Una revealed how hurt her children had been after being left entirely out of their father’s will.

‘They did not ask to be born but now they are left with no inheritance from their own father,’ Una said.

Una is amongst women who have found themselves in a similar predicament.

Her campaign group has a number of aims, including recognising transwidows ‘unique roles as mothers in holding our children’s welfare and peaceful development as our first concern – above our own mental welfare’.

The group also calls for prosecution the prosecution of abusive husbands and ex-husbands to include ‘psychological torture’.

Another aim of the group includes ending of ‘cancel culture’ and argues for the ‘hate crime’ legislation to amended so people discussing ‘gender dysphoria’ are not criminally prosecuted.

*’Una was not paid for this interview which she gave in order to publicise her group and reach other women who may be affected