Trans-sexuals and cross-dressers from all over the world gather in Harrogate this weekend for an International Trans-Gender Conference. Former man Janett Scott, right, tells STEPHEN LEWIS about learning to live with her feminine side.

JANETT Scott has three grandchildren. Her granddaughter calls her, simply enough, 'Auntie Janett.' Her two grandsons, however, refer to her more confusingly as 'daddy's daddy, who is a lady.' The confusion is nothing to what Janett herself felt growing up in the 1930s and 40s as a boy who was attracted to girls - but at the same time desperately wanted to dress and behave like them.

Biologically, Janet is a man.

She is not effeminate or homosexual, she stresses. She is a red-blooded, heterosexual man who likes women. It's just that at the same time she feels more comfortable living and dressing as a woman.

She says the thing she remembers most clearly from her teenage years is "utter confusion."

"I wanted to dress as a woman and yet I wasn't attracted to men or other boys.

"As a young man growing up I was attracted to women. But I was also attracted to their clothes. I used to wonder what was going on. I used to think: 'do I want to get into their knickers, or wear the damn things?'"

Janett was born Terry Turner. Terry first became aware of the urge to dress up as a girl when he was 11. He didn't have any sisters, so the only women's clothes he could get hold of were his mum's. They were far too big of course, so he took to digging out her cast-offs and altering them to fit, then wearing them when he thought nobody knew.

It didn't take long before he was discovered, and was severely punished for his "perversion". He still remembers his mum - with whom he retained a good relationship until she died many years later at the age of 98 - saying to him jokingly: "I tried to knock it out of you with a coat hanger".

She tried and failed. Ashamed and guilty, Terry couldn't give up his secret cross-dressing. It continued through two years of National Service and it survived his engagement and marriage.

He told his fiance, Frances, about his cross-dressing when they got engaged, and at first she seemed fine about it.

"It wasn't anything we had a problem with until she became pregnant with our first child," recalls Janett.

"But then she seemed to feel it was time to stop the fun and games and become a man."

He went to see a doctor, who decided he was transsexual. It was a word neither Terry nor Frances had ever heard.

They looked it up in the dictionary when they got home and the definition referred to it as a sexual perversion.

"And my wife said: 'Oh, my God, my new husband and the father of my baby is a sexual pervert,'" says Janett.

Terry loved his wife. But being labelled a pervert raised a barrier between them that was never to go away. It was the early 1960s and in those days there were no support groups they could go to for advice. Frances insisted Terry go to "aversion therapy" so that he could be 'cured'. "But you're not ill," Janett says, "So there is no cure."

The therapy involved Terry dressing up in women's clothing, while a psychiatrist gave him an injection that made him violently sick.

"It would last for 20 minutes or half an hour, during which he would tell me what a disgusting person I was, how sick I was," says Janett.

Needless to say, it didn't work. After six months of "treatment" Terry pretended it had, simply so as not to have to go for more therapy. But steadily, during the years, his cross-dressing urge grew stronger. Frances remained unable to accept it and refused to talk about it.

The couple were married for 29 years, and had two sons, Keith and Jeremy. Janett says, Frances was the love of Terry's life. Then, 16 years ago in 1987, Frances died suddenly after a heart attack. She was 51.

For Terry, who was then 53, it was a numbing blow. "I loved her. It was a horrible thing," says Janett, her voice trembling with emotion even after all these years.

"I felt a piece of my life had been ripped away." Yet in a strange way it proved to be liberating. The worst thing that could possibly happen to Terry had happened: and suddenly he wasn't afraid any more.

Until then, he had always kept his cross-dressing secret. His two sons had found out, a couple of years before Frances died, and it had almost destroyed the family.

Suddenly, he felt he had nothing more to lose. He was working as a telephone engineer and for four years he struggled on. He never went to work dressed as a woman but, eventually, his colleagues and employers found out.

"Eventually they offered me early retirement and I have never looked back," says Janett.

Terry retired on December 31 1991. And on January 3, 1992, he changed his name legally to Janett Scott and began to live openly as a woman.

During the last 12 years, says Janett, despite never having had surgery, she has learned to present herself as a woman; learned to apply make-up and dress in a style suited to her age and build. She describes herself as a "smartly-presented woman", and says a nurse once told her she looked like her favourite aunt. Janett is now president of The Beaumont Society - an organisation dedicated to raising awareness about trans-gender issues - one of the co- organisers of this weekend's International Trans-Gender Celebration/Conference in Harrogate.

Janett says attitudes to cross-dressing and transsexuality have changed since she was a boy.

It is no longer illegal for a start. In the 1950s, she points out, Terry could have been sent to jail for going out dressed as a woman. And she herself no longer feels guilty or ashamed.

"You're not doing anything wrong," she says. "It's not immoral or illegal. You're just expressing yourself as best and as well as you can, and going out and enjoying it."

There are still misunderstandings. After all these years there are people who still turn away from her in disgust and call her a pervert. But she says there are also those who can accept her for what she is.

She tells a story of bumping into a colleague from her days as a telephone engineer. The man had put on a couple of stones in weight since she knew him back in the days when she was Terry Turner.

They chatted quite normally for a while, with the man not even batting an eyelid at Janett's appearance.

"Then I said to him 'you've changed a bit!'" Janett recalls, referring to the fact he had put on weight. "And he said: 'you've changed a f***ing lot!'"

She lets rip with a gleeful laugh. There's nothing like being accepted for what you are.

That's all she and the UK's two million other trans-gender people want.

Updated: 11:19 Friday, August 08, 2003