Man-Turned-Woman British Politician Says Rape Made Her Lesbian

Nikki Sinclaire

 Britain's first sex-change parliamentarian has told how she became a lesbian after she was raped.
Former UKIP MEP Nikki Sinclaire, 45, was born a boy but had gender reassignment surgery on the NHS 18 years ago.

Today she revealed how four years after the operation, just as she was beginning to find women attractive, she was raped by a man, and subsequently realised she was a lesbian.
Miss Sinclaire, MEP for the West Midlands, founded a new party, We Demand A Referendum Now, campaigning for a referendum on British membership of the European Union, after she was ejected from UKIP after a row over policy.
The ambitious politician now hopes to become Britain's first transsexual MP.
Today she told The Sun how she was the victim of a brutal assault in central London, which she described as  'the most horrendous experience of my life', and one which contributed to her realising she was a lesbian.
In a revealing interview with the paper, Miss Sinclaire said she was walking home along a busy road in central London shortly before midnight when someone gripped her arm and kicked her leg, knocking her over.
She said: 'I gasped, overbalanced and landed painfully with a suffocating weight on top of me.'
After the attack, which she said left her feeling vulnerable despite being brought up in the capital, she went with a nurse friend to a hospital in Dartford, Kent, where DNA samples were taken and medics photographed her bruised body.
Because the attack happened in 1999, before the 2004 change in the law that recognised transsexual people's new genders, the rape was only classified as an assault.
Miss Sinclaire said that she had begun to feel attracted to women shortly before the attack, and had her first sexual experience with a woman with a lesbian she met playing pool in Liverpool.

She said she put the 'scary' idea that she might be attracted to women out of her mind, but said the rape made her 'very anti-men', and contributed to her realising she was a lesbian soon afterwards.