WHEN a Southampton tribunal ruled, earlier this week, that Eleanor Lynall had been sexually discriminated at work and unfairly dismissed it was a personal victory and a major triumph for her cause.

Eleanor's case hit national headlines after she was fired from the yachting firm where she worked as a computer manager because, when she joined the firm in 1996, she was known not as Eleanor but Andrew.

Over the two years she worked there she slowly began to inform her friends and work colleagues that at work she was living a lie and that, really, Andrew was Eleanor.

At home and socially she was out, but it was only at work she had to maintain the faade of looking, and acting, like a man.

She didn't feel comfortable with concealing her true identity from her employers so decided to tell them in a memo of her proposed sex change operation and that outside of work she was living life as a woman. But within days of informing them she was handed a letter of dismissal ending her lucrative career.

From that afternoon when she packed up her desk and left the Fordingbridge office, Andrew was never to be seen again.

As distressing as the dismissal was, it was the break Eleanor, who has changed her name by deed poll, needed to step out as the woman who, for years, Andrew believed he was.

Today, as she sits on her deep Aztec sofa swathed in grey angora while her ageing dog Pip scrambles under her feet, she says she is happy. Happy that finally she can be exactly who she believes she is and not have to hide behind a mask at work.

The tribunal win marked a major milestone in Eleanor's life; a life plagued with self-doubt, confusion and insecurities. And now she is hoping her battle will give others in the same situation hope and in some way change attitudes towards transsexuals.

Unlike other transsexuals' stories, Eleanor's didn't begin in early childhood with her wanting her mother not to dress her in trousers but in frilly dresses. But she does remember that, as a young boy, she felt different.

"It wasn't like I went around thinking "I'm definitely a girl, why aren't I being dressed as a girl and treated like a girl'', I just knew that something was wrong,'' she says, puffing on one of the countless cigarettes she was to smoke throughout our interview.

"When I was a young child I just knew that that 'thing' between my legs shouldn't be there.

"Sometimes I would get extremely distressed but I didn't really understand why. I was sent away to an all-boys school and I didn't fit in. I was a bit of a loner and I suppose the way I felt about myself did affect my relationships with my peers.

"As I grew up these feelings just got stronger. I'd struggled through my childhood and my teenage years in a state of bewilderment. At that point I hadn't specifically focused on gender - I just felt like I was a Martian.

"As I got older I did have relationships with women and I was very comfortable with the 'touchy-feely' side and the emotional side but I just couldn't satisfy them sexually. I couldn't strut my stuff. I didn't feel inadequate but there was a real sense of frustration.''

By the time Andrew got married to Lyn, a woman he'd met while working in the marine industry, he'd identified a possible gender "confusion''. He researched into transvestites, transsexuals and drag queens and while he didn't identify with everything, it suddenly dawned on him there was a lot going on in that area that he did identify with.

"I met Lyn and we got on marvellously. It was then I decided to occupy myself with more masculine things and drive out these feelings of confusion. So we got married but things in my head didn't change - if anything they got stronger. I was very wrong, I suppose, to have gone through with it knowing how I felt, but I was completely convinced doing this would be then end of it - it wasn't.

"Apart from the first week when we met there was never a physical side to our relationship. There was closeness and cuddles but nothing sexual and it was shortly after our marriage that I began to receive counselling.

"I wasn't gay, I was sure of that, although sometimes I would see a good looking guy in the street and think phwoar!

"How my wife stayed with me for as long as she did makes her an extraordinary woman. It all started to go wrong because, obviously, she wanted a husband to satisfy her and I just couldn't. We'd been together 13 years and I knew I had a massive problem and our relationship wasn't going to work because of that so she went her way and I went mine.

"Eventually, with the help of my GP, I was referred to the Gender Identity Clinic at Charing Cross Hospital where I was diagnosed with gender identity disorder. After therapy and counselling I began to take hormone treatment. I was suffering, at some stages, from serious depression where I just couldn't function. I was so unhappy and confused.

"I wasn't one of those guys that got turned on by wearing women's knickers under my trousers or came through the door from work, ran upstairs and put on a dress. I would tidy my hair and wear a little make-up but I'd always shopped in women's clothes shops as a young man because I am so small-framed men's clothes never fitted.''

The story of Andrew's progression to Eleanor is complicated and in some ways sad but it shows a real strength of character and a determination to achieve some sense of normality.

Through the hormone treatment, Eleanor now has breasts, a full chest of body hair has dispersed, and she is currently waiting for surgery to make the transition complete.

It would be very easy to mock Eleanor - indeed some do - but who is anybody to say how a person should live their own life

She's faced verbal abuse and sideward glances yet is doing no one any harm. It is because of this she has become somewhat militant when defending her decision in the press.

But, chipping away at the defensive exterior, it is easy to see, as she fiddles with her nails and lights another cigarette, how uneasy Eleanor is when talking about her confusion and the black days of her past where she felt neither man nor woman.

She refuses to accept that her problems were an illness but is ready to admit that she has a medical condition which has taken decades to diagnose - the first step on her road to a "normal'' life.

You have to admire her steely determination and respect the fact that today, sitting here dressed as a woman, she is happier - although possibly not yet totally happy - with her life and wants her triumph over years of difficulty and confusion to be an inspiration to someone else facing the same uphill struggle.

After the operation, which will be carried out on the NHS, Eleanor hopes she will be able to get on with her new life, establishing relationships with men and finding the closeness and companionship she has longed for.

"My friends and I both have the suspicion that, although I would say I was more bi-sexual, the next time I see one of those good looking men walk by I will approach him instead of looking from a distance. I have been confused for too long. I have been a-sexual, I suppose, for so long - not really sexually motivated at all - but I think after living and working in my female role for a while things will naturally progress and I can get on with living a normal life.

"After all, surely I deserve this as much as anyone else''

RACHEL LAMB

Converted for the new archive on 25 January 2001. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.