Скачать или смотреть 'We're just like any couple in love': Trans newlyweds give the first interview about their romance

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