Adam Wakelin   Finds  men happily in touch with their feminine side at a Leicester  group for transvestites, cross-dressers and  transsexuals

Jessica gets out one of her breasts for me to feel. "Good isn't it?" she smiles, as I prod the nipple, nod, and scramble to think of something, anything, to say.

"It's, um, very...big," I murmur, trying to get a grip.

"That one's a 10," announces Jessica, entirely unabashed as she loosens her blouse and pulls down her bra to reveal another, considerably smaller, breast. "This one's a six."

I prefer the second one, the smaller one, the one that's not been flourished by Jessica from a shopping bag under the table.

But I don't say that. I don't dare. She might ask me to stroke it.

In a night full of odd moments, being handed a false breast by a man dressed as a woman who, a couple of days ago, was sat in the Mercury canteen in his work scruffs talking to me as Jeremy (do try to keep up), may just be the oddest.

Jeremy/Jessica, the man/woman who runs the Leicester Chameleon Group, had come in to the office to give me a quick talk on the etiquette of what to do and say when you go in to do a story on a support group for transvestites, cross-dressers and pre and post-operative transsexuals.

"Don't pay any attention to the voice," he advised. "It's how they're dressed.

"If they look like a female it's 'Miss' or 'Mrs'. Otherwise they may pull you up quite short."

There will be men dressed as women and, possibly, women dressed as men. The thing to do, said Jeremy, was to ask them what they called themselves.

You can't be too careful, said Jeremy. He might look like he was dressed as a man today but he was in fact, "half-and-half".

So here I am, in a city community centre with the lights turned down on a Saturday night, wondering which way is up. I'll spend 10 minutes later on talking to a man I'd assumed was born a biological woman. He wasn't a woman. He was the bloke who'd come to lock up.

Which is a compliment, of sorts. I'd come, if I'm honest, half expecting lumbering pantomime dames with Crayola make-up and masculine bulges tucked uncomfortably between their buttocks.

It's not like that, not at all. Some of the ladies are Top Shopped to the nines in their skyscraper heels and slinky outfits; all tyrannically plucked eyebrows, immaculate lippy and long tarantula lashes. Others, the older ones, are a bit more, well, mumsy.

But they're all feminine. Apart from the hands. You can't disguise the hands.

"Some men make better women than women," says Jane, looking fabulously Patricia Hewitt-esque in her smart blue two-piece.

"Women don't always make the best of themselves," she sighs. "I see it all the time when I'm in the supermarket."

Jane is in her early 40s. Her other half, "Him", her biological alter-ego, is 73.

"You know what women are like," she says. "We always lie about our age."

Jane has been "out" since the mid-1970s and married to her wife for 51 years.

Happily married?

"No comment," she says. "We're still living together, if that's what you mean.

"I spend a lot of my time as Jane now. I go out shopping, fill the car up... Jane's a very confident lady. She's the real me.

"All the neighbours know. If we get a new neighbour I give them a couple of days to settle in. Then I go and tell them and show them my pictures.

"I think, sometimes, it gets the missus down a bit. But I can't help how I feel. I don't wear her clothes and she doesn't wear mine."

Jane is a friendly breath of fresh air. Things had got off to an awkward start, exactly as Jessica had predicted. It always takes a good hour to get going, she warned.

At 7.30pm just two visiting ladies have arrived, each sitting a discreet table apart in the cavernous hall. The mood lighting and candles on tables make it seem like a spectacularly unsuccessful seance.

Jessica's impressive spread of sandwiches, sausage rolls and cakes begin to look a bit optimistic.

People do eventually start filing in but no-one's told them a reporter would be here. Which probably explains why several ladies are giving me what Paddington Bear used to call a hard stare.

Jessica had neglected to mention my presence because she knew many would have stayed away.

The arrival of Will, the Mercury photographer, sends one woman scuttling off to the toilets, where she'll stay until he's gone.

You can't blame anyone for being frightened, confides Daisy. She came here three times before she finally plucked up the courage to get out of her car and come inside.

"Not everyone here is 'out'," she says. "You've got to be terribly careful. People could lose their jobs. They could lose their families, their marriages. They could get beaten up. It happens."

The Leicester Chameleon Group started nearly 30 years ago in someone's front room. Jessica, assisted by her friend Amanda, took on its running about six years ago.

The club, says Amanda, is "a stepping stone from the closet to the outside world", a supportive environment for men/ women to find their feet as women/men.

"It's like being a football supporter," says Jessica. "If you just watch it on the telly it becomes frustrating after a while, so you start going to matches. After dressing at home there comes a point where you need to go further."

As someone who spends most of his life barely aware of whether he's got his jumper on back-to-front, it's hard to understand the fascination for dressing up in women's clothes.

Lots of those here don't seem to entirely understand it either.

"I used to run my own business from home," says 63-year-old Verina. "When I got stressed, my wife used to say, 'Just go upstairs and put a frock on!'

"When I'm Verina it's very relaxing for me. I wouldn't say I'm unhappy as my male side but, at the same time, I do need to be Verina."

Jane says she's got a man's body and a lady's brain. Dressing up keeps her sane.

"A lot of this is not about sex, it's about gender," says Jessica. "The public have that misconception. Just because you go out dressed as a girl, it doesn't mean you're interested in getting screwed, to put it bluntly."

If you want to put people into boxes, then transvestites are men who wear women's clothes. They're as likely to be heterosexual as the rest of us.

Transsexuals are men trapped in women's bodies. They may be gay, straight or ambivalent. Transgender is a more general term.

Often, though, those pigeonholes seem hopelessly cramped. A woman here might tell you she's one thing, but her definition of it is completely different from the girl on the next table.

At least two wives are here tonight. One couple have brought their little daughter along. She tugs the sleeve of the lady in the leggings and high-heel boots and asks: "Dad, can I can I have some more pop?"

Dressing up is enough for some. Others feel the need to go further.

Daisy hopes to have a sex change operation, more correctly known as gender realignment. Even she seems a little befuddled by the implications of that.

Daisy is straight but, at the age of 54, still a virgin.

"I've never had sex," she says. "I've had girlfriends and been close a few times, but... it never felt quite right.

"Maybe that will change when I've got my vagina...I'll be a lesbian then.

"Odd isn't it?" she smiles. "These labels we put on people."

Verina's male side is a real ale enthusiast who is the chairman of a football supporters' club.

He started cross-dressing at the age of eight. Not that he could have called it that back then.

He just knew that women's clothes made him feel better about himself. Then he felt guilty for feeling that way.

They became his secret life; indulged through clothing catalogues and fleeting sashays in front of the bedroom mirror, hidden away in bags at the backs of wardrobes. He got rid of his women's clothes many times, but he always bought more. Just a little thing that always led to something else.

He had been married 27 years before he introduced Verina to his wife.

"It was pretty emotional at the time," she says.

"If we hadn't been together for so long, I don't think we'd have got through it."

His wife is very supportive, she says. They even go away on "tranny weekends" with another couple.

There are ground rules. His wife would be mortified if Verina came to be common knowledge. No-one in his village knows about her.

Well, hardly anyone.

"I think people do know," she says. "My wife's best friend asked her once if I'd been to a fancy dress party. Verina had been seen.

"My son knows and my daughter knows. We agreed that I could tell them once they had finished university. I told my daughter in the car. I expected her to take it quite well. She didn't. We don't talk about it any more."

It can make your head spin, all this; all those "hes" and "shes" that swap and change mid-sentence.

I can't remember going anywhere that's aroused such fantastic interest from friends.

"What was it like?" I've been asked that all week.

"What were they like?"

The people in the group are no different.

"Are we what you expected?" they say. "What do you think of us?"

I think they're nice, I suppose. Friendly. Honest and helpful. Unbelievably so, considering I ask so many personal questions and listened to so many answers with my mouth open.

It would be easy to write the wrong thing and I hope, genuinely, that I haven't.

The group's not sordid and it's not a pick-up joint.

It's a place where people go to be themselves. And don't we all need somewhere like that, sometimes? Whoever we are.

Penny pulls up a chair to give me a wife's perspective. That's her husband over there, she says. Her name's Kim.

She knew he dressed in women's clothes before she married him. It was fine, Penny decided, as long as she never had to see him that way.

Twenty-odd years later, he told her he couldn't carry on like that any more. He had to be a she. He was leaving.

Penny asked to see his photos on the computer.

The first thing she thought was, "Oh my God!" Then she thought, "Well that top doesn't go with that skirt!" and "Those shoes aren't you at all."

"Then I started looking at his eyes, in every photo, his sad eyes," she says. "He looked so sad and lonely."

Penny took it slowly with Kim. They used to sit watching television together at first. A couple of years later, he went "full-time" as a woman. Soon, all being well, he will go for gender realignment surgery.

"My one stipulation is that we have to celebrate our 25th wedding anniversary before that happens," says Penny.

After that, they will have their marriage annulled. Kim will go under the knife, and they'll become wife and wife.

Things have never been better, says Penny. They even share a wardrobe. She's wearing Kim's coat tonight.

But, once Kim has that operation, everything will change. She'll be sharing her life and her bed with a woman, with all that it entails. For better or for worse is one thing, but she didn't say "I do" to that all those years ago.

"I married the person not the packaging," she says. "I've now got a happy wife, not a grumpy man who spends half his life on anti-depressants."

The Leicester Chameleon Group meets every month. For more, visit:

www.leicesterchameleonsgroup.sm4.biz