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.
She said her fellow UKIP politicians had been very accepting of her sexuality, whereas she had encountered the most homophobia from Liberal Democrats.
Miss Sinclaire said yesterday she had been 'overwhelmed by all the support' she had received after revealing in the Sun on Sunday that she had had gender reassignment surgery at the age of 23.
Her new book, Never Give Up, tells how until now only her family and close friends were aware of her past.
The book's foreword said: 'There was one great secret that Nikki never shared with anyone other than her family and close friends.
'Hers is a powerful personal story. Yet she insists it is only one facet of her life, and though it tormented her childhood and teenage years, it is one that no longer dominates her or her future.
It adds: 'As the first "sex change" parliamentarian in Britain, Nikki Sinclaire has made history.
'But she is likely to be far happier, in the future, being known less as a statistic than for her conviction politics.'
Miss Sinclaire is keen that her revelations do not overshadow her politicial ambition, and has commissioned a poll to see whether voters minded if a candidate was transsexual. It showed that two-thirds of people said it would make no difference to how they voted and fewer than 10 per cent said it would make them much less likely to favour a candidate.
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