Matthew Kantaras isn't on trial for being a transsexual, but that didn't stop a Florida lawyer trying to help his wife win custody of their two children from focusing on the physical details of Kantaras' life — including how he has sex and whether it's possible for him to urinate standing up without a penis.

"Without anything that you purchased over the Internet or from catalogs, how did you and Linda have sex?" asked Claudia Wheeler, who is representing Michael Kantaras' wife Linda Kantaras.

"Sometimes missionary style with me on top, sometimes she was on top. The size of my penis may have been small but there was penetration," Kantaras replied. "And we both achieved sexual satisfaction," added the 42-year-old bakery manager.

Kantaras' sexual proclivities have come into focus in the battle over his two children — Matthew, 12, and Irina, 10 — because Wheeler and her client have sought to portray his sexual dysphoria as damaging to his children, even downright unnatural.

During her first attempt to ask the balding, mustachioed Kantaras about his sex life, Wheeler seemed to cast the prosthetic penises Kantaras has described using as unholy when she cautioned, "Let's not talk about any of those things that God doesn't make."

On objection from Kantaras' lawyer, Collin Vause, Wheeler retreated, offering to narrow the scope of her inquiry instead to "the normal way" of having sex before admitting, "Perhaps there is no normal way."

"Normal" is a concept that has often been called into question in this precedent-setting Florida trial. While Linda Kantaras and Wheeler are seeking to prove that Michael Kantaras is not a normal father, Kantaras and his lawyers have argued that his transsexual status has nothing to do with his ability to be a good father.

The dispute has centered largely on what Michael Kantaras refers to as his penis — actually a clitoris that has been enlarged by hormone treatments as part of a battery of procedures he began at a Galveston, Texas, clinic in 1985, when he was called Margo.

Given her first chance to cross-examine Kantaras on Thursday, Wheeler argued that, enlarged or not, his clitoris is still not a penis — and Michael Kantaras is not a man even though his license, passport, marriage certificate and other documents say he is.

The lawyer further focused on Kantaras' earlier claim that he was able to go to the bathroom standing up, albeit with a little more of his "bottom" showing than other men.

Wheeler asked whether this wasn't something all women could do with training, and whether Kantaras' enlarged clitoris had anything to do with his standing ability. Kantaras replied that he wasn't a medical doctor, and couldn't say for sure.

After eight days, this trial has focused largely on their father's gender because Linda Kantaras' central claim is that Michael Kantaras is not a man, and therefore is not her husband under a 1998 Florida law banning same-sex marriages and has no right to custody of their children.

Wheeler also narrowed in on a letter her client sent Michael Kantaras in January 1999, in which Linda Kantaras excoriated her husband for leaving her for her best friend. She alleged that his real desire to be a woman was what brought their union to a close.

"Your sexual need to be satisfy had to be done. So at any cost, you got what I could and would never do for you. That was be a woman with a woman which was you," Linda Kantaras wrote in the letter.

Michael Kantaras called the letter a fabrication, rejecting the notion that his wife ever considered him anything other than a husband.

Michael Kantaras' lawyers have argued that Linda Kantaras orchestrated a smear campaign against her husband to turn the children against him. Their foremost example: Linda Kantaras' revelation to the kids, outside Michael Kantaras' presence, that he was not their biological father and had not always been a man.

Wheeler forced Kantaras to admit during cross-examination that he couldn't prove the 1989 discussion with the children was in any way pejorative of his gender dysphoria.

To support this point, Wheeler summoned Crystal Shoemaker, Linda Kantaras' sister, and her husband, William Shoemaker, as her first two witnesses. As the children's aunt and uncle, the couple were present when the children were told that Michael Kantaras was neither their father nor a man, and both testified that the revelation was executed in a careful and caring manner.

Crystal Shoemaker also testified that Linda Kantaras had never called Michael Kantaras a woman in her presence.

Testimony resumes Friday at 9:30 a.m. The trial is being televised live by CourtTV.