A woman who spent almost a decade with her transsexual husband testified Tuesday in the custody battle over their two children that their marriage was never consummated because her husband is still a woman and she isn't a lesbian.

"When Michael Kantaras takes his clothes off, he is a woman in my eyes," testified Linda Kantaras.

"So your testimony under oath is that you never had sex with Michael Kantaras?" asked her lawyer, Claudia Wheeler.

"No ma'am," Kantaras replied.

The claim, which directly contradicted Michael Kantaras' earlier testimony that the couple had sex using prosthetic penises or the enlarged clitoris he has from testosterone treatments, caused Circuit Court Judge Gerard O'Brien to interject.

Michael Kantaras

"We recently had an affair in Washington where there was a great of dispute about what was meant by sex," O'Brien said, in reference to former President Bill Clinton's denial of sex with intern Monica Lewinsky. "So when we're asking her 'did she have sex,' I'm not so sure when she says 'no,' what we're talking about ... no consummation?"

The lawyer rephrased her question: "Did you ever have any type of sexual relations with Mr. Kantaras?"

Again, Linda Kantaras demurred. "No, I did not have sexual relations. I kissed him, yes, he was my husband for 10 years," she said.

"Did he ever try to put anything inside of you that was attached to his body and not made by some manufacturer?" Wheeler clarified.

"No," said Linda Kantaras curtly.

Such details about the vagaries of transsexual life have surfaced daily in this trial, which has departed greatly from its root — the fate of the Kantaras' two children. But while Michael Kantaras and his lawyers insist that being a transsexual has nothing to do with being a good father, Linda Kantaras claims it makes all the difference in the world.

It was friction over Michael Kantaras' transgender status, in fact, that sent the marriage spiraling toward divorce in the first place, Linda Kantaras testified in her second day on the stand.

"We weren't communicating," she testified. "Sex was not important to me, but love and affection is important, and I wasn't even getting that. He wouldn't hold me and hug me and kiss me, because he said, 'I cannot hold you and hug you and kiss you and then stop.' He said, 'I'm not a machine.' He said, 'I want to do it all or I want to do nothing.' And he chose to do nothing."

Linda Kantaras has also charged that her husband's unique situation harmed the children. Although the two — Matthew, 12, and Irina, 10 — rarely, if ever, saw Michael Kantaras naked, it wasn't only disrobed that her husband revealed his "secret," she told the court.

The mustachioed, balding Kantaras may look like a man, but the one part of the transformation he never completed was the expensive and risky process of phalloplasty, or the construction of a penis using skin and fat from his own body.

His surrogate, according to Linda Kantaras, was a sock. "He rolled it up and put it in his underwear," she said, her hands performing the motion she claimed to have seen almost daily during their nine-plus years together.

At the end of the day, the sock would be retrieved from its place and left around the house — on the back of the couch, on the TV, or on the bookshelf. "It constantly reminded me he wasn't a man," she said. "He would put his hand in his pants and take the sock out from between his skin and his underwear."

The children took note, Kantaras said, with Matthew Kantaras even imitating his father by using the sock himself. "I don't want you to do that in front of Matthew any more," she said she told her husband.

Kantaras also testified that her husband controlled many aspects of her life, including where she went, whether she worked, and how she wore her hair. At first, she simply enjoyed the attention, explaining, "My whole life, from the farthest I can remember, nobody cared where I was."

But between 1994 and 1998, after securing work as a substitute teacher and gaining confidence in herself, her attitude changed. "[People] gave me a lot of respect," she said, "so that changed the way I was toward Michael."

His transgendered status, she testified, "stopped Michael from being able to be compassionate to me ... caress my hair, say I was beautiful, say he liked my body. He would say that I was fat. He would say that I had a big bottom. He would say that my chest would sag. When I would walk by he would say 'boing, boing, boing'... because my body shakes when I walk."

But the biggest blow was yet to come. In the summer of 1998, Michael Kantaras told his wife he was leaving her.

Linda Kantaras described the conversation, which happened in the couple's garage, near tears. "His words were, 'Linda I don't love you, I haven't loved you for the past five years, and I never will love you again.'"

"I fell to my knees and started crying," Kantaras testified. "I asked him not to divorce me. Michael said, 'Linda get up I don't want to hurt you I don't want you to cry. It's over.' I stood up. I quit crying immediately, and I said, "There's the door.'"

After the separation (the couple is still legally married), Linda Kantaras received yet another blow: Her husband admitted he was in love with her best friend, Sherry Noodwang. For Linda Kantaras, this revelation was difficult to bear and it prompted her to pen what has become a central document in the case, a January 1999 letter lashing out at her husband for the demise of the marriage.

"Did you ever dream that you would have to be on the stand discussing this letter?" Wheeler asked her client Tuesday.

"No," Kantaras replied. "It explains how hurt and angry I was at Michael for telling Sherry [he was a transsexual] and for being selfish and wanting his needs met and for hurting Matthew and Irina who were two innocent bystanders who had no choice who their mother and father were."

The trial, which is being broadcast live by Court TV, continues Tuesday at 9:30 a.m.