AFTER years of battling with her sexual identity, Paula Ryder is finally living life as a woman.

But after a High Court judge this week denied a wish to have her birth certificate changed to reflect her "real" identity, she has vowed to continue her fight.

In a ground-breaking case on Wednesday, the 53-year-old from Bishop Auckland, County Durham, asked for permission to seek a judicial review of the Registrar General's refusal to allow any alteration to the document.

However, Mr Justice Lightman, sitting in London, ruled there were "insuperable obstacles" and her challenge "cannot possibly succeed".

Speaking after the announcement, Miss Ryder vowed to carry on campaigning to secure her true identity.

She said: "We are not going to give up. I have got a lot of support for this from all over. My legal team is considering what to do next.''

She said that although the name on her birth certificate is Paul Ryder and states she is a boy, she is of ambiguous gender and has been diagnosed as having Klinefelters syndrome, which produces abnormal chromosomes.

She said: "I was brought up as a boy by my mother and father. I went to a boys' school but related in my junior school days to being more of a girl than a boy.''

The torment continued for her when she went through puberty early at the age of 11 and then started to grow breasts when she was 14.

After years of seeking help and being turned away, she decided to get on with life as a man, marrying in 1979.

After her wife died in 1994, she began to have psychosexual counselling and had gender reassignment surgery in January 1999. Her battle has also seen her ridiculed in the street and a small element of youths near her home have thrown stones at her windows and hurled abuse.

Miss Ryder's counsel, Sally Bradley QC, asked Mr Justice Lightman to quash the refusal by the Registrar General of Births, Marriages and Deaths to change her birth certificate, saying it was an out-dated and narrow approach to an issue which is treated sympathetically by society.

But he said that the law did not allow such an amendment.