It was a recipe for love: Soon after donut fryer Linda Forsythe met her future husband, a transsexual baker named Michael Kantaras, she left the father of the baby she was carrying, she testified Monday in the custody battle over their two children.

But like any good bread, the relationship needed time to rise, the 33-year-old substitute teacher testified in her first day on the stand.

"I thought it was a mutual feeling," she said of the 1988 meeting, but "he said, 'Linda, I'm sorry, you're too young for me.'"

Michael Kantaras

The two eventually married in 1999, after Michael Kantaras, now 42, helped Linda Forsythe through the birth of her son, Matthew, and two years later, they conceived a daughter, Irina, using sperm from Michael Kantaras' brother.

During her short time on the stand Monday, Linda Kantaras, dressed in a bright red blazer with a white mock turtleneck, only had time to testify about the rosy beginnings of her marriage. When she resumes Tuesday, her testimony will likely take a darker turn, to the crumbling of the marriage nearly a decade later, leaving the Kantaras' two children at the center of this Pasco County, Fla., divorce battle.

Another witness, Pastor Rebecca Baker of the Calvary Chapel Worship Center in Newport Richie, Fla., did focus on the break-up of the marriage, however, testifying that an epiphany swept over Linda Kantaras after she was "saved" by religion.

Describing a private counseling session with Kantaras, Baker reasoned that her charge had "come to a relationship with Jesus Christ. She told me that Michael is a woman and that she was artificially inseminated to have children, so I said, 'This is a lesbian relationship?'"

Whether Linda and Michael Kantaras were engaged in a lesbian relationship — or a heterosexual one, however unorthodox — is the the central question of this case. Linda Kantaras has alleged that her husband is still a woman because he does not have a penis, and therefore the couple were not legally married under a Florida law banning same-sex marriage.

Pressed by the pastor to consider the relationship a lesbian affair, Linda Kantaras admitted, "Well, I guess so," Baker testified. "And so you're having sex with him?" Baker asked. "No. He was mean to me. I didn't want to be near him. And he was a woman, and I didn't want to have sex with him because we couldn't have sex," Kantaras said, according to the pastor.

Circuit Court Judge Gerard O'Brien, who will decide the outcome of this trial, now in its third week, later asked Baker whether a sexless near-decade of marriage wasn't difficult to accept as the truth.

"You seem to accept Linda's statement to you that Linda had no sex with Michael Kantaras ... for your information that's nine years. Would you find it difficult to believe a statement like that?" O'Brien asked.

But the pastor remained nonplussed and offered herself as a case-in-point. "I believe her," Baker said. "Now I'm a single woman too. And I have not had sex in my single life since I've been saved either. It's a choice you make."

Rebecca Baker

Baker, who recently hired Linda Kantaras for a position in the 6,000-member church, had nothing but praise for the substitute teacher, lauding everything from her child-rearing abilities to her punctuality.

But on cross-examination, Michael Kantaras' attorney, Collin Vauss, elicited Baker's views on gay and lesbian relationships.

"Does your church disapprove of lesbian and gay relationships?" Vauss asked.

"What is to disapprove, I don't understand," Baker stumbled. "I don't know ... are you familiar with the followings of Christianity and the teachings of Jesus Christ?"

Vauss assured the witness that he was familiar with Christianity, and Baker continued, "There's a code of conduct, OK, that Jesus Christ has given people ... number one, it seems to be that heterosexual relationships are the norm ... and number two, premarital or sex outside of marriage is not permissible."

She added, "I have no problem having a relationship or pastoring anybody who is in a lesbian or gay relationship. However, I will teach them the principles that Jesus Christ preaches."

Vauss then pressed the pastor on her opinion that Kantaras is still a woman, even though he has had his breasts, ovaries and uterus removed; takes male hormones that have deepened his voice and given him facial hair; and is labeled male on his marriage certificate, driver's license and passport.

In response, Baker likened Michael Kantaras' desire to be a man to the desire of a local man to be the walking embodiment of God.

"An amazing thing happened today," the pastor said. "A man came into the church saying, 'I'm Jesus Christ.' Well, he can believe all he wants that he's Jesus Christ, but he's not."

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

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