A man who now lives as a woman has been spared jail after admitting possessing indecent images of children in a case described by a judge as unique.

Michaela Hammersley, 58, formerly known as Richard Michael Hammersley, had previously pleaded guilty to 16 charges relating to the images after police found them in the dining room of her home at Riddlesden in September 2008.

Prosecutor Giles Bridge told Bradford Crown Court yesterday Hammersley had said in a police interview she felt the images were beautiful and did not accept they were indecent.

The court heard the images were of level one, the least serious. Judge Jonathan Rose said it was a case on an “entirely different footing” to any other he had come across in his 30 years in criminal law.

The roots of Hammersley’s offending dated back to when she was a boy, he said, “who was uncomfortable with being a boy and more importantly with being in the company of boys”.

He said Hammersley, who described herself as asexual, had “never been in my view someone whose attraction to femininity and children has had its root at all in matters of sexual behaviour”.

Judge Rose said he had seen photographs of Hammersley’s living circumstances, which he said could almost be those of a seven or eight-year-old girl, and included dolls and “pink, pretty things”.

The judge said he was describing Hammersley’s circumstances to explain why he was not sending her to prison.

Hammersley, formerly of Western Avenue, Riddlesden, but now of Dunster Road, Southport, was sentenced to a three-year community order with supervision and ordered to sign the sex offenders register for five years.