By Carey Goldberg
The New York Times
In Boston, Nancy Nangeroni is helping arrange a courthouse vigil for a slain transsexual. In Washington, Dana Priesing lobbies for laws that would ban discrimination against "transgendered" people.
And in Southern California, Jacob Hale and the rest of the local Transgender Menace chapter occasionally pull on their black Menace T-shirts and go for a group walk just to look people in the eye with collective pride in who they are.
All see themselves as part of a movement with members who are only now, nearly two decades after gay liberation took off, gathering the courage to go public and struggle for the same sort of respect and legal protections.
The name that scholars and organizers prefer for this nascent movement is "transgender," an umbrella term for transsexuals cross-dressers (the word now preferred over transvestites), intersexed people (also known as hermaphrodites), womanish men, mannish women, and anyone whose sexual identity seems to cross the line of what, in l990s America, is considered normal.
That line has certainly blurred. Dennis Rodman preens in his bridal gown, RuPaul puckers for MAC cosmetics, and viewers flock to Movies like "The Crying Game."
But movement members say they cannot escape the feeling that in a society grown more responsive to other minorities, they are among the last pariahs.
When they give up the old dream of simply "passing" as their desired sex, they face painful battles in everyday life and in the political arena, where they are condemned as deviants by religious conservatives and often spark controversy among more mainstream gay and lesbian groups.
Their very existence, they say, is such a challenge to gut-level ideas about a person's sex as an either-or category---as reflected in everything from binary bathrooms to "he" and "she" pronouns---that they are often subjected to scorn, job bias and violence.
"There's finally a voice saying, 'Enough,' " said Riki Anne Wilchins, a Wall Street computer consultant and movement organizer.
"We pay taxes. We vote. We work. There's no reason we should be taking this. When you have people in isolation who are oppressed and victimized and abused, they think it's their own fault, but when ... they see it happening to other people, they realize it's not about them. It's about a system, and the only way to contest a system is with an organized response.
As many as 60,000 Americans consider themselves valid candidates for sex-change surgery, based on what psychiatrists call "gender identity disorder" reports the Harry Benjamin Gender Dysphoria Association.
But that is only the tip of a far larger icebergs organizers say, of cross-dressers ----many of whom are heterosexual men --- and people who live as the opposite sex but never undergo surgery.
The movement's growth, however, is easy to discern. Scores of participants rallied as part of a new advocacy group called Gender PAC for the first time in Washington last fall and plan to do the same in May, and transgender conventions now draw hundreds and number nearly 20 a year.
The movement's coalescence, which members say began over the last five years and recently accelerated, has gained particular momentum from the Internet, which connects far-flung people and affords them a sense of safety.
On-line groups that began by swapping tips on using makeup and obtaining hormones now also spread word of the latest victims of violence and the next protest.
But "the fundamental building block of the whole movement," said Dr. Barbara Warren of the Gender Identity Project at New York City's Lesbian and Gay Community Services Center, "is the willingness of transgender folk to put themselves out there."
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