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Transition: Crossing the Gender Divide| 1, 2, 3, 4
The rambling, three-story house has been home to a number of transgender activists, including Sylvia Rivera, who was at the Stonewall Inn on the night in June 1969 that police raided the gay bar. Rivera, then just 17, helped lead the ensuing riots, which are seen as the birth of the modern gay rights movement.

Rivera, who was homeless before moving into Transy House in 1995, encouraged Rusty Moore and Chelsea Goodwin to open their home to other transgender people in need, and in recent years, it's become an unofficial community center.

PHOTO: Michael Cervieri
Erykah Ramdass started dressing as a girl at age 14.

Moore, Rivera and Goodwin have been active in the Metropolitan Gender Network, the New York Association for Gender Rights Advocacy and other political groups, fighting for transgender antidiscrimination legislation with passion and panache. Rivera once scaled the walls of New York's City Hall in a tight skirt and 4-inch heels in an unsuccessful attempt to admit gay and lesbian demonstrators.

On Feb. 19, Rivera, 50, died of liver cancer, casting a pall of grief over the house. "It's a loss for us, yes," says Goodwin, "but it's a loss for the whole damn community."
Now, a new generation of transsexuals is coming of age at Transy House. Among them are Erykah Ramdass, a 21-year-old pre-op transsexual who had been living in a shelter when she arrived on Goodwin and Moore's doorstep nearly two years ago.

Erykah Ramdass as a boy

On this winter evening, Ramdass wears billowy sweat pants and a tight sleeveless shirt, a picture of the Eiffel Tower stretched across her small, hormone-spawned breasts.

She is long and lean like a runway model. The only clues that she was born male are her well-developed biceps ("Wow, she's buff," said one woman who glanced at her picture, not knowing Ramdass was a transsexual.) and the shadow that appears on her chin as evening comes. Today, she wears a wig of thick, curly hair that falls around her face like a shroud.

From the time she was a toddler in Trinidad, Ramdass thought of herself as a girl. "I remember putting on makeup all the time and running around in saris," she ways. As a young teen-ager in New York she did drag shows for her friends.

At 14, she began dressing like a girl most of the time, stretching the limits of the family that had supported her up till then. She ran away, living first with a boyfriend and later in cheap hotel rooms. At 18, she was taken in by Covenant House, a youth shelter sponsored by the Catholic Church. But officials there didn't know quite where to place her, first assigning her to the boys' dorm and later to the girls'.

At Transy House, there's no confusion about where she belongs,

Someday, Ramdass says, she'd like to have sex reassignment surgery like Moore and Goodwin, the sooner the better, but for now, "I'm comfortable where I am and who I am."

Next page: Rusty's Story
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Transgender History

History is full of people who defied strict gender classifications. In South Asia, hijras - hermaphrodites or eunuchs - have been recognized as a separate caste for thousands of years, sometimes oppressed, at other times treated with reverence. In many cultures, people who were born with or took on characteristics of the opposite sex were thought to have divine or healing powers. Some American Indian tribes traditionally recognized three sexes - men, women and people who for biological or social reasons didn't fit into either category.

It wasn't until the 20th century that technology and social mores made it possible for large numbers of people to purposefully transition to the opposite sex. Select the dates below to learn about the past centur'y major milestones in transgender history.




From Woman to Man

While media attention on transgendered people usually focuses on men who present as women, a large proportion are women who choose to live their lives as men.

Female-to-male transsexuals can take male hormones that will help them grow facial and body hair, deepen their voices and cease their menstrual cycles. Many choose to have a hysterectomy (removal of the uterus), and oophorectomy (removal of the ovaries) and some undergo chest reconstruction surgery.

Genital reconstruction is less popular with female-to-male transsexuals than with male-to-females because surgery is more difficult and costly and the outcome less effective. However, with recent improvements in surgical techniques, more transsexuals are choosing to undergo phalloplasty -- construction of a penis using skin, nerves, veins and arteries from other parts of the body - or metaidioplasty, creation of a small penis from a clitoris.

Often these manufactured members are inadequate for urination or copulation and some female-to-male transsexuals choose instead to use a prosthetic penis that is strapped or glued on.

Among the best known female-to-male transsexuals was jazz singer and musician Billy Tipton, who lived as a man from the time he was 19. His deception was not revealed until he died in 1989.

Hillary Swank as Brandon Teena

In the 1990s, the murder of Brandon Teena brought attention to discrimination against female-to-male transsexuals.

The story of the 21-year-old pre-operative transsexual, who was killed by two acquaintances, was immortalized in the 1999 feature film "Boys Don't Cry" and in the documentary "The Brandon Teena Story." (For more information about Teena, check out the Brandon Teena Memorial and Brandon, the Guggenheim Museum's multimedia memorial.)

 
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