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“If a 5-year-old black kid came into the clinic and said he wanted to be white, would we endorse that?” he told me. “I don’t think so. What we would want to do is say, ‘What’s going on with this kid that’s making him feel that it would be better to be white?’”

Zucker says that in 25 years, not one of the patients who started seeing him by age 6 has switched gender. Adolescents are more fixed in their identity. If a parent brings in, say, a 13-year-old who has never been treated and who has severe gender dysphoria, Zucker will generally recommend hormonal treatment. But he considers that a fraught choice. “One has to think about the long-term developmental path. This kid will go through lifelong hormonal treatment to approximate the phenotype of a male and may require some kind of surgery and then will have to deal with the fact that he doesn’t have a phallus; it’s a tough road, with a lot of pain involved.”

When they reversed course, they dedicated themselves to the project with a thoroughness most parents would find exhausting and off-putting. They boxed up all of John’s girl-toys and videos and replaced them with neutral ones. Whenever John cried for his girl-toys, they would ask him, “Do you think playing with those would make you feel better about being a boy?” and then would distract him with an offer to ride bikes or take a walk. They turned their house into a 1950s kitchen-sink drama, intended to inculcate respect for patriarchy, in the crudest and simplest terms: “Boys don’t wear pink, they wear blue,” they would tell him, or “Daddy is smarter than Mommy—ask him.” If John called for Mommy in the middle of the night, Daddy went, every time. When I visited the family, John was lazing around with his older brother, idly watching TV and playing video games, dressed in a polo shirt and Abercrombie & Fitch shorts. He said he was glad he’d been through the therapy, “because it made me feel happy,” but that’s about all he would say

Iran carries out more sex change operations than any other nation in the world except for Thailand

government even provides up to half the cost for those needing financial assistance and a sex change is recognised on your birth certificate.

She has had to work as a prostitute to make ends meet.

In April 2007, Rep. Barney Frank of Massachusetts, Rep. Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin, and others introduced the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA) that was transgender inclusive, in that it would provide protections for not just gays and lesbians but for people whose gender identity and expression didn't match their sex assigned at birth. Lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) advocacy groups drummed up support for ENDA over the summer; the list of co-sponsors grew to over 170. But when the bill was introduced for a vote in September, legislators ditched protections for gender identity and expression, citing concerns that the inclusive bill lacked the votes.

Many of the first proponents of city and state laws banning discrimination based on sexual orientation didn't intend only to protect gay and lesbian people. Matt Coles, then still a law student and now the director of the ACLU's LGBT Project, was part of the legal team that drafted San Francisco's nondiscrimination ordinance in 1977. They left the term "sexual orientation" undefined in the measure, intending to provide protection for everyone from transgender people to "butch women and sissy guys." But when opponents of the ordinance charged that the language would also shield such "sexual orientations" as pedophilia, the drafting team realized it needed a stricter definition. "And although we really didn't want to do this, we defined the term," Coles says. "It was the easiest thing to do." The legislation now defined sexual orientation solely in terms of sexual-partner choice.

Still, some gay talking heads continue to wonder aloud whether trans people deserve a place in the gay-rights movement. Salon blogger Jon Aravosis suggested that the "uprising" over ENDA was anything but directed by the grass roots: "Sure, many of the rest of us accepted de facto that transgendered people were members of the community, but only because our leaders kept telling us it was so. A lot of gays have been scratching their heads for 10 years trying to figure out what they have in common with transsexuals, or at the very least why transgendered people qualify as our siblings rather than our cousins. It's a fair question, but one we know we dare not ask."

Transvestism, along with six other sexual behaviours, will be struck from Sweden’s official list of medical diagnoses starting on January 1st, 2009

The other diagnoses which will soon disappear from the disease registry include fetishism, fetishistic transvestitism, sadomasochism, gender identity disorder in youth, and multiple disorders of sexual preferences. Holm said that the changes emphasize that these behaviours are not illnesses in and of themselves, nor are they something perverse.

Transvestites test the limits of Turkey’s tolerance

Human-rights groups say hundreds of transvestites are detained, beaten, tortured or sexually abused every year. Many are driven into prostitution. “They are seen as the lowest of the low and face more police brutality than any other group,” says Eren Keskin, a human-rights lawyer. And when anyone has dared to file a complaint, she adds, “not a single policeman has been convicted.”

Turkey is said to have more transvestites per head than anywhere bar Brazil.

just eight years ago, a school just like M.J.'s, a junior high in a relatively small town, had to be forced by judicial order to allow a trans student to come dressed in her chosen gender. And that school wasn't in Mississippi or in rural Kansas. It was in Massachusetts, the state that only four years later legalized marriage for same-sex couples. A state thought of by many as one of the most progressive in the country when it comes to gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender rights.

Many would view the politically red heart of the country as a harsh, unwelcoming, and vaguely dangerous place for the transgender community. When we think of states like Nebraska and Wyoming, we don't think of M.J. -- we think of people like Brandon Teena and Matthew Shepard, both killed in vicious, nationally publicized hate crimes. But the truth of the matter is far more interesting, inspiring, and instructive. Away from the coasts and the urban havens, a vibrant transgender-rights movement is slowly emerging across the mountain and plains states. Through increased visibility, community building, legislative outreach, and face-to-face public education in churches, schools, and neighborhoods, trans people are building a foundation for equality in some of the nation's most conservative regions.

Mike Thompson, the executive director of Equality Utah explains, "If you can convert people in the reddest of states, then you can convert people anywhere."