By CAREY GOLDBERG

c Copyright 1996 The New York Times

LOS ANGELES -- In Boston, Nancy Nangeroni is helping arrange a courthouse vigil for a slain male-to- female 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 walkabout, just to look people in the eye with collective pride in who they are.

All see themselves as part of a burgeoning movement whose members 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 1990s America, is considered normal.

That line has certainly blurred. Dennis Rodman preens in his bridal gown, Ru Paul puckers for MAC cosmetics, and viewers flock to movies like "The Crying Game."

But members of the movement say they still cannot escape the feeling that in a society that has 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 both in everyday life and in the political arena, where they are roundly 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 universal 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 discrimination and violence.

"There's finally a voice saying, 'Enough,' " said Riki Anne Wilchins, a Wall Street computer consultant and organizer in the movement. "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 you hit that critical mass that 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."

No one knows exactly what that critical mass is. Experts say that in the more than 40 years since George Jorgensen emerged from the operating room as Christine, several thousand Americans have undergone sex-change surgery; they are believed to include nearly even numbers of men and women.

Perhaps as many as 60,000 Americans consider themselves valid candidates for such surgery, based on what psychiatrists call "gender identity dysphoria," according to the Harry Benjamin Gender Dysphoria Association, the leading medical association of specialists -- including sex-change surgeons -- that sets guidelines for treating transsexuals.

But that is only the tip of a far larger iceberg, 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 of people and number nearly 20 a year.

Increasingly, a "T" can be found tacked onto the "G, L and B" of gay, lesbian and bisexual events and groups, from community centers to pride parades.

In San Francisco, which a survey has shown is home to about 6,000 of the movement's constituents, the San Francisco Human Rights Commission has formed a Transgender Community Task Force, and the protest group Transexual Menace now counts 46 chapters nationwide, some of which are called Transgender Menace. There is even a new national group, Transgendered Officers Protect and Serve; members act as marshals at events when needed.

The movement's coalescence, which members say began over the last five years and accelerated in recent months, has gained particular momentum from the Internet, with its ability to connect far-flung people and afford 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 political 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 and be visible."

That takes more than the courage to face funny looks in the checkout line. The most painful of rallying points is the frequency with which they are attacked and even killed.

"I know so many people who've suffered from vilification in their daily lives just because people have heard they're transsexual, not because they look weird or act weird," said James Green, a female-to-male transsexual and head of FtM International, the biggest group for what many members call "transmen." "As soon as the fact is known, they're just targets, and people are still being murdered."

Since last year, Ms. Wilchins and Transexual Menace have taken to organizing vigils after the slayings of transsexuals. In May 1995 they protested outside the Lincoln, Neb., courthouse where the rapist and killer of a young woman living as a man -- named Teena Brandon and known as Brandon Teena -- was coming to trial. Since then, they have marked the deaths of several transsexual women who were killed by men they dated.

The next will come Sept. 16 in Lawrence, Mass., where Deborah Forte, a transsexual, was killed.

"We're so invested in being men or women that if you fall outside that easy definition of what a man or woman is, a lot of people see you as some kind of monster," said Susan Stryker, a male-to-female transsexual with a doctorate in history whose book on changing sex is to be published by Oxford University Press next year.

Gender PAC, the advocacy group, is lobbying to have crimes against "transgendered people" included in the Hate Crimes Statistics Act, which lets the Justice Department track crimes based on race, religion, ethnicity and sexual orientation.

(These crimes do not fall under the orientation category because "transgenderism" concerns sexual identity, not sexual practices, Gender PAC says; some male-to-female transsexuals are lesbians, for example.)

Gender PAC's other priority, said Dana Priesing, its main lobbyist -- and a prominent Washington litigator until she began her sex change -- is to get the group's constituency included in the Employment Nondiscrimination Act, a bill in the House of Representatives that would protect gay people from job discrimination.

Employees currently have no recourse if they are dismissed because they reveal their sexual identity or undergo "transition" except in a handful of cities -- including San Francisco, Seattle and Santa Cruz -- and the state of Minnesota.

If Nancy Nangeroni is any judge, transsexuals still need help in the workplace. A 42-year-old, MIT-educated computer designer, she found she could not get a job if she volunteered that she was a male-to-female transsexual, but had no problem if she kept silent.

Ms. Nangeroni is not only open about her identity but also runs "Gender Talk," a radio talk show every Wednesday evening on WMBR-FM, a Boston-area station.

"There's a widespread discontent with gender roles," she said, "and transgenderism is trying to speak to that in a compassionate way, speaking only liberation and not doctrine. It's kind of like shooting fish in a barrel sometimes. People are very ripe for it."

Not everybody. Christian conservatives and advocates of traditional family values condemn the movement as decadent and unhealthy.

"This is yet another social pathology," said Robert H. Knight, cultural studies director for the Family Research Council, a think tank in Washington. "This is deviant behavior that seeks legitimization in the social, legal and political realms. It is part of a larger cultural movement to confuse the sexual roles and to usher in a relativistic mindset concerning sexuality itself."

The movement has also created some friction within the gay and lesbian groups that have generally accepted and aided it. Some gay and lesbian organizers have balked because its issues do not concern sexual orientation but rather identity.

Others argued, usually sotto voce, that flamboyant "drag queens" and "stone butches" would further alienate straight America and belie their claims that gay people are really just like everybody else.

But "transgendered people" have long been at the heart of the gay rights movement, said Kerry Lobel, deputy director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force. Now, she said, "they're seeking and have found their own political power."

"All of a sudden a lot of people feel, 'Hey, I am proud,' " said Alison Laing, director of the International Foundation for Gender Education in Waltham, Mass. "It's like gay pride. People say, 'I didn't choose this, but I do choose my behavior and my attitude.' "

Alison Laing's life demonstrates the kind of freedom the movement espouses. A husband and father, "M. Laing" (to use the honorific proposed as an ungendered alternative to Mr. and Ms.) spends about 80 percent of the time dressed in women's clothes and 20 percent as Al, in men's clothing, showing that "we don't have to live in gender boxes."

c Copyright 1996 The New York Times