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The more I talk to transsexuals about what adolescence was like for them, the more my own transformation from scraggly tomboy to woman comes back to me. But as I watched my body turn into something new and strange, I found social roles and cultural images that I could use to create a future version of myself. What would it feel like to grow up without those images? Or with images that seemed everyday to become more distant as your body develops? As Ina and I talked over the course of several weeks, I began to believe that our routes to womanhood followed parallel roads. Mine, of course, was paved and well lit; I was spared the most excruciating and dangerous aspects of her journey.

If gay people have shown how preconceived gender and sexual categories don't correspond to human multiplicity, transsexuals have something else to teach us: Beginning in adolescence, we put together a sexual and gender identity that is part body, part behavior, part inner sense of our outer roles.

And while the youngest transsexuals challenge us with the most difficult ethical questions, the very flexibility of their youth may well shift our cultural understanding of transsexualism. Twenty-one-year-old Elizabeth, for example, has a life no one would envy -- but her self-possession and her comfort making her own rules make her future look surprisingly promising.

Two years ago, after a blowup with her family in Compton, Calif., when she told them she'd decided to become a woman, Elizabeth escaped to New York City and ended up on the street. She's been living at Covenant House, Manhattan's homeless youth center, ever since. Her stories of the struggles of the last few years -- from life as a gay teenage boy with a macho father to her days hustling on the street, negotiating tricks with predatory old men -- are not pretty.

Yet Elizabeth seems deeply resilient, determined to find her own dignified way despite her life's tumult. She doesn't buy the "woman born in a man's body" model of transsexualism. Rather, she describes her choice in pragmatic terms. "I decided I'd rather be a woman than an effeminate man," she says. "People are really hard on men who don't live up to the male image." Seemingly unaware that her decision might look like a last-ditch escape from a life of not measuring up, Elizabeth doesn't couch her life story in mystical inevitability or psychological excavation. She's not all that interested in figuring out why she turned out this way; she simply knows that becoming a woman was the right decision.

Elizabeth concedes that there's more to being a woman than she had anticipated. Men don't always treat her with the respect she thinks a woman is due. She worries a lot more now about how she looks, how she smells, how she walks. She still faces indignities every day -- people making disparaging comments about her body or refusing to refer to her with feminine pronouns. "It's more personal now when they're cruel," she says. They're making fun of Elizabeth's most intimate hopes, ridiculing the self she is busy creating.

But she's wary of seeming to try too hard. Passing is a huge deal to most transsexuals, and in their quest to be taken as "real" women, Elizabeth says, many trannies overdo things. "I don't wear much makeup" she says proudly. In the low light of Tiffany's, a West Village diner where we had dinner, she looks lovely, with large brown liquid eyes and luminous olive skin. In the dim light, the shadow of her facial hair barely shows, but she comments on it anyway. "I really hate that I have to shave. What man wants to wake up next to a woman with a 5 o'clock shadow?" Surgery to redo her genitals is still a faraway, expensive dream, but so far she's "happy with the results of the estrogen."

Three months after our first meeting, Elizabeth's life has improved. She has a new job as an assistant at a Chelsea hair salon with a boss who accepts her. Her mother has since made up with her and given her a new middle name. "I'm now Elizabeth Marie," she says with a smile -- still trying it on. Every once in a while, she says, the wind in her newly shoulder-length hair or an admiring look from a man will give her a little wave of ecstasy. "For the first time in my life," she says, "I feel peaceful inside a lot of the time."

It will always be difficult to figure out where laws and medical protocols should end and an individual's life -- and sexual identity -- must be left to shape itself. At a certain point, rules must melt away. As Elizabeth's newly forged version of transsexualism suggests, all people can ultimately become their own genders, the product of their own dreams. The night before we first met, Elizabeth dreamed she walked into her room at Covenant House and there was a big cocoon hanging over her bed. As she watched, it opened up and she floated out, naked, her body perfect, beautiful, female.
salon.com | Aug. 28, 1999

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