I go all the way back to the 1950s. When I first came out to my mom at 5 years old, in 1960, she was terrified that if anyone found out they would give me electroshock or a lobotomy - that was the standard therapy for transsexuals back in those days.

The public image of Cross-dressers was Milton Berle - dressed as a very ugly woman, with a mostly Bass voice.

In 1969, you could still be arrested in most states just for appearing in public dressed as a woman. The Stonewall Riots started when Police tried to round up a bunch of drag queens and cross-dressers (hard to tell which was which back in those days).

In the 1960s and early 1970s, we saw cross-dressers on Monte Python, with falsetto voices, and bad make-up, but almost looking like matronly women.

In 1979, we had Sulka, one of the first transsexuals to make movies as both a She-male and post-op. It was easy to see that things weren't quite right.

In 1986, Shannon did movies as both she-male and post-op and shared here experience of a brand new procedure that gave her a sensitive clitoris. Most of her movies were banned because of the Meese commission mandate that made bondage and orgasms mutually exclusive.

Finally, in 1992, Ru Paul crossed the Hudson into New Jersey, where it was still illegal to be in public places cross-dressed. Several movies about Drag Queens, including Pricilla, Queen of the Desert, Paris is Burning, and To Wong Foo, showed some real men cross-dressed and looking and acting credibly as women. In Transamerica, the transsexual still had to be played by a woman.

From Harvey Milk to the Gay Marriage proposals, many gays wanted to discourage cross-dressers and transgenders from speaking out and being too visible. However, when we began to ask the question, "If a transsexual is married as a man, to a woman, and then has a transition, will the wife be deprived of life, liberty, and property, including life saving health care, visiting rights in hospitals, and tax benefits - - because it is now a same sex marriage, with no due process of law, no criminal act being committed?" - a question which calls into question the constitutionality of DOMA as a violation of the 5th amendment.

The real issue has been that the whole spectrum of transgendered community has been so GOOD at HIDING that most people have no idea what the realities are. When 15,000 transgenders were interviewed, they discovered that over half had attempted suicide multiple times and should have died but didn't. Based on other related metrics, this indicated that at least 2/3 of all transgenders had tried to kill themselves and half who tried actually succeeded. When police began to investigate suicides by looking at computers and public records such as facebook and twitter - looking for signs of cyberbullies, they found that more than half of all male teen suicides were related to being transgendered or gay and being outed then cyber-bullied and often physically bullied.

Only last year, in December of 2011, the American Psychological Association declared that attempting to convince a transsexual who really wanted to transition to accept their birth gender was actually UNETHICAL, because there was such a dramatic contrast between those who had not transitioned (very high suicide rate) and those who were in transition or had transitioned (90% were happy, gainfully employed, comfortable in their new lives, and healthier).

The bigger challenge these days is finding ways to distinguish between the transvestite, cross-dresser, and transsexual. Transgenders are so good at protecting and concealing their secret that they often find it very hard to sort out their true feelings related to whether they want to dress like a girl, be perceived as a girl once in a while, or would like to be a girl full time - with or without SRS. Sometimes, when caught, a man will claim that he's only a transvestite - when his true feelings are those of a transsexual.

If you really think about it, the transgender phenomenon is essentially still mostly ignorant. Because society puts so much pressure on males to enforce gender conformity, and this pressure often includes terrorism, threats of violence, actual violence, and even violence under supervision of authority figures, transgenders have become masters at maintaining low profiles. We have no real idea of how many men are transgendered (including all types), and we have no idea how many might be harboring a secret desire to change their gender, part time or full time for the rest of their lives. I think of the scene in the Matrix where Morpheus offers Neo the two pills, but in my version one pill is blue, which will make you a perfect specimen of masculinity, fit, handsome, and attractive, but you have to spend the rest of your life in suits and male clothes, and the other pill is pink, which will turn you into a young and beautiful woman, with the wide variety of fashion available, but at the cost of having to work harder to gain respect and power. How many men would choose the pink pill? I don't think anybody has a clue.

When Harry Benjamin wrote his recommended treatment program for transsexuals, he knew he was addressing a psychological and psychiatric community that still viewed transgender behavior in all it's forms as a criminal act, usually associated with homosexuality, prostitution, drugs, and criminal activities of other types. Until that paper, the standard treatment for most transgenders was "therapy" that was more like torture than treatment. It usually involved being stripped naked and sprayed full force with a fire hose for a while, or being nearly drowned in ice cold water, if that didn't work, there was electro-shock, and if that didn't work, there was orbital "ice-pick" lobotomies, and if that didn't work there were full frontal lobotomies. Watch "One Flew Over the KooKoo's nest" to get just a slight taste of how the treatments usually went. Often, a doctor or hospital would drain the insurance before turning the patient over to the state psychiatric hospital, where the extreme measures were taken.

Compared to the costs of those radical and debilitating treatments, or the very high suicide rate, the cost of HRT and SRS is a bargain.