NEW YORK -- Roz Blumenstein was nervous. She always gets anxious before speaking in public, yet she likes to do it and does it well. Her nervousness, in fact, serves her nicely at a podium; it makes the audience root for her.
And this night Blumenstein, 33, was facing a friendly crowd. Dozens in the audience at a Greenwich Village meeting hall were, like her, transsexuals, people who had had sex-change operations. All of the 100 or so in attendance were drawn by a common interest in gender identity -- a person's innate sense of maleness or femaleness, which, as this group was well aware, doesn't always match one's anatomy. She told the group how, as a bewildered and isolated teen-age boy, she fled Brooklyn for Times Square. Over the next decade Blumenstein lived on the streets, had sex-change surgery, became addicted to heroin and worked in the sex industry. It was a difficult time, and Blumenstein's memories of it aren't happy ones. "My dealings with transsexuals for the last 17 years have not been very positive," she said dryly. In 1987 she kicked her drug habit and began pulling her life together. She enrolled in college. Eighteen months ago she joined the Gender Identity Project, sponsor of the evening's forum, and began counseling others.
No longer does she cross the street when she sees another transsexual so as to escape notice. "The transsexuals I've met here are socially acceptable people," Blumenstein said. "Before, I thought that could not be."
The Gender Identity Project, a service of the Lesbian and Gay Community Services Center in New York's Greenwich Village, is one of a growing number of programs around the country that help transsexuals come to terms with themselves and with a society that rarely welcomes them. The project was formed in 1990 by Barbara Warren, the center's director of mental health and social services and a specialist on addiction.
One of the program's goals is to create a sense of community: "Alienation feeds on isolation," Warren said. Another is to link people searching for identity with others who have accepted themselves.
Similar projects have sprung up nationwide in recent years, oriented toward transsexuals rather than researchers in the field. There are regional "open gender conventions" and specialized meetings, such as the 2-year-old New Woman Conference and an international meeting on transgender law.
New journals have emerged, among them Chrysalis Quarterly out of Decatur, Ga., which has examined complaints about criteria for surgical candidates at gender identity clinics, and the TV/TS Tapestry Journal of Wayland, Mass., which updates readers on issues ranging from the legal aspects of changing gender identity to developments in electrolysis. Tapestry publishes a 21-page directory of services.
All this activity bespeaks a subculture emerging from the shadows. "I was lucky. I came into this community as it started to believe in itself," said Denise Norris, a speaker at the Greenwich Village forum, who had undergone surgery just six months earlier. "The world is beginning to make space for us -- or should I say, we are beginning to make space for ourselves."
But transsexuality is abhorred by many outside the field. "Do we accept this as something that should be approved or morally neutral?" said Gary Jarmin, a spokesman for Christian Voice, a 300,000-member lobbying group. "No. It defies the fundamental values that we believe in." He was particularly critical of what remains the most controversial aspect of transsexuality, sex reassignment surgery, which he called immoral.
Even among professionals who accept the morality of the surgery, there are mixed views on how it affects people. Follow-up studies have been inconclusive, due in part to difficulty tracking people after surgery and in finding objective ways to measure results. In the past, some post-operative transsexuals suffered emotional breakdowns. A few committed suicide.
In 1979, spurred by such tragedies, a group of professionals in the field adopted standards of care for transsexuals seeking surgery and the doctors who treat them. Among their requirements: The patient must have at least a year of psychotherapy before surgery, and must have lived full time in the social role of the desired sex for at least a year.
Since the standards were written, according to one study, only 10 percent of applicants at gender identity clinics have completed sex reassignment surgery.
Transsexuals unsuited for surgery may find comfort in hormonal therapy, psychotherapy, occasional cross-dressing or living full time in the chosen gender, said Dr. Charles Ihlenfeld, a psychiatrist in Greenport, N.Y.
The group that set the standards -- the Harry Benjamin International Gender Dysphoria Association -- was named for the endocrinologist whose work in the 1950s created the field of gender identity research. Ihlenfeld was once Benjamin's associate.
Today professionals rarely use the term "transsexual," preferring "gender identity disorder" or "gender dysphoria," which cover a broad spectrum of people whose inner sense of who they are doesn't match their genitalia.
Included are those who enjoy occasionally dressing in clothes typically worn by the opposite sex. Further along are men who find sexual excitement in cross-dressing. At another point are people like the character portrayed by Jaye Davidson in last year's hit film "The Crying Game," who live full time as members of the opposite sex but still value the anatomy they were born with.
Benjamin reserved "transsexual" for people who live full time as the opposite sex, loathe their genitalia and urgently desire a sex-change operation.
Experts estimate that about 25,000 people in the United States are transsexual, of whom 6,000 to 11,000 have undergone sex-change operations. The surgery is major: for men, removal of testicles and conversion of the penis into a vagina; for women, double mastectomy, hysterectomy and phalloplasty, the construction of an artificial phallus. The male-to-female genital surgery is said to produce excellent cosmetic results, but the complex techniques of phalloplasty remain imperfect.
With or without surgery, experts say female-to-male transsexuals often have an easier time than male-to-females. They may get less pressure as children, since tomboys are more accepted than "sissy" boys. As adults, it's often easier for a woman to pass as a short man than for a man to pass as a tall, strong-featured woman. Hormone treatments help a lot: a beard covers a delicate jaw, testosterone bulks up muscles. And becoming a man gives a boost in status, where going the other way means coping with sexism.
The most celebrated transsexuals have been male-to-female, beginning in 1952 with ex-GI Christine Jorgensen. Others include writer Jan Morris and tennis star/ophthalmologist Renee Richards.
Last month's forum began with a tribute to Jorgensen, who died in 1989.
"History, for so many of us, really began with Christine Jorgensen," moderator Rachel Pollack began. "It's a new thing for us to have our own memories, our own anniversaries, our own special events, and this is really one of them." .