Ceridwen Troy is tall and slender with shoulder-length chestnut hair that she nervously swipesbehind her ear with her fingers. The 24-year-old is like a restless filly, ready to bolt, as she talks about her childhood. Raised in Wallace, a speck of a community in Steuben County, Troy says she began having questions about her gender when she was a teenager.

"I remember being 14 or 15 years old and already having given up on the thought of ever having a family," she says. "I wasn't what the people around me were seeing."

Troy didn't know how to express what she was experiencing at the time. We all live in a gendered society, she says. But the Jehovah's Witness society she was raised in is extremely conservative and hyper-gendered, she says.

"In my religion, the idea was that if you were a man, you would have a wife and children, and you would provide for them as the patriarchal head of the household," she says. "But when ‘man' doesn't work for you, the rest of it falls apart. And there was suddenly no future for me. I would cry myself to sleep at night, not knowing why praying wasn't enough to help me."

Troy tried throwing herself into her religion, and at 15 she became a minister. But she gradually broke away from the faith - she says she didn't fit in - and was accepted at SUNY Geneseo. It was in the beginning of her freshman year that she heard the word "transgender" for the first time.

"There was just this bizarre moment, when I thought ‘Oh my God, you mean there's a word for this?'" Troy says.

Transgender is frequently used as an umbrella term in the LGBT community. But the transgender world is so diverse, it is more like a mobile of suspended adjectives and pronouns that are interrelated; yet they move freely from one to another. Mention "transgender" and many people will think of entertainer RuPaul or actor Tim Curry as Dr. Frank-n-Furter in the ‘70's cult classic "the Rocky Horror Picture Show." But these drag characters are rich stereotypes that don't represent most people in the transgender community.

People who are transgender don't identify with their biological gender and don't conform to society's traditional expectations of gender. Some transgender people will fully change their male or female anatomy through various medical procedures - sometimes referred to as "gender reassignment." Some pursue partial changes. And still others don't undergo any medically induced changes at all. But they might express their gender by the way they dress or through their behavior.

No one knows the exact size of the transgender community locally or nationwide. It is generally thought to be a segment of the larger LGBT community, which by most accounts is less than 10 percent of the population. Differences in gender expression and identity are nothing new; they've been found inancient civilizations. Native Americans, for instance, recognized that some people possessed what they called "two spirits," the essences of both sexes in one body.

But the transgender community in the 21st century is testing, at least in Western cultures, the understanding of gender and sexuality. Some social, legal, and medical questions are being explored for the first time. For instance, does a T-woman - a man who becomes a woman - need both breast and prostate cancer screenings? Possibly, since most reassignment surgeries performed on males do not include removing the prostate gland.

And a T-man - a woman who becomes a man - should logically be sexually attracted to women, right? Not necessarily; sexual orientation doesn't always correlate to gender.

The transgender community, given this extreme diversity, is often isolated, the target of discrimination, and misunderstood. Despite those challenges, most transgender people will tell you it beats living a life that feels like a mistake, a deformity, and a lie.

Troy found confidence and a sense of personal freedom at college. By the end of her sophomore year, shebegan, in the parlance of the transgender community, to "transition." It's a gradual process that takes months, sometimes years. Some people describe it as a corrective realignment of the mind and the body.

"I started dressing more like the way I wanted to," she says. "And I grew my hair out."

Troy began taking hormones, which make masculine characteristics like body and facial hair less pronounced. But discussing the medical aspects of her transition makes Troy bristle.

"It's my medical history that we're talking about here," she says. "I mean, I get that people are curious, but to me it's a rather mundane thing."

She's not offended by questions about whether she's taking hormones. But she rolls her eyes at the one question she says everyone asks, "Have you had the surgery?" Troy says she would urge people to take a step back and ask themselves why they want to know. Understanding the complex relationship that the transgender community has with the medical community is more relevant, she says.

"There are so many hoops you have to jump through," she says. "There is a relationship with the medical community at large that is very conflicted."

Caring for transgender patients, especially when it comes to surgery, is a sub-specialty. Finding experienced doctors takes research and tenacity. Most doctors lack sufficient training in treating transgender people, and some have ethical problems working with them.

The lack of access to affordable and appropriate health care is the biggest issue most people in the transgender community face, says Christopher Hinesley, a T-man and former director of the Gay Alliance of the Genesee Valley.

"Most medical procedures aren't covered by health insurance," he says. "But some procedures are required in order to legally recognize the change."

This creates a conundrum for many people, because it touches on the second most important issue transgender people face: employment.

"How do you maintain a job when you're going through such a dramatic change in your life?" Hinesley says. "Yet you need employment in order to pay for the medical procedures."

Proper health care is also important for those people who self-identify with a gender, Hinesley says, and they want to "pass" undetected as that gender. Some people don't care if they pass or not, but for those who do, it can be a painful experience knowing that they don't, he says. It can add to employment difficulties, and for some transgender people, it can be dangerous to be out in public.

"It's been a long time since the gay and lesbian community had to be closeted as a whole community," Hinesley says. "But that's really where the trans community is today; we're like 30 years behind the progress made by the larger LGB community. You can lose your job, your family, and your friends. You can lose it all."

And there is resentment about it.

The transgender community is still fighting for basic protections, while the LGB community is busy fighting for marriage equality, says Pamela Barres, a T-woman and co-director of the Rochester chapter of the New York Transgender Rights Organization.

"It seems like we're being run over by the marriage express people," she says. "This is what everyone is talking about. It's what the media talks about. But when it comes right down to it, marriage equality is a happiness bill. I don't want to prioritize, but we need protection from discrimination for transgender people."

The transgender community was slighted by the 2002 passage of the state Sexual Orientation Non-Discrimination Act, which protects people from housing and employment discrimination based on sexual orientation. The legislation did not include the transgender community. The Gender Expression Non-Discrimination Act is intended to correct that omission. GENDA passed the New York State Assembly last year, but it has not been approved in the Senate.

"As a political movement, more and more of us are standing up and saying ‘We're here, too,'" says Barres.

But the risk of rejection and ridicule, as Troy has learned, is real and at times, heartbreaking.

A confrontation with her mother had been brewing for years. During one spring break, Troy was at home eating breakfast when her mother came downstairs. She could tell by the way her mother looked at her that she was pissed, Troy says.

"Why don't you want to be a man?" her mother asked.

Troy knew the answer would only anger her mother more.

Highly educated people in the transgender community may have a slight shield against employment discrimination compared to those who don't. When one of Bill Pickett's twin sons told him that he was transgender, Pickett wasn't too concerned about his son's livelihood. Lawrence University, his son's employer, was extremely supportive of the astrophysicist, Pickett says.

That was of some consolation to Pickett, but the former president of St. John Fisher College and father of seven children says that he was still rocked by his son's news.

"I had no clue," he says. "I had all of the other concerns you have when they're growing up - drugs, alcohol, illness, and accidents. I never once thought about this. The only exposure to it I had was watching one of those shows like ‘Jerry Springer.'"

Pickett was concerned that his grown son, Brian, a married man and the father of two young children, might be delusional and having some type of mental breakdown. What he discovered, he says, was something worse.

"He told me about his journey, through a letter," Pickett says. "He told me that he had attempted suicide. That's because shame becomes such an inherent part of their personality. And that discovery was chilling for me because I realized right there that I could have lost my child."

In a matter of a few weeks, Pickett had to become accustomed to his new daughter, Megan. Pickett insisted on being by her bedside through the surgical transition. But it was only the beginning of a long and difficult process for the entire family.

Seven years later, Pickett says he has grown to love and respect his daughter. But he couldn't be dishonest about his feelings, either.

"It was a sense of profound loss," he says. "It was like a death. I told Megan this. I told her that I miss Brian and if it were up to me, I wouldn't have changed a thing."

Pickett was not the only person unprepared for Brian's transition to Megan; her twin brother, Sean, was shocked and angered.

"Like a lot of twins, they were very close," Pickett says. "It was a lot like a relationship with a spouse. He asked some of the same questions. He wanted to know, ‘Who were you all of this time?'"

The bigger question for the whole family, Pickett says, was the effect this would have on Megan's children.

"When you do something like this, you're going to hurt people," Pickett says. "It's one thing when you're talking about adults, but it's another when you're talking about your children; how can you do this to an 11-year-old son and a 9-year-old daughter? There's going to be collateral damage."

Megan's relationship with most of her siblings remains tense. They've all had to make adjustments, Pickett says.

"I knew that I cared about this relationship, so I had to be proactive about it," Pickett says. "But the relationship between Megan and Sean has not been reestablished. And I said to Megan, ‘You have to work at this. You're the one who changed; he didn't.'"

Married to her when she was Brian, Megan's wife wasn't O.K. with the change, either, and left.

"I love all of my children," Pickett says. "But I learned that I can't determine where their relationships with each other will end up."

Pickett says he is sometimes approached by other parents trying to cope with situations similar to the one his family is experiencing.

"I tell them that this is a real medical condition that needs to be resolved," he says. "And I tell them that they need to be the same mother and father they always were to their son or daughter. Remember that nobody has died. Nobody is going to prison. Don't draw lines when it comes to these relationships and you'll get through it. That's what I learned: We can all get through this if we try."