There is no smooth continuum to transgender history, a crescendo from horrified rejection to the level of acceptance that exists today. The graph is one of peaks and plunges. What has sustained the movement has not been public demand for equal rights for transgender people but individuals whose bravery has defied societal convention regardless of risk.

The appearance of transgender women in the United States can be traced as far back as the Native American culture of the 1500s. Spanish Conquistador Cabeza de Vaca wrote of seeing "effeminate, impotent men" wearing women's clothing and doing the work of women among the Coahuiltecan Indians," according to a history by Genny Beemyn, director of the Stonewall Center at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. In some instances the reactions of the conquistadors were extreme and violent, Beemyn wrote, including the setting of dogs on a group of Cueva Indians for assuming the roles of women and another instance of a transgender woman burned alive.

Issues of gender did not simply disappear. Several centuries later cross-dressing had become enough of a phenomenon in the 1850s that some cities, including Chicago and Kansas City, passed laws prohibiting wearing clothing of the opposite sex, according to the 2008 book Transgender History by Susan Stryker. By the end of the 19th century, 28 cities had such ordinances on the books. The increase, Stryker believes, had much to do with the shift of American society in the industrial age from rural to urban. "Female-bodied people who could successfully pass as men had greater opportunities to travel and find work," she wrote. "Male-bodied people who identified as women had greater opportunities to live as women in cities far removed from the communities where they had grown up. "

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The late 19th and early 20th centuries also resulted in systematic research by various physicians, the most important of whom was German-trained Magnus Hirschfeld, described on some historical Web sites as the "father of transgenderism." Under the banner of the Institute for Sexual Science that he started in Berlin, Hirschfeld did pioneering work in establishing that transgender women and men were not "sexual deviants," as they were often described, or suffering from the "delusion of transformation of sex," but individuals who had been born the wrong gender.

The Institute of Science is believed to have performed the first recorded genital transformation surgery in which a penis was replaced with a vagina in 1931, according to various histories. Around that time, Einar Wegener—who transitioned to Lili Elbe—in addition to the construction of a vagina, had ovaries implanted to try to induce sufficient levels of estrogen and then, in a bid to make her transition as fully as possible, an operation attempting to create a uterus in order to give birth; it resulted in Elbe's death in the aftermath of the surgery. Hirschfeld's work came to an end with the rise of Nazism in the 1930s. Adolf Hitler called him "the most dangerous Jew in Germany," and the contents of the institute were burned at a bonfire in 1933. He fled the country.

In 1939, British doctor Michael Dillon started taking testosterone in an apparently unprecedented effort to transition from female to male. Several years later Dillon, as quoted in Beemyn's history, wrote a book summarizing the needs of transgender women and men: they "would develop naturally enough if only [they] belonged to the other sex."

The first widespread exposure to the American public of a transgender woman came in 1952, when it was revealed by the New York Daily News that a former Army soldier, newly named Christine Jorgensen, had gone to Denmark (she could not get the procedure done in the United States) and undergone transition surgery. Jorgenson created a sensation not only in the United States but also around the world, in part because she had once been a soldier and was now in the eyes of the media a "blonde bombshell." In the can-do-anything era of the 50s, her looks made her a symbol of the wonder of medical science, Beemyn noted.

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Jorgensen's transition coincided with the work of American endocrinologist Harry Benjamin, whose contribution to the cause of transgender men and women is the greatest of any doctor. Benjamin pounded away at the notion that gender dysphoria could be cured through psychotherapy. He prescribed hormones to those wanting to transition and suggested surgeons in other countries given the lack of a single one in the United Stated willing to do the surgery openly. It was also because of Benjamin that carefully delineated standards of care exist for transition, so as to avoid impulse and possible regret.

The transgender movement advanced further when Johns Hopkins University opened its clinic and became a pioneer in genital surgery in the mid 1960s. Other universities followed. In 1976, Renée Richards (page 18), who had had sex-reassignment surgery (now widely referred to as gender-confirmation surgery), received widespread attention when she successfully sued in New York Supreme Court to play in the U.S. Open tennis championship after her application was denied on the basis she was a man. In 1977, she lost in the first round in women's singles but made it to the finals in women's doubles. She retired four years later and returned to her ophthalmology practice.

There was increasing momentum towards acceptance of transgender men and women. But in 1979, Johns Hopkins stopped doing surgeries after saying internal studies—now seriously questioned—had shown little psychosexual improvement in many of those having them. In the same year professor Janice Raymond created a firestorm with the publication of The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male. "I contend that the problem of transsexualism would best be served by morally mandating it out of existence," she wrote.

Raymond's was not a lone opinion. Other feminists deeply resented transgender women for appropriating womanhood without ever facing the full effects of sexism. Schisms developed between various gay and lesbian activist organizations and the transgender community.

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The numbing murder of 21-year-old transgender man Brandon Teena in Nebraska in 1993 had the lone redemptive aspect of turning the pendulum once again to the positive. (See John Gregory Dunne's account of the crime on page 86.) After Teena was arrested by the county sheriff and listed as female in a local newspaper account, two of his "friends" beat and raped him. After Teena reported the rape to county authorities, the men killed him and two others. The horrific act caused a nationally covered demonstration outside the courthouse where the two men were tried; one received the death penalty and the other a life sentence. It marked the first widespread public attention to an anti-transgender hate crime. The exposure only multiplied with the 1999 film Boys Don't Cry, for which Hilary Swank, as Brandon Teena, won the best actress Academy Award.

The film blended into another crucial era for the transgender movement, the rise of the Internet and the ability of transgender men and women to get information and communicate with one another without fear of unwanted exposure.

The cultural atmosphere for transgender men and women has been on a sustained high for the past several years. Books by Jennifer Finney Boylan—the Anna Quindlen Writer-in-Residence at Barnard who was married with two sons before transitioning (she remains married)—and former People.com editor Janet Mock (see page 38) were national best-sellers. Transgender woman Laverne Cox's portrayal of a transgender woman inmate on Orange Is the New Black on Netflix has received raves (page 30). So has Amazon Prime's Transparent for its combination of candor, pathos, and humor as personified by Jeffrey Tambor's remarkable portrayal of a transgender woman who decides to "go public" in midlife while juggling an ex-wife and three marvelously well-meaning but more marvelously screwed-up grown children.

Caitlyn Jenner of course caused a worldwide sensation earlier this summer (page 64). She is the latest iteration in the half-millennium transgender battle. She has raised public consciousness. But she is not the savior. A recent poll taken by Quinnipiac University in the states of Ohio, Florida, and Pennsylvania showed that Jenner's transition has done little to change societal attitudes. Just as telling, the percent of men and women with a favorable opinion of Caitlyn Jenner did not reach 50.

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A 2013 report shows rates of unemployment and household income below $ 10,000 among transgender individuals as being at least double that of the general population. Other data has revealed the attempted-suicide rate among those identifying as transgender to be a mind-boggling 20 to 30 times that of the rate for the nation at large.

But progress is still on the bull run. Several weeks ago, the Pentagon announced that it was taking steps to allow transgender women and men to serve openly in the military. In announcing the move, Defense Secretary Ashton B. Carter recognized that "transgender soldiers... are being hurt by an outdated, confusing, inconsistent approach."

At long last.