Transgender identity is an enormously complex phenomenon, and it would have been easy to get involved in long discussions of the various types of transgender identities found in the community. There were at least three issues related to transgender identity that potentially could have derailed discussions of Intro 24.

First was the issue of sex reassignment surgery, which makes a lot of people uneasy and which could have raised the subsidiary issue of payment for SRS. True, the notion that the City of New York would be bankrupted by a rush of city employees to have sex-change operations was a complete red herring, given that payment for SRS was not part of the legislation; but at the beginning of the campaign, this fear could not have been wholly discounted.

Second was the issue of cross-dressing in the workplace, which could have alarmed the business community, as it did in New Orleans when their transgender rights bill became whittled down to a bill to protect the rights of transitioning and post-op transsexuals.

Third was the issue of religious strictures on gender identity and expression, which could have triggered the intervention of the cardinal and other conservative religious leaders.

The strategy that we pursued was to frame the issue as one of basic human rights; the issue could be reduced to one simple word: discrimination. The message was that transgendered and gender-variant people faced pervasive discrimination, and that they were not fully protected under current law and would not be until this bill was passed. We consciously articulated this campaign in the light of the history of previous civil rights struggles, including the campaign for the gay rights bill that passed the New York City Council in 1986 after years of activism. And in explaining the host of transgender identities, we used a simple diagram that I devised, composed of three concentric circles to illustrate the three populations at risk from discrimination: the transsexual, the transgendered, and gender-variant people, even if, as the Commissioner for Human Rights maintained, post-operative transsexuals were already included under law. The diagram helped us from getting diverted by long digressions about the differences between this and that transgender identity. We could not afford to get caught up in endless discussions of definitions and questions about what the difference between a ‘transsexual’ and a ‘transvestite’ was. The diagram enabled us to move quickly through definitional territory to the issue at hand, the need for this legislation. To paraphrase the 1992 Clinton campaign, our theme could well have been, "It’s discrimination, stupid." And who could be for discrimination...? Hence, the simplicity of the campaign’s central message contributed to our ability to persuade those who needed to be persuaded.