E-Mail This Article to a Friend Catching up with the DNC’s openly transgender delegates BY KRISTEN LOMBARDI

TUESDAY, July 27, 2004 -- Vanessa Edwards Foster is making history these days -- and it feels great. The Houston delegate counts herself among the first openly transgender delegation to participate in the Democratic National Convention. Four years ago, in 2000, only one such delegate, Jane Fee, of Minnesota, attended the Democrats’ hottest political event. This year, that number has grown by five.

"It’s an exciting time," gushes Foster, a tall woman with warm, brown eyes and a lightly freckled face. Dressed in full cowboy regalia -- denim jeans and a tasseled suede vest dominated by KERRY/EDWARDS 2004 political buttons -- Foster sits outside Au Bon Pan, in Kendall Square, waiting for fellow delegates to join her. Growing up as a boy named Marvin, she tells me, she played football, went fishing, and engaged in other "typical boy from Texas things," such as drinking a little too hard. She didn’t come to terms with her gender-identity problem until a full decade after her adolescence, in 1988, at age 30. "I was a late bloomer," she says.

Today, she and the four other delegates (there are also two transgender advocates attending the DNC as committee members) are talking candidly about the hardships they’ve endured as an out transgender. On Monday night, Foster and three of her colleagues -- Monica Helms, a Georgia delegate; Barbra Caspar, a New Jersey delegate; and Melissa Sklarz, a New York advocate serving on the DNC rules committee -- make appearances on the MIT-operated radio station, WMBR, which airs a "Gender Talk" program billed as "frank talk about transgenderism in the first person." Over the course of 90 minutes, the DNC delegates discuss a wide range of topics on everything from first-hand sexual experiences to the Democrats’ aggressive recruitment of transgenders for the 2004 convention.

This historic delegation sees its mission as simple: add transgender issues to the mix of those trumpeted by the Democratic Party. So far, they’ve met mixed results. Two weeks ago, when party activists ironed out the language of the official Democratic Party platform, Scott Safier, a gay man from Pennsylvania, pushed the platform committee to include the phrase "gender identity" in its list of anti-discrimination categories. Safier wanted the Democrats to stand up not just for minorities, women, and gay people, but also for transgender people. But those two words set off a maelstrom, with cautious party activists fearing that "gender identity" would give the Republicans too much fodder for nasty political attack ads.

The delegates didn’t find out about the controversy until 24 hours before the platform committee was scheduled to vote on the language. By then, according to Sklarz, "Our options were few to none." Sklarz (who describes herself as "a guy on the outside, a pile of goo inside" until she made the transition from a male to a female in 1989) explains the situation like this: she and her colleagues could either debate the platform on the floor of the DNC so as to stress the importance of transgender civil rights -- a move sure to go down in defeat. Or they could suck it up and push the issue at a later date, outside the convention spotlight. They chose to suck it up -- for the good of the overall party. The Republicans, after all, are masters of twisting truth just enough to make the Democrats look like they’re from outer space.

"The Republicans can sensationalize anything," Foster observes. The transgender delegates didn’t want to give the Bushies any ammunition to use against Kerry.

That doesn’t mean that the delegation won’t avail itself of its newfound access to the Democratic Party’s movers and shakers. Already, the five delegates are using the DNC to gain the ears of influential leaders. On the first day, Helms tells me that she has introduced herself to such progressive icons as Howard Dean and Al Sharpton and urged them to pay attention to the community’s concerns -- how transgender people can lose their jobs, go bankrupt, and be denied health care, and public accommodations. How the community, in essence, lacks basic civil rights.

These five openly transgender delegates may represent a mere fraction of the 4353 delegates and alternates at the DNC from all 50 states -- less than one percent, to be exact. But they are proving to the rest of us that the transgender-activist community has arrived. Sklarz puts the sentiment best: "Now that we have a seat at the table, we can actually do some good with it. We are not going anywhere."