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CHRIS ROBERTS: Andrea Jenkins has lived in her comfortable apartment on Lake Harriet in Minneapolis for two years. And she spent half those evenings walking along the shore, searching her soul.

ANDREA JENKINS: A lot of time devoted to and committed and spent on who I am, how can I deal with these changes in a positive way, keep my sanity, keep my own self-respect and get respect from others. A lot of time spent on doing that around this lake.

CHRIS ROBERTS: Jenkins is a 34-year-old preop male-to-female transsexual, which means that she's being treated with female hormones but is yet to undergo the surgery which will change her genitalia from male to female. Tonight, she wears a flowered silk scarf under a sensible wool coat, flat-heeled women's shoes. And her hair is pulled back by a band.

She's tall and broad with a robust male frame that's slowly being softened and curved by hormones. For as long as she can remember, she has lived in her own mind as a female encumbered by a male's body. As a young child, she played house with the girls in her neighborhood, usually adopting the role of mommy and coveting their dolls.

ANDREA JENKINS: I had these feelings of being female. But I think as all children, we kind of learn our gender roles pretty early. And I just-- like most everyone else, I kind of fell into my assigned gender role and had a pretty normal male childhood.

CHRIS ROBERTS: When Jenkins was 12, she spent a summer on her uncle's farm in Alabama, working in the fields and wearing her hair in braids. One day, when she and her uncle went into town to sell watermelons, a man approached their truck and exposed Jenkins' gender turmoil.

ANDREA JENKINS: He knew that I was a girl. I mean, I tried to tell him. I tried to convince him. I was even almost to the point of showing him my penis because he was totally convinced that I was a girl. And he approached me about having sex.

It really freaked me out. And I started crying. And I went and told my uncle what was going on. And so the guy eventually left. But after that point, I realized then that even though I protested the fact that I was not a girl, I really enjoyed the attention of his thinking that I was a girl.

CHRIS ROBERTS: From that day on, Jenkins vowed to find a way to help her body conform to her perception of herself. But it took many painful years and a failed marriage before she mustered the courage to publicly admit that she was a transsexual. Now, with female hormones flowing in her system and intensive therapy and gender experimentation under her belt, she's ready mentally but not financially to complete her transformation with sex reassignment surgery. In a procedure that many people have difficulty comprehending, at least without wincing, her male sexual anatomy will be reconstructed into that of a female.

ANDREA JENKINS: And it's really remarkable. Usually, most gynecologists wouldn't be able to tell unless they did an internal examination. So you don't really lose your penis. So I guess I'm really not that frightened about it. I mean, being female to the world, I'm doing that now. So the surgery is kind of anticlimactic. And I wouldn't even have to ever tell anyone if I never wanted to.

CHRIS ROBERTS: The surgery, which along with breast enlargement and electrolysis to remove body hair, costs upwards of $30,000. It probably won't be covered by Jenkins' health insurance. Eventually, she says, she'll raise the money because she views the surgery as crucial to her self-image as a woman. What concerns her more is how she'll be received as a transsexual female and whether she'll find someone who can appreciate all that she is in relationship. Sexually, Jenkins is as nontraditional as she is in terms of gender.

ANDREA JENKINS: I guess I identify, sexual orientation-wise, as bisexual with a strong preference for males, Yeah, sexually, there should be a relationship orientation.

CHRIS ROBERTS: There is also the question of how much status Jenkins will lose as she moves from male to female and what kind of resocializing will have to take place.

ANDREA JENKINS: In dating, for example, where I was once used to maybe having meals prepared for me and having a beer brought from the fridge, now I'm expected to do those things. And it's challenging.

CHRIS ROBERTS: As Jenkins has worked her way through her gender identity crisis, her family miraculously has stuck with her. She works as an employment counselor for Hennepin County and has been amazed by the support she receives on the job, which she isn't threatened with losing. What she has lost is respect and inclusion in the larger African American community, where she says transsexualism is totally unheard of. Part of what has kept her going is her spirituality, her faith in God. I asked her whether tampering with the body she believes God gave her is immoral.

ANDREA JENKINS: God created everything. God created babies who are born with half a lung. God created children who may be born with a heart murmur. And God also created these really brilliant people who are able to help those people overcome those issues. If you can somehow correct that problem, then you should.

And all of this, again, is God's creation. It's all here for us to use if we just ask. Why should I live my life in torture because you feel that it's immoral? It would be immoral for me to continue to lie to myself and everyone around me.

CHRIS ROBERTS: Being transgender is not a 20th century phenomenon. It's been a part of the human condition for centuries. In India and in some Native American cultures, transgender people were revered or believed to be imbued with special powers.

Most psychologists and psychiatrists now view transgenderism as a serious disorder only if it causes problems in the lives of the individuals they treat. It's estimated that 1% to 2% of the population is transgender to some degree. The common link among them all, according to St. Paul psychologist Diane Olson, who has worked with transgender people for the last 24 years, is that their body doesn't match the gender identity in their mind.

DIANE OLSON: What's wrong with them is their body, not their mind. And that, I think, is what goes on with most transgender people. They don't see their mind as having a problem. It's their body that has a problem. Unfortunately, the rest of the world tends to see it just the reverse. We accept the body as being the correct way of defining who we are and not the mind.

CHRIS ROBERTS: What psychologists also believe, says Olson, is that transgenderism, for the most part, has a biological origin.

DIANE OLSON: There are a certain percentage of transgendered people who are raised as the opposite sex in their early years, from birth until they were sent to school. But for a far greater number of people, there is some chemical or hormonal event that occurred probably before birth, in the third or fourth month of pregnancy, or some kind of chromosomal or gene causal factor.

CHRIS ROBERTS: Transsexuals are not the only people who exist on the transgender continuum. Walter Bockting, coordinator of transgender services for the University of Minnesota's Program in Human Sexuality, says people experience transgender in a multitude of ways.

WALTER BOCKTING: So there might be people who just enjoy playing with gender roles. There might be people who cannot relate to either gender, to men or women. There might be people who have a bigender identity and enjoy both and combine those two. There might be people who are born female, raised as a girl, but who discover their manhood and are much more comfortable with the male gender role, and vice versa. So the motivations with which people transgress these gender lines vary greatly.

CHRIS ROBERTS: Bockting says people often confuse gender identity with sexual orientation, which, in the case of transgender individuals, are two distinct dimensions. Sexual orientation is who you're attracted to. Gender is who you are.

WALTER BOCKTING: We have male-to-female transsexuals, who are sexually oriented towards women. And if they live as transgender women, they might identify as lesbian. And the same for female-to-male transsexuals, who might be attracted to men and identify as gay after reassignment. So the two are really separate.

CHRIS ROBERTS: The University of Minnesota's transgender program is one of the few publicly funded programs in the country that combines education, individual and group therapy, and counseling and referral on sex reassignment surgery. Walter Bockting says in therapy, patients find out who they are by constructing their own autobiography.

WALTER BOCKTING: And out of that, it becomes more and more clear what kind of identity emerges. And once then they have some ideas, then they will actually practice those and take it on. So actually, for example, alter their appearance somewhat or go to a mall in the suburbs in a different gender role or go to a gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender community event. So it's trying things out, reflecting on that, and then ultimately find out what makes people most comfortable, what they see as a best fit.

CHRIS ROBERTS: Bockting says people proceed with sex reassignment if therapists and the patient mutually agree that it's the only way to resolve the patient's gender distress. Before surgery is performed, the University requires patients to take hormones and live in their new gender role for at least a year. In the Twin Cities, Andrea Jenkins' story is not that unusual. Estimates vary, but by some accounts, there are several hundred profoundly transgendered or transsexual people in the metro area alone, many drawn here by the U's program. For Minnesota Public Radio, this is Chris Roberts.