Tiffany Woods left her office in Fremont one day last week to meet with a 17-year-old boy who identifies as a girl and has been rejected by her family.

Woods is working with the youth to help her finish high school, set goals, think about a job and understand that she is not alone.

"This girl's family is traditional Catholic Latino," says Woods. "They expect their son to be a son."

Woods, a 47-year-old male-to-female transgender person, added, "I was the first transgender this teenager had ever met. It's different over here in the East Bay."

The only resource

Woods runs TransVision, the only health and resource center for transgender and transsexual women in Alameda County. The nonprofit, which Woods co-founded in 2002 and is funded by the county's Office of AIDS, works with transgender women ranging in age from 17 to 55.

Woods defines transgender as someone who is living as the gender to which he or she was not born. Much of TransVision's work is in the prevention and treatment of HIV.

"Our original mission statement was to create HIV services for transgender women," says Woods. "Now there is a great need for employment services, services dealing with discrimination issues and housing. And we are seeing a lot more youth coming out and doing survival sex work on the street because they've been kicked out of the house."

Pointing to the 2002 murder of transgender youth Gwen Araujo in the East Bay town of Newark, Woods says fear persists in the community.

"When you get outside of San Francisco, the world is a very different place," she says with a dry laugh. "It's conservative. We don't hang a rainbow flag on our door. It's still much more stealth living."

Woods, who is married to a woman and has three young children, says, "It appears to others that we live as a lesbian couple, and my kids just know they have two moms."

Telling the stories

In addition to her work at TransVision, Woods is the associate producer of "Trans Francisco," a documentary focusing on the San Francisco male-to-female transsexual community. The film premiered Saturday at the Frameline San Francisco International LGBT Film Festival.

"The film is there to tell the stories of the women in the film, including myself," says Woods, who is featured with her wife, Bridget. "We want to show that many of us are looking for the same thing that everyone else wants: family, security, health care, jobs and quality of life. And, we hope to move hearts and minds forward in a better understanding of trans people, specifically, trans women." {sbox}