SAN FRANCISCO

“WE figured we’ll print 500 copies and they’ll take months to sell,” Rocco Kayiatos said the other day, referring to Original Plumbing, a quarterly he started a little over a year ago with a friend, Amos Mac.

“We just thought there was a need because the world is pretty much ignorant of the existence of transmen,” said Mr. Kayiatos, a poet and rapper who performs under the name Katastrophe and who, like Mr. Mac, identifies himself as a transman.

It turned out that Mr. Kayiatos’s assumptions were both right and wrong. It is true that a lot of people remain uninformed, if not about the existence of transmen  to use an umbrella term for someone born female who identifies as male (think of Chaz Bono)  then about the variety of the experiences that fall under the rubric and transmen’s growing cultural presence.

Those people probably don’t live in the Bay Area, where the zine is published, and where transmen have been gathering over the past decade in numbers no official agency has counted. But the scope of the population can be guessed at from its visibility on the local scene.