Annie Corbin's son Bailey, a 40-year-old Montrose resident, left their 93-percent white, Midwestern, heavily churched town about 10 years ago after realizing it had no place for him. That was around the time he finally accepted his gender identity, having been born a girl.

A mother to two other children, both sons, Corbin has grieved over the daughter she lost, but fully accepted the son she gained. She is miffed the equal rights ordinance that would have protected Bailey from discrimination failed Nov. 3. But she can loosely understand why her son's new hometown hasn't come around.

"I have something in me that made me wonder why this baby I had came out a girl that was supposed to have been a boy," Corbin said. "Was that some kind of genetic defect that her father and I put on her? Then I have to crawl back out of that and say, hey, it's nobody's fault. It's not a fault. Not a disorder. It's just how it is."

The ordinance that protected 15 classes became, to Bailey and his peers, a referendum on the decency of transgender people. Its landslide loss shattered in one night the faith he had spent a decade building in Houston. But if anything became clear after the election, it's that Houston, like much of the nation, is still trying to understand gender identity and its place in public spaces and institutions. Even families of transgender people sometimes struggle to comprehend.

Read up on the topic

The trans civil rights movement began with stacked odds because it represents such a minority, less than 1 percent of the population, according to various studies. The movement is seen as the frontier beyond gay marriage rights, and trans activists "have moved so much faster than any of these other social justice movements," said Mara Keisling, director of the National Center for Transgender Equality. "It's because they've all laid the groundwork for us."

She expects to see a tipping point as more transgender children come out, just as gay rights picked up support from families with openly gay children.

Minneapolis became the first city to pass protections for transgender people 40 years ago, and more than 225 other municipalities and 19 states have followed suit. Houston is one of the only major U.S. cities without such a law.

Despite those ordinances, the rights of transgender people are being disputed in court or considered by federal authorities.

This month, the U.S. Department of Education said an Illinois school district had violated anti-discrimination laws by prohibiting a transgender student to shower in the girls locker room. The district superintendent says he disagrees with the decision and stood by the district policy.

The Obama administration also has backed a 16-year-old Virginia transgender student who is suing for the right to use the boys restrooms at his high school, saying that denying access violates Title IX, the 1972 law prohibiting sex discrimination in education.

In Houston last week, a woman filed a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission alleging she'd been fired from a learning center in Katy for refusing to address a 6-year-old child as a transgender boy. The center denies that was what led to her termination.

Susan Maasch, a director of the Maine-based Trans Youth Equality Foundation, which advocates for kids between ages 2 and 18 who may be in various places on the gender spectrum, said people who haven't met transgender children should take the time to read up on the topic. Children should be supported, she said, rather than taught to feel shame.

The child in Katy "is entitled to the same feeling of safety and security (at school) as any other child," Maasch said.

Beyond bathrooms

In 2013, the Public Religion Research Institute reported that 9 percent of Americans had a close transgender friend or family member. In 2014, the Human Rights Campaign said 17 percent of American survey respondents knew or worked with a transgender person, increasing to 22 percent this year.

It jumps to about 80 percent when the question is about gays and lesbians.

"We all have gay friends or gay co-workers or relatives and are used to that, but transgender is kind of a new situation for us to take into consideration when laws like this come up to vote," said Thomas Speier, a 42-year-old IT manager in Jersey Village.

He could have supported the ordinance - and its broad protections for others - had it not included transgender people, though he admits his view might change if he knew even one transgender person.

Speier said he also could have supported the ordinance had the opposition not so effectively framed the discourse around bathroom encounters. Even proponents were uncomfortable with that topic, Keisling argues. It's one of few public spaces that, in general, is taboo for conversation. ("Bathrooms are yucky," she said.)

Instead of negating unfounded fears of transgender predators, activists avoided the subject, Keisling said, just as the gay rights movement long avoided myths about gay people being child abusers.

"And the same with (gay) marriage," she said. "We didn't talk about marriage because we were afraid if we asked for marriage that people would flip out, and we wouldn't get job protections and things like that."

Anti-gay activists framed debates around the sex act.

Indeed, Texans could still use sodomy convictions to discriminate against gays and lesbians until the Supreme Court shot down state laws in 2003.

Houston attorney John Nechman was part of that effort.

As a Korean immigrant, he literally fought his way through adolescence in 1970s Houston, a gay Asian in an America still licking its Vietnam War wounds. He came to love the city and turned his penchant for fighting into a successful law firm specializing in immigration and LGBT issues.

He still faces discrimination. And he once had to correct a contractor who had come to the office and cried foul when he ran into Bailey, Corbin's son, in the men's restroom. He is a paralegal at the firm. But Nechman thought Houston had turned a corner - until Election Day.

"I'm not feeling the friendliness of my own town anymore," he said.

The impending defeat crystallized for Nechman the Sunday before the election sitting with his brother, Scott, at their mother's dinner table.

Scott had always accepted John, his sexual orientation and his partner.

Scott asked out of the blue: "Why are they doing this ordinance to let men in women's restrooms?"

John's heart sank.

Scott ended up voting for the ordinance, after he learned about its broad protections for multiple classes. He has no doubt transgender people routinely face discrimination. But he admits he was blindsided by loud, emotional arguments from both camps, and that his understanding of transgender issues has had to slowly evolve.

'Ease into it'

He still has concerns about potentially volatile confrontations between people in bathrooms - like a woman in transition unintentionally scaring a girl in the ladies room - and thinks a sensible solution might be to require that future construction include a third bathroom.

"I don't want to be force fed anything," he said. "I want to ease into it and figure it out."

While Houston debates how to proceed beyond the election, Bailey lives in a virtual bubble in Montrose, scarcely venturing beyond the city limits. At a pizza joint in Waller once, he endured snickering, laughing and pointing. In his neighborhood, though, people aren't surprised to see him with his beard and breasts, he said.

His mother doesn't trip over pronouns anymore. But she also hasn't forgotten her daughter.

"Sometimes I hear things come out of his mouth that make me fall back into the old days, when he was a child," Corbin said. "It's only a flash. I still have three sons."

Emily Foxhall contributed to this story.