Judith Valente

Special for USA TODAY

BLOOMINGTON, Ill. — As a member of the Army National Guard, Jordan Becker drove tanks and shot M-16 rifles. Dark-haired, muscular, with a trim goatee, Becker works as a personal trainer, pumping 200 pounds of iron daily to build up his biceps and chest muscles.

Becker looked a lot different growing up. In a photograph at age 4, he is a girl with curls in a frilly dress. Even then, he says, he knew he was meant to be a boy. "When I started dressing myself, I wore boys' clothes. In school, I always wanted to hang out with the boys at recess. I played football," he recalls.

Two years ago, Becker began transitioning from female to male. He injects himself with testosterone every two weeks and has had both breasts surgically removed. "This is not something that's just skin deep," says Becker, 25. "It's about so much more than the hormones. It's about becoming who I always wanted to be."

References to transgender individuals date to the ancient Greeks, and in some cultures, transgender individuals are considered spiritually gifted and afforded special status. In U.S. society, they remain largely ostracized, even as the gay rights movement has made great strides toward social acceptance.

Emboldened by a new Amazon.com series titled Transparent, about a father who becomes a woman, and Netflix's popular show Orange Is the New Black, which features a transgender actress, many like Becker increasingly are speaking out about their lives.

Thursday is Transgender Day of Remembrance, which commemorates victims of hate crimes. It's been a tradition since 1999, following the death of Rita Hester, a transgender activist from Boston who was stabbed 20 times. No one was ever charged with the crime.

A study in 2011 by The Williams Institute at UCLA estimates that about 700,000 Americans are transgender. Dignity USA, a Catholic advocacy group for gay and transgender people, puts the number at 1% of the U.S. population. A definitive count is hard to determine since many transgender people go to great lengths to blend into society.

Several high-profile transgender individuals recently have been in the news. In the fashion world, transgender models Andrej Pejic and Claudia Charriez are the latest rage. Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, R-Fla., has publicly defended her son Rodrigo, 28, who was born Amanda. Chelsea Elizabeth Manning, an Army soldier convicted of passing classified documents to WikiLeaks, began life as Bradley, a male. Manning, who is serving time in the all-male Leavenworth Federal Prison in Kansas, has sued to receive hormone treatments, but the Pentagon has refused to pay for them.

"Transgender people live in a world that categorically excludes us," says Owen Daniel-McCarter, a Chicago attorney and transgender rights advocate. "Not just excludes us, but doesn't recognize our existence."

Transgender individuals say they were born trapped in bodies of the wrong gender. Being transgender isn't the same as being gay or cross-dressing. It is known clinically as "gender dysphoria" – a severe discontent with one's assigned sex.

Little is known about what causes gender dysphoria, says Robert Garofalo, a pediatrician at Lurie Children's Hospital in Chicago who has worked with adolescents who question their gender. "What I do know is that it's something that occurs with much greater frequency than many of us in this country think," Garofalo says.

A NEW LIFE

At work, Chris Haley wears loose-fitting shirts and a jacket to conceal burgeoning breasts, the result of estrogen treatments. At home, Haley becomes Kristen, a woman in an ash blond wig with a fondness for silver jewelry and dangling earrings.

Haley, 59, has children and a grandchild and remains married to the same woman as when she was a man. Haley says her wife "went through a lot of grief at the loss of her husband" when she began hormone therapy. But, she says, "it's a part of our married life now. We both agreed we love each other too much and that life apart would be unconscionable."

Laura Thor, a Littleton, Colo., clinical social worker who specializes in gender-identity problems, says that in 25 years of practice, she has worked with "pastors, physicians, teachers, actors, truckers and computer engineers."

Thor says transgender individuals challenge society to think more creatively about what it means to be human. "A key line for me in the Book of Genesis says, 'Male and female God made them.' If the word and is used and not or, isn't something being hinted at regarding human beings and their range of diversity?" Thor asks.

Now that public opinion is turning in favor of legalized gay marriage, Thor and others say transgender issues will become the next civil rights frontier.

Some signs of tolerance are emerging:

The U.S. Justice Department's Community Relations Service has held training sessions with law enforcement agencies to break down stereotypes and ensure transgender people are adequately protected by police.

An increasing number of health plans pay for hormone therapy. The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where a significant number of students identify as transgender, says its health plan covers both hormone treatment and gender-reassignment surgery.

The federal government allows transgender individuals to change their gender designation on Social Security cards and passports. Many states permit those changes on driver's licenses and birth certificates.

BARRIERS PERSIST

For people such as Becker, there is still a long way to go. He gave up his dream of becoming an Army "lifer" because the military, while accepting openly gay recruits, considers transgender individuals "mentally and physically unfit for duty."

Becker says members of his Guard unit supported his decision to become a male, but he chose to leave rather than fight the Army's policy. "It's frustrating. I'm willing to serve my county, go overseas for my country, even die for my country, but because of some regulations in a book, I'm disqualified," he says. Becker is working with civil liberties lawyers to change the military's policy.

Ande Biggs, 19, who lives in Washington, Ill., says she knew she would run into people in the small, rural community who remember her from high school as "Andrew." Biggs says it took months to work up the courage to fill a prescription for female hormones.

"It took me five months to mentally prepare myself," Biggs says, "to know that I love myself enough to do this, that this is something I'm doing for myself."

Transgender people experience high rates of homelessness, unemployment and depression largely due to prejudice, according to the National Center for Transgender Equality. More than half of transgender individuals report having considered suicide.

Becker says that as a teen, he contemplated suicide twice. "I remember lying in bed thinking, 'Why does God hate me?' " He says transgender people will continue gaining acceptance if they step outside the shadows. "People fear what they don't know. As I always tell people, I'm still the same person. It doesn't matter what's in my pants or under my shirt."