To begin with, I would like to take you back to a hot summer afternoon four years ago. It was on June 30, 1998 that seven people gathered in David Valentine’s living room in his apartment in Greenwich Village to found an organization that was to be called the New York Association for Gender Rights Advocacy. In three days, this organization will be four years old, still a toddler in the developmental life cycle of an organization. When we founded NYAGRA four years ago, it was only seven people sitting in David’s apartment, thinking big and dreaming of a day when transgendered and gender-variant people would enjoy full legal equality in this city and this state.

It is important to realize, as we celebrate the passage of Int. No. 24, that four years ago, the idea of a transgender rights bill passing the New York City Council in April 2002 would have seemed far-fetched; and anyone who would have suggested that that bill would pass the Council 45-5 would have been accused of delusions of grandeur.

I would encourage you to go to the offices of Gay City News – the successor to Lesbian & Gay New York – and to go through back issues of LGNY; you won’t see any stories about transgender rights. Look at old issues of the New York Blade News, too, and you’ll find nothing about transgender rights. There might be the occasional article about transgender-inclusive social services or a transgendered victim of a hate crime; and of course, you’ll find the usual photos of drag queens and other performers sprinkled in amongst the ‘serious’ news. But you’ll see little about a visible transgender community and nothing about anything that even remotely resembles an organized transgender political movement. If the virtual absence of any transgender political organizing is apparent in the gay press from 1998, in the mainstream media in New York, you’ll notice a complete absence of anything about transgender rights.

Four years ago, no mainstream politician in New York had even heard the word ‘transgender.’ A few openly gay or lesbian elected officials were quietly talking about these issues, but only within small circles and even then, only sporadically. Social services for the transgender community were extremely limited, and the only transgender-specific program of any prominence was the Gender Identity Project of what was then known as the Lesbian & Gay Community Services Center; today, of course, it bears the inclusive organizational name, ‘LGBT Community Center,’ and I’m delighted to recognize the Center as a co-sponsor of this event. Four years ago, the New York City Gay & Lesbian Pride March featured the usual gaggle of drag queens, but there was no ‘transgender’ in its name. This Sunday, marchers will stride down Fifth Avenue in the first LGBT Pride March sponsored by Heritage of Pride, which last fall changed the name of all of its events to be bisexual- and transgender-inclusive.

Four years ago, there were a few small transgender political organizations, but there were none that were actively involved in the legislative arena, and none whose name would have been recognized by any non-gay politician. Four years ago, no one was talking about transgender inclusion in discrimination or hate crimes law; it simply wasn’t on the agenda.

Today, virtually every organization in this city has adopted ‘LGBT’ as either part of its name, its sub-title, or its organizational self-description. And not only LGBT social service providers and AIDS agencies, but non-LGBT, non-AIDS social service providers are rushing to include ‘transgender’ in their mission statements and in their programming.

Candidates for citywide and statewide office are actually using the ‘T’ word, and whether they are fully on board with the legislative agenda of the transgender community, they are at the very least paying lip service to our issues. And of course, we now have a city human rights law that explicitly includes gender identity and expression.

There’s still a long way to go in order to ensure that all transsexual, transgendered, and gender-variant people can live lives free from invidious discrimination and violence. But we can say that New York City is now the largest jurisdiction in the country to have adopted a transgender anti-discrimination law through legislation; and that is an achievement for a still-small organization that is only four years old and a community that remains among the most marginalized in this city.

What we are witnessing is the transformation of transgender rights from a marginal issue discussed only within a small circle of transgender activists to an issue that candidates for elected office in this city and increasingly throughout the state must address. Hence it is not only a transformation of transgender rights as an issue, it is nothing less than the transformation of the political context in which the issue of transgender rights is discussed. To put it in terms that a social construction theorist might use, the discourse of transgender rights and of transgender inclusion has become the dominant discourse within the LGBT community here in New York City. Indeed, the very fact that we call it an ‘LGBT community’ today, and not simply a ‘lesbian and gay community,’ as it was widely referred to back in 1998, shows how far we’ve come. If ‘discourse’ is simply a way of thinking and talking about something, then the way in which we think of ourselves as a community has changed, and equally significantly, the way we communicate that to the non-queer world has also changed. And the passage of Intro 24 reflects the transformation of that discourse.

Enactment of that law is NYAGRA’s greatest legislative victory, and the greatest legislative victory for the transgender community in this city and in this state. We deserve the opportunity to celebrate the tremendous achievement that it represents. But I believe it is also incumbent upon us to understand how this victory came about. For it is only by engaging in a rigorous examination of the campaign for Intro 24 that we can understand how to reproduce it elsewhere, in other cities and at the statewide level, where such a breakthrough is not yet in sight. And so we must move beyond a mere description of this campaign to an explanation of it.

What I would like to do today, therefore, is to explain as well as to describe the emergence of a movement for transgender rights through the perspective of the campaign for Int. No. 24, the transgender rights bill first introduced in the New York City Council as Int. No. 754 in June 2000. Towards that end, I will turn to Malcolm Gladwell’s book, The Tipping Point, which provides a conceptual framework that may be useful for explaning the success of the campaign for Intro 24, even if there is nothing LGBT-specific in the book itself.

The central hypothesis of The Tipping Point is that "ideas and products and messages and behaviors spread just like viruses do" (Gladwell, p. 7). While we ordinarily associate the term ‘epidemic’ with horrible diseases such as the bubonic plague, the Ebola virus, and HIV/AIDS, there are both good and bad epidemics. An example of a bad epidemic that Gladwell cites in his book is the epidemic of smoking among youth, while an example of a good epidemic – ‘good’ at least for their manufacturer – was the sudden popularity of Hush Puppies, the out-of-fashion shoes from the 1950s that once again became wildly fashionable in the 1990s among young people in lower Manhattan.

Just as one could describe an explosion of crime as a ‘bad’ epidemic, so the dramatic fall of crime such as took place here in New York City could be conceptualized as a ‘good’ epidemic. Gladwell goes into considerable depth in describing and explaining the ‘Broken Windows’ theory of crime that Bill Bratton applied as police commissioner. The theory was that addressing small crimes such as graffiti-tagging and turnstile-jumping in the subway could lead tobig overall reductions in crime, and it seems to have worked spectacularly well. There is, of course, the whole issue of racial profiling, which is not addressed in the book, but the point of the example is simply to illustrate how small changes in the lived urban environment can radically alter the context in which crime takes place. What I would like to do, a la Gladwell, is to call the campaign for the New York City transgender rights bill an epidemic (of the best sort), and use this address to attempt to explain it. For it seems to me that it is not enough simply to describe the campaign; to be able to draw lessons that might be useful to activists elsewhere, it is incumbent on us to understand the reasons for its success, and that requires something more akin to social science.

Now, one might think that a Ph.D. in political science would qualify one to attempt such an explanation. But the truth is, academic political science is full of theories of limited explanatory value and dubious utility to advocates and activists in the so-called ‘real world.’ Other than the notion of ‘band-waggoning’ – which is, just as its name might imply, the notion that politicians jump on the band wagon once they see a success in the making – there is little in academic political science that I find useful for attempting to explain the success of the campaign for Intro 24. Indeed, it may be the very fact that Malcolm Gladwell stands outside the charmed circle of academic political science theorists that he can think so clearly and creatively. Gladwell has no need to get articles published in the American Political Science Review, and as a journalist, he writes far better – more clearly and more entertainingly – than most academic political scientists.

In his book, Gladwell offers three simple laws to explain social change, and illustrates these with interesting case studies that offer compelling evidence for the theory of the tipping point. The three rules of epidemics, as he calls, them, are these:

Rule I. The Law of the Few. "Social epidemics...are driven by the efforts of a handful of exceptional people," Gladwell declares (21). According to Gladwell’s theory, social change is engineered by a relatively small number of people in any context.

Rule II. The Stickiness Factor. According to Gladwell, "There are specific ways of making a contagious message memorable; there are relatively simple changes in the presentation and structuring of information that can make a big difference in how much of an impact it makes"(25).

Rule III. The Power of Context. As Gladwell puts it, "The lesson of the Power of Context is that we are more than just sensitive to changes in context; we are exquisitely sensitive to them"(140).

This, then is the theory of the tipping point. At its core is the hypothesis that an epidemic is about the process of transformation – of attitudes and of behavior – by a small number of people working creatively to change reality. And that is fairly accurate description of the campaign for Intro 24.