The Mother of Us All Where would we be without Phyllis Frye?

Phyllis Frye is the Quentin Crisp, the Bela Abzug, the Sidney Poitier of the transgender movement in Houston, and perhaps even the country. Forthright and smart, Frye was out there when nobody in Houston was out there as a transgender. From speaking to countless university human sexuality classes, to successfully changing, in 1980, Houston’s ordinance that prohibited crossdressing, to founding the Transgender Law Conference in 1991, to receiving lifetime achievement awards from the national Lavender Law Conference, the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, and Houston’s Unity Committee–Frye has championed transgender causes for over 25 years. (And at no small toll from stress and harassment.)

Despite threats of saying she’s going to slow down, Frye recently announced her candidacy for one of the county at-large positions for the State Bar of Texas. "It is a win-win situation, she says. "If I win, it says a lot for being OUT, and I know I will be a terrific director in service to the State Bar of Texas. If I lose, it will still be a win, because Harris County lawyers who have ignored the issue will have to think about the issue. It is kinda like Rosie O’Donnell coming out as a lesbian parent. People have to think about a real person that they have come to know."

A large part of Frye’s activism has been as a lawyer, in her representation of important transgender cases and in her legal writings, which are creating a body of legal reference for a full gamut of transgender issues, such as "what clothing [transgendered people] are allowed to wear on the job, which restroom they are allowed to use on the job, their right to marry, and the very definition of their sex."

To give a sample of Frye’s writings, we quote from the introduction to her sweeping law journal article "The International Bill of Gender Rights vs. the Cider House Rules." She starts by describing what may be her most famous case to date, Littleton vs. Prange, in which a San Antonio court of appeals found that Christie Lee Littleton had not indeed been legally married to her husband–and thus could not sue for medical malpractice in his death–because her birth certificate said that she’d been born a boy. Frye writes:

"The decision reached by the court in Littleton underscores the need to remove or ignore the present body of case law and social mores that operate against transgenders. John Irving’s book The Cider House Rules and the movie by the same name serve as a clear parallel to the jurisprudential approach we must take toward this type of a legal environment. In The Cider House Rules, the experiences of Homer and Candy, both at the actual cider house and at the orphanage in St. Cloud, reveal a profound theme that cannot be ignored. In life, we are confronted with sets of rules that are legally imposed or socially ingrained. If these rules are absurd or inapplicable, we must ignore them to live our lives until we are able to change the rules or create new ones. Similarly, so long as the laws and social mores of society are absurd or inapplicable, transgenders must ignore them and continue to work toward having the rules changed or removed."

To read more about Frye’s work, see her webpage at www.transgenderlegal.com. If you wish to receive her trans-informative "Phyllabuster" newsletter, e-mail PRFrye@aol.com. –Ann Walton Sieber

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