she was trans and she refused to answer The festival maintained a women-born-women policy since its inception, as evidenced by posters from the first festival in 1975 . Each year afterwards a group of women, both transgender and cisgender, protested the exclusion of trans women from the event. Initially these protests were small and sometimes carried on inside of the camp. A more organized group of trans women and their allies began camping and holding demonstrations outside the gate. After a five-year hiatus, Camp Trans returned in 1999, led by transgender activists Riki Ann Wilchins and Leslie Feinberg, as well as many members of the Boston and Chicago Lesbian Avengers. The events of this year drew attention and controversy, culminating in tensions as a small group of transgender activists were admitted into the festival to exchange dialogue with organizers and to negotiate a short-lived compromise allowing only post-operative trans women on the festival land. The Transsexual Menace and Transgender Nation The Transsexual Menace, co-founded by Riki Wilchins and Denise Norris in 1994, the year that Transgender Nation folded, tapped into and provided an outlet for the outrage many transgender people experienced in the brutal murder of Brandon Teena, a transgender youth, and two of his friends in a farmhouse in rural Nebraska on December 31, 1993. The murders, depicted in Kimberly Peirce's Academy Award-winning feature film Boys Don't Cry (2000), called dramatic attention to the serious, on-going problem of anti-transgender violence and hate crimes. The Transexual Menace continues to have periodic resurgences to protest both transgender hate-crimes and the marginalization and/or exclusion of transgender issues by the LGBT community. Another radical and effective organisation was Transgender Nation which noisily dragged transgender issues to the forefront of San Francisco's queer community, and at the local level successfully integrated transgender concerns with the political agendas of lesbian, gay, and bisexual activists to forge a truly inclusive GLBTQ community. Transgender Nation organized a media-grabbing protest at the 1993 annual meeting of the American Psychiatric Association to call attention to the official pathologization of transgender phenomena. Transgender Nation paved the way for subsequent similar groups such as Transexual Menace and It's Time America that went on to play a larger role in the national political arena. GenderPAC GenderPAC (Gender Public Advocacy Coalition) fulfills a vital need for advocacy, both within the transgender community and outside it, on gender-related issues and is by far the