The Trans-Cyberian Mail Way

Certain features of cyberspace have allowed new forms of minority activism in many spheres of influence. This paper looks at how those features have been particularly appropriate to the life experiences of the transsexual and cross-dressing communities. They have enabled a new community identification category, transgender. This new category has enabled transgender people to acknowledge the transgender self as having an experience outside of the conventional binary dichotomies of sex and gender. Through the experience of the virtual self in cyberspace they have been able to acknowledge an experiential self - an actual self, and become aware of the inade quacies of the self they experience in the real world. This has changed the transgender community's understanding of the legal problems they face and their use of law to tackle those problems. This paper looks at two particular areas in which this new understanding has enabled new forms of activism, and considers how the under standing of the actual self has arisen.