As a transgendered man, Morty Diamond is part of the newest visible contingent of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender community.

Morty Diamond got hit by the question in the summer of 2002, when he was heading into his job deejaying at Lafitte's in Exile on Bourbon Street. A night bartender setting up for his own shift thought he looked familiar. The inquiry took Diamond by surprise -- in the months that he'd been playing CDs and videos for the bar's crowd of mostly older, friendly gay men looking for a less rowdy hangout than Oz or the Bourbon Pub, the issue had never come up.

"I didn't decide to pass on purpose," Diamond remembers. "They assumed I was a fag as soon as I plopped my ass down on the chair to get interviewed. I didn't think it was going to be an issue, but by the time I'd worked there a few weeks, I decided it would just be best to keep it to myself."

Ten months earlier, Diamond, the 29-year-old editor of the 2005 anthology From the Inside Out: Radical Gender Transformation, FTM and Beyond (Manic D Press), had moved to New Orleans after several years living in San Francisco. During the late 1990s, he operated a club night called the Cud Club, a weekly party for gay, lesbian, transgendered and genderqueer partiers (more on these terms later). He felt comfortable in a forward-thinking community where gender and sexual identity existed in a reasonably safe and fluid space.

"So I needed a job, and to my San Francisco way of thinking, it was 'Go where the queers are,'" says Diamond, who has since moved to New York City. "They'll love trannies, and whatever. But of course you have to remember it has to do with concentration. Of course, a lot of people know that transwomen (men living as women) exist -- unfortunately, they don't pass as well as transmen. If you've never been introduced to a transman before, there's the facial hair, and the low voice. You just don't know."

As a transgendered man, Diamond is part of the newest visible contingent of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender (LGBT) community. Born biologically female and lesbian-identified since his teens, Diamond began taking injectable testosterone in his early 20s, binding his chest and using a male name. In 2004, he underwent chest surgery, leaving small scars where his breasts had been. With the flat chest, lowered voice, facial hair and beefier upper body, he easily passes for a biological -- albeit short -- guy.

This ease of passing suggests why this community might not have been locally visible until recently. Diamond, who briefly attended a Female-to-Male (FTM) support group during his time in New Orleans, says that in his experience, most local FTMs appeared happy to pass as gay men.

"I didn't live in New Orleans long enough to feel accepted or not by the dyke community, or feel like there was or wasn't a trans community. But a lot of the guys in the group were living -- it's called 'stealth' in San Francisco. Just these very straight guys from Kentwood or Lafayette who'd come in just for the group."

The physical transition of a female body to a transgendered male one is jump-started by intramuscular injections of testosterone, which trigger a kind of second physical adolescence. The voice changes and drops; facial hair thickens; menstruation quits and the upper body redistributes and packs on muscle. Many local FTMs opt for elective hysterectomy. Chest surgery, which can cost up to $8,000, is popular.

But metoidioplasty, also called phalloplasty, is generally considered to be prohibitively expensive for what you get -- a scrotal sac constructed out of labial tissue, plus an extended clitoris augmented with flesh taken from the upper arm and often fitted with an implant to aid in erection, all for $70,000 to $100,000.

"For that price, I could get a really nice car," says one local FTM.

For many FTMs, "sex" is seen as the result of a capricious chromosomal coin toss -- but "gender" is a self-selected identity. Some prefer a fresh vocabulary, using invented gender-neutral pronouns like "ze" or "hir."

And then there are practical considerations -- such as public bathrooms.

"I've been harassed in the women's room every day of my life since I was 12," says K*, a 23-year-old pre-op (on hormones, pre-surgery) FTM. "The men's room is a totally different experience. Men don't look each other in the eye in the bathroom. They go to the bathroom because they have to go. Women want to hang out and talk -- which makes the men's room a much more comfy space in general for me."

K's bulky, gym-rat upper body makes him an imposing figure, but he comes across as a friendly math nerd. He recently completed a master's degree in mechanical engineering at Tulane University, and most questions about acceptance and community are met with the self-effacing shrugs of someone who's spent the past two years in the library.

Raised in New Orleans, K came out as a lesbian to his family at 17 with little fanfare. "My mom is a lesbian and a psychiatrist, and she was cool with it. She's not so cool about the trans thing. She wanted me to involve her in the process more than I did. I came out before taking any physical or medical steps, and she was very against hormones. It's more of a parent thing about the idea of altering my body."

Local FTM Buck Angel says that K's experience isn't that unusual. "With FTMs, parents are usually more accepting," says Angel. "Talk to an MTF (Male to Female). I can guarantee you 90 percent of their families hate them, won't talk to them. My parents were way more accepting of me having a sex change than they ever were about me being a lesbian. It makes total sense because I was a hardcore dyke, and they were a little uncomfortable with that.

"That old-school way of thinking -- you know, here's your daughter and how do you introduce your daughter when your daughter looks like a dude -- people are very judgmental about these things. Now my parents are just like, I'm their son. I thought you had three daughters? No, we have two daughters and a son."

Angel, acknowledged as the top FTM in the porn industry, has lived and worked in the French Quarter for the past three years. "Now I don't know if there is such a thing, the trans scene in New Orleans," he says. "Most of the time I don't really relate, because I'm not really out there promoting transgender. I use the FTM thing and I use the transsexual thing, but at this point in my life, I really just consider myself a man."

Buck Angel, now in his 40s, transitioned in 1994, at a time when the media visibility for FTMs was absolutely nil. The 1999 film Boys Don't Cry, starring Hilary Swank as FTM Brandon Teena, raised some awareness. In recent years, books like Diamond's From the Inside Out and characters like the drag king FTM Ivan played by Kelly Lynch on the Showtime series The L Word have also started to bring FTMs into popular culture.

Which is what 22-year-old pre-op FTM Stevie Williams and his 20-year-old partner Mo Snow are arguing about. Walking up to a local coffee shop, the two look like your average pair of hip teenagers -- Williams in a pro-condom T-shirt and a floppy, growing-out Mohawk under a blue newsboy cap, Snow with close-cropped red hair and ears weighted with thick squiggles of stainless steel and black rubber. The treatment of the Ivan character in The L Word is of much interest to them.

"He's a drag king who obviously has some gender issues, but they haven't addressed it," says Williams. "But they haven't used any actual terminology or addressed any trans issues, other than in a very basic way."

"Ivan was really popular, and people were really interested in it," adds Snow. "But they ended up veering off in a different direction."

"But it is the L-word, not the T-word," concedes Williams, who is studying journalism at Tulane University.

In high school, Williams received a standing ovation from his family's church for a speech on his gender identity issues. The two are well versed in queer theory. Williams was out as a lesbian from his early teens, and chose to transition at 20; after some failed experimentation with femininity, Snow identifies as genderqueer, with no plans to involve hormones or surgery.

Ultimately, it seems to be young adults like them who are the face of the newest concept of gender -- comfortable with the existence of a range of identity and sexuality, armed with plenty of language to describe the issues, and able to be unimpressed with poor treatment of a trans character on a major television program instead of simply amazed by its presence at all.

"The FTM thing is still very new to people, it's something not a lot of people are aware of," says Buck Angel. "People have this preconceived notion that to be a man, you have to have a penis. But it's not black and white. It's the way it is. I mean, I'm a man with a p--y -- and people will be like, you're not a man if you have a p--y. And it's like, yes I am. The United States government recognizes that. I changed my birth certificate, my passport -- I'm totally legally male. So I'm challenging that mentality."

K puts it in simpler terms. "The thing is that I've been continually growing into just me," he says. "I don't think I've really changed that much at all. I'm just going to continue being me."

* Subject's name has been changed as per request