THE TRANS-CYBERIAN MAIL WAY

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