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HOUSTON — Nearly four decades before Caitlyn Jenner introduced herself to the world, Phyllis Randolph Frye came out as a transgender woman in a far less glamorous way. No Diane Sawyer, no Vanity Fair.

It was the summer of 1976. As Bruce Jenner, 26, was celebrating his decathlon victory at the Montreal Olympics, Phillip Frye, 28, was admitting defeat in suppressing his gender identity. He, becoming she, had already lost a lot: He had been forced to resign from the military for “sexual deviation.” He had been disowned by his parents, divorced by his first wife and separated from his son. He had been dismissed from several engineering jobs.

Now, with the encouragement of his second wife, Trish, he was starting to transition and wanted to be forthright. Going door to door, he distributed letters to advise the community that the neighbor formerly known as Phil — the husband, father and born-again Christian; the former Eagle Scout, Texas A & M University cadet and Army lieutenant — was going to start living full time as Phyllis.

In response, she got her house egged, her tires slashed, and her driveway spray-painted with obscenities. Teenagers openly mocked her, the engineering profession blackballed her and the federal government rejected her for a job because of her “desire to impersonate the opposite sex.”

During that bleak, embittering time, Ms. Frye could not have imagined that someday this tiny transgender population would generate a hugely visible movement, and that she would be considered not only one of its pioneers but a pillar of her civic community — the country’s first openly transgender judge.

“All my life, I have gotten judged,” she said in a recent interview in her office, surrounded by her many degrees and awards, movie posters for “Tootsie” and “Transamerica,” and photographs of Trish, to whom she has been married for 42 years.

Ms. Frye, 67, did not watch Ms. Jenner, 65, come out as a transgender woman on national television in late April: “It’s old hat to me,” she said. Nearly 17 million viewers did, though, as Ms. Jenner tapped into what some have seen as a bafflingly sudden moment of ubiquity for transgender Americans (roughly estimated at 700,000 adults). But this moment — when transition stories are increasingly and empathetically featured in the media, campuses buzz with gender politics and the president condemns transgender persecution in the State of the Union address — did not materialize out of thin air. It evolved over the last quarter-century as Ms. Frye and others built a transgender civil rights movement, fighting dexterously to rebrand a highly marginalized group; demand, and increasingly win, equal protection under the law; and put the T in L.G.B.T.

Despite a historic affinity between gay and transgender people, mainstream gay rights groups did not initially embrace the transgender cause as their own. They saw it as a liability. Yet from the time their far younger movement coalesced, most transgender advocates felt kinship and a practical need to ally themselves with the large, relatively well-financed gay movement.

“We realized that we should have a parallel movement, but also needed to be dug into the L.G.B.T. movement,” said Mara Keisling, the executive director of the National Center for Transgender Equality. “The folks I work most closely with are all very nice, sweet people, but we had to be such hard asses. At a certain point, we said, ‘No more moving gay people ahead without trans people.’ ” Having felt the sting of gay groups’ rejection long ago, Ms. Frye led some of the earliest sorties in what became a pitched battle for transgender inclusion. She repeatedly argued that homophobia and transphobia were entwined, and made the case that many transgender people are themselves gay.

At the same time, Ms. Frye was one of the first to act on the need for transgender advocates to develop their own legal theories and agenda. In the 1990s, she convened annual transgender law conferences, where grass-roots activists from around the country first met and developed an aspirational transgender bill of rights. Between events, she helped tether the growing network through group emails she called her “Phyllabusters.”

“Caitlyn Jenner stands on the shoulders of somebody like Phyllis Frye,” said Shannon Price Minter, the legal director of the National Center for Lesbian Rights and one of several transgender appointees by the Obama administration. “Phyllis is the grandmother of our movement.”

Precursors

When Ms. Frye was a small child, Christine Jorgensen became a worldwide celebrity after traveling to Denmark for gender reassignment surgery: “Ex-GI Becomes Blonde Beauty,” The New York Daily News trumpeted in December 1952; “Bronx ‘Boy’ Is Now a Girl,” said The New York Times. In the years that followed, while other transgender people quietly sought treatment abroad, too, no real transgender community developed. There were precursors: private cross-dressing clubs on the West and East Coasts, most notably Hose & Heels (for heterosexual men only), and a gritty urban subculture of drag queens in big cities like New York and San Francisco.

But in San Antonio, in the 1950s, Ms. Frye grew up the middle child in a middle-class home where gender roles, true to the era, were rigidly fixed. Her father was an engineer and a Mason, her mother a stay-at-home mom and amateur painter. Tarzan and Jane, she called them in a speech once.

As a young boy, Phillip Frye coveted his female cousin’s junior bake set and his mother’s spike heels. But he got “the cues” — “not for boys, not for you.” Fearful of detection, he overcompensated with machismo, telling the “dirtiest jokes” with the “foulest mouth.”

“I was so good at being a guy that I should have won an Oscar,” she said. “I was an extremely good Boy Scout — but I would have rather been in the Girl Scouts. I was the R.O.T.C. commander of my high school — but I would have rather been the head cheerleader. And I cross-dressed whenever I could, in private.”

"Phyllis is the grandmother of our movement." Shannon Price Minter, legal director of the National Center for Lesbian Rights In Phillip’s high school years, his mother uncovered a cache of her own clothing, and underclothing, in her son’s closet. Was Phillip just experimenting? she asked hopefully. Yeah, he said.

“My parents would have pitched me out then if I told the truth,” Ms. Frye said. “Because when I did come out, a decade later, my dad said, ‘You’re dead to me if you do this.’ And he kept his word.”

In 1966, as Phillip Frye was entering the nearly all-male engineering program at Texas A & M, transgender history was being made, though that has come to be understood only in retrospect.

In the Tenderloin district of San Francisco, the drag queens who hung out at Gene Compton’s 24-hour cafeteria rose up against police harassment. Susan Stryker, who wrote “Transgender History,” published in 2008, considers it the first collective, militant “queer” uprising against police harassment in this country’s history. It predated by three years the Stonewall Rebellion, which galvanized the gay rights movement.

Nineteen sixty-six was also the year that Harry Benjamin, a German-born endocrinologist based in New York, published a groundbreaking book, “The Transsexual Phenomenon.” Dr. Benjamin advanced the now widely accepted idea that gender identity could be distinct from anatomical gender; he implored the American medical community to help those who so desired align their bodies with their identities through hormones and surgery. Additionally, the first university-based gender identity clinic in the country opened at the Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. Dr. Benjamin’s research and the clinic were both bankrolled by one of the doctor’s patients, a wealthy transgender man named Reed Erickson; the movement continued to be self-financed by transgender people through the early 2000s. Wearing the garrison cap of a “fish,” or freshman member of the Corps of Cadets, in conservative College Station, Tex., Phillip Frye, like most Americans, had no idea such things were occurring. Like many transgender people of that generation, he thought he was alone, or nearly so.

During his junior year at college, Phillip Frye married his girlfriend. They had a son. While he continued to dress in women’s clothing, he did so furtively and shamefully, explaining his secret to his wife only after she caught him.

Upon graduation, he was commissioned by the Army and stationed in West Germany with his family. His marriage began to crumble. Lieutenant Frye revealed the reason behind the marital discord to his superiors, and was sent back to the United States, where he made a good-faith effort to be “cured.”

He underwent drug therapy, hypnosis and aversion therapy, in which he was induced to vomit while handling women’s underwear. The therapies didn’t work. His wife filed for divorce.

And in mid-1972, the Army, citing a diagnosis of “transvestism, chronic, treated, unchanged, manifested by the compulsive need to wear female clothing,” accepted his resignation “in lieu of elimination.” He was granted an honorable discharge because he had been forthright about his personal life.