CHICAGO (AP) – It’s another Wednesday night as a small group of regulars trickles into a youth center tucked on Chicago’s north side.

From the city and suburbs, they are an eclectic bunch – dressed in everything from jeans and T-shirts to pumps and sparkly dresses. Some are college students, full of hope for the future. Others are street kids, estranged from their families and finding it difficult to survive.

What binds them together is the desire to be around people like themselves – those who are transsexual, androgynous or, as some describe it, “gender fluid.”

“Groups in general, I’m not big on. But I meet good folks here,” says David Fischer, a 20-year-old college student who recently began making the transition from female to male. He sports a suit jacket and a fedora, and has a blue mohawk.

For him and others, these Wednesday nights are a chance to share information, sometimes a meal – and, at least for a few hours, to escape the judgment of the outside world.

“Gay kids have a veneer they can hide behind. They can blend if they want to. A lot of these kids don’t have that veneer, so 24-7, they are bombarded with discrimination at home and on the street,” says Dr. Rob Garofalo, a physician who specializes in adolescent medicine at Chicago’s Children’s Memorial Hospital. He helped create the youth center with assistance from other agencies, including the Howard Brown Health Center, a clinic for gay men, lesbians and transgender people.

The Broadway Youth Center, which opened last fall to serve teens and young adults with a wide array of needs, is one of only a few places across the country with support services for those who are questioning their gender – something doctors say is happening at younger and younger ages.

Often, these young clients have strained or broken relationships with their families. And because it is much less common to be transsexual than lesbian or gay, finding peers who are going through the same thing can be difficult.

“They are clearly, clearly more at risk than any other population we deal with,” Garofalo says, noting that young transsexuals, more than others he treats, are more likely to be homeless or involved in prostitution as a means to make money to survive.

The pain of that life is apparent one evening as members of the youth group discuss a movie they’ve just watched. The film is called Soldier’s Girl and is based on the true story of a U.S. service member who was brutally murdered by a fellow enlistee after he fell in love with a transsexual woman.

The mood after the movie is somber.

“At least the ‘trans’ person didn’t die,” one youth offers quietly.

Still, it’s not all bad for these young people who – beyond the chance to share such moments with an empathetic group – also are aware that they’re living in a time of growing acceptance. Illinois, for instance, recently became one of a small but growing number of states to prohibit discrimination of transsexuals in such areas as employment and housing.

Today, more transgender people who are 18 or older also have greater access to doctors who can prescribe hormones to help in the transition from one gender to another. This is an important development, Garofalo says, because many who can’t get hormones legally buy them on the black market and take them without a doctor’s supervision.

Even with that development, making a decision to transition – and to have expensive gender reassignment surgery – remains a daunting process. Many young people look to the counseling and medical services at places such as the youth center and Howard Brown to get them through it.

Jessi Uzel, a 23-year-old graduate student at DePaul University who attends the transgender group, recently started taking hormones, which she gets at the Howard Brown clinic at a reduced cost of about $60 a month.

“Yes, our lives are tragic in many ways. But the idea is, it doesn’t have to be tragic,” says Uzel, who began her transition from male to female last summer and says she wouldn’t have been able to do so without the emotional support and financial break she’s received. “You can do hormones the right way, and just be able to live life.”

Already, she has begun to grow breasts and her skin has started to soften.

“It’s very empowering,” says Uzel, who is studying music composition. She wears a bandanna to cover a receding hairline, which she hopes will disappear as the hormones take effect. Eventually, she’d like to have gender reassignment surgery, though the cost is prohibitive right now, as it is for many members of the group. Insurance rarely covers such procedures.

When she was a teen growing up in small-town Iowa, people hardly uttered the word transsexual. So Uzel used the Internet to look up more information about transsexuality. And, at age 15, the boy then known as Josh made a revelation to his mother.

“I want to be a girl,” Josh said, later taking it back when he realized how upset his mother was.

“She looked at me like I was something totally foreign,” says Uzel, who was the “good son,” the Eagle Scout who got good grades and college scholarships.

Uzel tried for four more years to fit in as male, only to come out again as transsexual at age 19. Last Christmas, after attending the support group for a few months, Uzel asked her family to start calling her Jessi.

Fischer, the 20-year-old college student who’s transitioning from female to male, went through an extensive counseling process at Howard Brown before receiving hormones.

As a teen, Fischer – then known as Dai – tried to be like the other girls, wearing makeup and girls’ clothes even when it didn’t feel right to do so.

“I didn’t want to be a freak. I kind of thought I was – but I didn’t want to be,” says Fischer, who initially dropped out of high school but is now studying photography and film at the College of DuPage, west of Chicago.

As a teen, Fischer started wearing men’s deodorant and stole clothes from a brother to wear. “It made me feel a little more real, a little more who I was,” he now says, explaining that after years of torment, he decided to transition from female to male last summer.

For him, it has made a huge difference.

“Now I walk around and I look at the world and I feel happy,” Fischer says over a meal at a café near the youth center. “I mean, I have problems, but I can deal with them. I don’t feel like I have to separate myself.

“I feel like I have a future.”

At the group, he and others discuss issues related to their gender transition – among them, the legal steps to changing one’s name; how to tell family and friends; and dealing with the confusion changing genders can cause with a medical insurer and at work or school.