Dressed in a fire-engine red miniskirt and matching pumps, 30-year-old film editor Bart Cox walks fearlessly--albeit a bit unsteadily--into his not-so-secret other life.

In the bat of a false eyelash, he has transformed himself from a 6-foot-5 gun-shooting outdoorsman type into the towering Empira, out for the night at a wild barroom bash in Silver Lake.

A cross-dresser since age 5, Cox is an unrepentant example of gender-bending 1990s-style. He has shed the taboos of role reversal, coming clean with friends, family, even his boss. Venturing out to bars, parties and on shopping trips dressed as a woman, Cox exercises a mostly latent realm of his personality. He likes to feel handsome and pretty at the same time.

The causes and implications of cross-dressing and transsexuality have long transfixed psychologists, sociologists and sexologists. Now, for the first time, more than 90 such experts will gather to share what they know at the "International Congress on Gender, Cross Dressing and Sex Issues," hosted by Cal State Northridge's Center for Sex Research.

In research to be presented at the four-day event, which begins Thursday, USC nursing professor Bonnie Bullough concludes that the psychological makeup of cross-dressers--heterosexual and gay--and transsexuals varies widely.

"The whole trans-gender picture is far more complex than we previously thought," said Bullough, who with husband Vern has co-authored more than 20 books on human sexuality. "Not all these people are emotionally or mentally disturbed. They don't all want to kill themselves or appear on the 'Geraldo' show. They live happy, normal lives."

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Virginia Prince is the grand old dame of the trans-gendered.

In 1960, the Los Angeles resident began publishing the quarterly Transvestia, the first magazine for straight cross-dressers, and later founded the Society for the Second Self, the first support group for the same community.

Now 82, Prince has followed a long and painful road to self-discovery. "There was a time when, had there been a pill to cure me, I would have taken two of them," he said. "But 70 years in the gender trenches have brought a sense of inner peace with who I am."

Who Prince is, experts say, is a sexual pioneer who has lived full-time as a woman, without trans-gender surgery, for more than 30 years. He has helped define the gray area of gender dysphoria, the dissonance between body and brain.