Louis G. Sullivan, a groundbreaking trans activist who forged some of the earliest trans peer support networks in the U.S., engaged in a series of videotaped interviews between 1988-1990 with psychiatrist Ira B. Pauly. This brief article offers a rhetorical analysis of selections from those interviews in order to introduce readers to Sullivan’s rhetorical strategies for persuading the “gender profession” that it was possible to be both trans and gay or lesbian.