It’s the 50th year of Provincetown’s Trans Week, formerly known as Fantasia Fair, and tickets are all sold out, although some events including keynote talks and the annual Follies! fashion show on Friday night are open to the public.

Fantasia Fair was first held here in 1975. “We officially changed the name to Trans Week in 2022, but we were using the terms interchangeably until then,” says Dallas Denny, board chair of the International Transgender Education Organization, which oversees the event. “ ‘Fantasia Fair’ kind of made it sound like it was a fetish party, which it never was.” The new name shifted the focus away from spectacle and toward trans identity.

The event was conceived by Ariadne “Ari” Kane and other members of the Cherrystone Club, a trans support group in Boston. They chose Provincetown as the location because of its reputation for tolerance and because its remoteness would offer safety and privacy for nervous newcomers. The goal was to provide an environment where trans and gender-nonconforming people could learn about themselves through workshops and social events, says Denny.

She first came to Fantasia Fair in 1992. She had heard that it was about cross-dressers who were straight. But she says that’s not what she saw when she got to Provincetown. “Ari was calling herself an androgyne,” says Denny. “There were a lot of transexuals and transgender people. I didn’t find cross-dressers here. I found a great diversity of gender expression at Fantasia Fair.” She has attended every year since then.

In its early days, Fantasia Fair offered workshops on topics like voice modulation and scarf tying and addressed aesthetic concerns through beauty and makeup. Some events were held at the Unitarian Universalist Meeting House with the primary purpose of educating the public.

“Ari came up and got to know people in town,” says Denny. “Provincetown was off the beaten path and sufficiently distant from the mainland to provide anonymity for those who wished to keep their cross-dressing from becoming public knowledge.” October was a perfect choice because summer tourists had left by then.

That first year, 1975, lodging, meals, and events were set to be at the Gifford House. But Denny says the Gifford House was padlocked when Ari showed up because the bank had foreclosed on it. With no internet or cell phones, there was no way for Ari to let the people about to arrive that the Gifford House was unavailable.

“Everyone would use the clearing houses and magazines back then,” says Denny. “If you wanted to contact someone, you’d send a letter to a magazine and they would forward it.” Many registrants had used pseudonyms.

Fortunately, Stan Sorentino, an owner of the Crown & Anchor, stepped in and saved the day, offering to host the events and to house and feed the guests. This was how the Crown became one of the host venues for the last 50 years. The Follies! fashion show is still held there. “It always felt like the Crown was home,” says Denny.

The topics of Fantasia Fair workshops shifted during the mid ’80s toward personal development. The ’90s saw a wider variety of participants, including heterosexual male-identified cross-dressers, trans men, and intersex people.

Dee LaValle has been coming to Trans Week since 2015 and was named its executive director in 2018. “Thinking has changed; terminology has changed,” she says. “Most transgender people are not surgery bound. I did want surgery. But we don’t beat ourselves up if we don’t want surgery.”

One of the goals of Trans Week is to talk about politics and find ways to combat hate, says LaValle. The recipient of this year’s Transgender Pioneer Award is Shannon Price Minter, the longtime legal director of the National Center for Lesbian Rights who continues to challenge medical bans and sports bans on behalf of transgender people and their families. He will give a keynote talk on Saturday, Oct. 26 at 1:30 p.m. at the Crown & Anchor.

Other keynotes that are open to the public are on Thursday, Oct. 24 with Ariadne Kane, Dallas Denny, Miqqi Gilbert, and Dee LaValle and on Friday, Oct. 25 with Jamison Green. Those events are also at the Crown starting at 1:30 p.m. The fashion show is Friday from 8 to 10 p.m. in the Paramount Room at the Crown, with doors opening at 7. Tickets are $20. A complete schedule for the week is at transweek.org.

Even though other events including lunches, dinners, and banquets are sold out, Denny says that shouldn’t stop people from coming. “There have always been people who show up during our week and don’t register,” she says. “They often walk around not meeting our eyes and feel like they’re intruding. But we would like to see several thousand trans people here for the week. It’s good for the town, and it’s good for people to feel comfortable with themselves — that’s better for everyone.”