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Summary
Summary
When Cris Beam first moved to Los Angeles, she thought she might put in just a few hours volunteering at a school for transgender kids while she got settled. Instead she found herself drawn deeply into the pained and powerful group of transgirls she discovered. In Transparent she introduces four of them--Christina, Domineque, Foxxjazell, and Ariel--and shows us their world, a dizzying mix of familiar teenage cliques and crushes with far less familiar challenges like how to morph your body on a few dollars a day. Funny, heartbreaking, defiant, and sometimes defeated, the girls form a singular community. But they struggle valiantly to resolve the gap between the way they feel inside and the way the world sees them--a struggle we can all identify with. Beam's careful reporting, sensitive writing, and intimate relationship with her characters place Transparent in the ranks of the best narrative nonfiction.
Author Notes
CRIS BEAM is a journalist who has written for several national magazines as well as for public radio. She has an MFA in nonfiction from Columbia University and teaches creative writing at Columbia and the New School. She lives in New York.
Reviews (2)
Publisher's Weekly Review
In this gripping, illuminating and deeply moving portrait of transgender teens in Los Angeles, the smallest incidents reverberate sharply. Beam, volunteering at a support center for trans teens, helps a young woman named Christina make changes on her driver's license: her name from Eduardo and the gender from male to female. The DMV clerk adamantly refuses to make the adjustment and only acquiesces after the humiliated Christina has a meltdown and Beam, pretending to be an ACLU lawyer, demands a supervisor. Christina is one of several, mostly minority, male-to-female transgender women to whom Beam becomes attached. Their group interactions including fights, friendships and daily struggles to survive form the center of the book. Though these women's lives are difficult when Christina is beaten during an attempted rape, she has to lie to the police about being transgender there are also moments of quick wit. As Beam morphs from parent to therapist, chum, cheerleader and legal adviser, she seamlessly blends memoir, reportage and advocacy. The result is a vivid and fiercely empathetic narrative that juxtaposes dead-on portraits of these young women with clearly articulated fury at a culture that's not only fearful of anyone who deviates from traditional gender roles but treats minorities and the poor with contempt. (Jan.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
Beam writes of her volunteer activities at Eagles, a small high school for gay and transgender teens in Los Angeles, by focusing on first one, then another, of the young people she encountered. Many were homeless, thrown out by their parents. Some alternated between gender identities, switching from masculine to feminine names as well as apparel. Beam taught language skills and writing. She and her students, who sometimes wandered into school and sometimes didn't, managed to pull together enough pieces to make a magazine. Along with obituaries of friends, the 20-page glossy contained teen poetry, medical advice on the hazards of too many hormones acting too quickly, a transgender Hints from Heloise, and two columns, Getting Out of a Gang and When Your Grandma Finds Your Drag Clothes. Other victories, less tangible but equally important as she established meaningful relationships with the kids, as well as frustrations, obstacles, and disappointments, make for compelling reading that fills an important niche in gender studies. --Whitney Scott Copyright 2006 Booklist
Excerpts
Excerpts
1SCHOOLHERES WHAT YOU SEE when you drive down Los Angeless Santa Monica Boulevard just east of La Brea: a 7-Eleven, a Shakeys Pizza, a low concrete building with fish painted on the side, and a taco stand. Theres a Chinese takeout place and a triple-X video rental shop, a filling station, and four lanes of traffic, two in each direction. Old people waiting for the bus. Young mothers dragging children in flip-flops. A discount dollar store, a Laundromat, and a bunch of teenagers standing around and smoking. If you stare for more than a minute, you may note that most of these teenagers are girls, and that theyre more ethnically varied than other cliques in this segregated town. But thats it. Santa Monica Boulevards got the sun-bleached, chain-store feeling of most of L.A.If youre a transgender girl (meaning you were born male but live as a female), you might notice something extra along this stretch of Santa Monica. Its here that youll find girls trading secrets about how to shoot up the black-market hormones purchased from the swap meets in East L.A. If the hormones dont work fast enough to manifest your inner vision of wider hips and C cups, you can find out about pumping parties out in the Valley, where a former veterinarian or a surgeons wife from Florida will shoot free-floating industrial-grade silicone into hips, butts, breasts, kneeseven cheeks and foreheads. Of course, this is dangerous when the oils shift and form hard lumps in the armpits and thighs, but youll look good for a while.On Santa Monica, you can learn which dance clubs, like Arena (with its crudely painted ocean mural on the outside), let in underage kids and have go-go boxes for dancing. You can learn which motels, one block up on Sunset, are safe and clean and have weekly rates. You can find out about the telemarketing company that hires transgender youth, no matter what they look like, to sell garbage bags and first-aid kits over the telephone. Of course, for the job youll have to memorize a script saying that youre handicapped and that these household items are offered at higher prices because they provide employment to mentally handicapped people like yourself. And though it makes you sick to say it, this technically wont be a lie; transgender people are still dubbed mentally ill by the medical community, the way gay people were in the seventies. This is how the telemarketing firm gets away with cheap labor.On Santa Monica, you can walk with a friend to the Jeff Griffith Youth Centerone of the few outreach agencies that knows about, and feeds, struggling transgender kids under twenty-four. Its right on the corner of Sycamore; youll recognize it by the thick bars on the windows and the hand-drawn sign that says NO FIGHTING. Here you can sign up for a shower or get free bus tokens or a subsidized meal on a tray that looks just like the kind served in the high school cafeteria you ran from. Theres also a big TV and a pool table with no billiard balls, and you can ha Excerpted from Transparent: Love, Family, and Living the T with Transgender Teenagers by Cris Beam All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
Table of Contents
| Part 1 School |
| Eduardo/ Geri/ Christina |
| Mothers |
| Arriving |
| Body |
| Boyfriends |
| Part 2 Lockdown Skidmarks |
| Violence |
| Change |
| Commencement |
| Author's Note |
| Endnotes |
| Selected Bibliography |
| Acknowledgments |
