Transparent: Love, Family, and Living the T with Transgender Teenagers [Paperback]

Cris Beam (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 14, 2008

When Cris Beam moved to Los Angeles, she thought she might volunteer just a few hours at a school for gay and transgender kids. Instead, she found herself drawn deeply into the pained and powerful group of transgirls she discovered. Transparent introduces four: Christina, Dominique, Foxxjazell, and Ariel. As they accept Cris into their world, she shows it to us—a dizzying mix of familiar teenage cliques and crushes and far less familiar challenges, such as 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—and who among us can’t identify with that? Beam’s astute reporting, sensitive writing, and passionate engagement with her characters place this book in the ranks of the very best narrative nonfiction.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred 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.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Booklist

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 © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 336 pages
• Publisher: Mariner Books; 1 edition (January 14, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0156033771
• ISBN-13: 978-0156033770
• Product Dimensions: 5.2 x 0.9 x 8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (14 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #352,095 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #38 in Books > Gay & Lesbian > Biographies & Memoirs > Transgender
  • #51 in Books > Gay & Lesbian > Parenting & Families
  • #76 in Books > Gay & Lesbian > Nonfiction > Transgender

More About the Author

Cris Beam is the author of Transparent: Love, Family and Living the T with Transgender Teenagers (Harcourt, 2007) which won a Lambda Literary Award and was a Stonewall Honor Book. Her second book, I Am J, was released from Little, Brown in March 2011, and she's currently working on a book about foster care in the U.S. for Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Cris teaches creative writing at Columbia University, New York University, and Bayview Women's Correctional Facility. She has an MFA in creative nonfiction from Columbia and lives in New York City.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

15 of 17 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars A truly exquisite and deeply kind book you simply must read! January 7, 2007

By Andrew Solomon

Format:Hardcover

This book engages in many ways and at many levels, and part of what works in it is its complexity and density--which makes it harder to write about in any very coherent way. It's an amazing mix of autobiography and biography and social commentary and science and comedy, and it succeeds narratively in all of these areas, and, which is more remarkable, it makes them fit together as a coherent whole. Beam has a frankness in dealing with herself and the girls who are her subject that is arresting and powerful. She has a real and identifiable voice.

I love the fact that she started off at Eagles on a whim, and then allowed herself to be drawn so deep into these lives, and to weave them together with her own. This is a wonderful document of dawning relationships, and it's wonderfully generous because it describes not only what the author could do for these trans teens, but also what they did for her.

Of course it involves such interesting questions. The issue of class is everywhere here, the fact that she could break out of her own world and accept their world on their terms. And the issue of when she got carried away with that--as when she accept the girls' prostituting themselves, which might be bowing to reality, or might be accepting someone else's life as they present it, or might be losing sight of the horror, or might be a realization that it's not quite so horrible if you actually get up close and look at it. There's something voyeuristically satisfying about reading the narratives of what it is like inside this strange universe. She has managed by and large to look at the questions attached to being poor and abandoned and the questions attached to being trans, and the balance she has achieved there is elegant. I found myself toying with what it would be like to be trans, and not feeling threatened by or uncomfortable with the idea, even the idea of being trans and impoverished and lonely and lost. Beam has brought a kind of solidness to these terrifying experiences, that made it possible to process them without too much trauma. Her courage in all she faced gives the reader a kind of courage to face it too.

The scene in which she writes about her own relationship with her own mother and the question it drove her to ask, and how that determined her fine behavior toward these girls, is exquisitely beautiful, modest, wise, knowing, and gentle.

Beam's prose is great. I love her similes--saying that someone's crying is like an exploding aquarium--and her wonderful descriptions of how the girls ate when she took them out for those initial meals, and so many apt turns of phrase that make her sometimes exotic material completely vivid and visceral. She manages to make the science and social theory flow right in, so that they never appear as interruptions to the flow of the story. And she made me feel that I understand what it is to be trans, that it isn't as simple as hormones or clothing or surgery, what a complicated and rich identity it is. And it made me feel how hard it is, in public bathrooms, in romantic escapades, and in every other way.

A truly astonishingly wonderful book.

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Sharing your heart January 23, 2007

By Dr. Mark S. Cohen

Format:Hardcover

In Beam's stunning exposure of the nearly invisible sub-culture of transgender people living on the streets of Los Angeles she addresses issues of societal values and law, of public safety and public ignorance, of kids living on outside of the safety net, race relations, gangs and a seemingly endless variety of issues that act harshly on this particular group of young people. She tells us that their gender identity challenges not just the straight community that makes up the majority of the country, but also the homosexual and transvestite community with whom they are so often grouped. Amazingly, she does this in an unapologetically blurred role of reporter and actor in the dramas of the lives of the characters she studies.

Reading the book, you cannot but love Cris and the kids who so honestly reveal themselves to her and through, her, to you. The pressure on growing up trans must be nearly unbearable, but because this young people have such clarity in their own crossed-gender identities they are have almost no choice but to fight with the perceptions and expectations of the people around them in order simply to be honest with and to themselves. There is no "giving up" and more than you or I could give up our gender identity under pressure and cross over as the man or woman we are not. In the end each of the actors of Cris' book is heroic, even if they end up incarcerated for real crimes.

In her public readings from Transparent, Cris has traveled with some of the transgender kids who appear in the book. These people want more than anything to be seen and accepted. They also continue in their transference attachment to Cris as their trans-parent or to almost any adult figure who can show them love and accept them as normal.

Sadly, after opening a window to an otherwise invisible world, Cris Beam leaves us with so many more questions. What happens to these kids when they reach adulthood? How many people are out there who suffer quietly as closet transsexuals? Do any of them develop long lasting 'marital' relationships?

Obviously, the most important questions are those that we the reader ask of ourselves, about our gender identity, and about our ability to serve transgender youth with the compassion they so truly deserve. Would that we all could be as heroic as Cris Beam.

8 of 10 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars a brave and courageous account of trans youth in L.A. January 2, 2007

By Felicia Sullivan

Format:Hardcover

In compassionate, honest, flawless and often times humorous prose, Cris Beam (a volunteer teacher at Eagles - a school for gay trans teens in L.A.) tells a compelling story of four fearless male-to-female transgender kids - Foxx, Christina, Ariel and Domineque - and shares with us their loves, heartbreaks, struggle to survive and their desire to find a sense of family and community in a society that consistently shuns them. Los Angeles is Mecca, the land of reinvention, of opportunity, where kids kids tossed out of their homes by unaccepting parents can flee.

Although highly informative (Beam details the disparate urban trans scenes, offers us statistics on trans kids, explains the trans lexicon, and interviews medical professionals so we can gather an understand of the medical and psychological concerns - high doses of estrogen shots which may lead to bread cancer, for example) the stories are the heart of the book and the characters - their need to fit in, to feel comfortable in their own skin, to simply be accepted for who they are and the choices they've made - are utterly accessible to any audience.