Customer Reviews

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

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

TS lit has been largely dreary, solipsistic and poorly-written over the years. Jennifer Finney Boyan's bestselling She's Not There, building on her pre-exisiting literary skills, rectified matters considerably.

Now, here's something even better - a TS tale told by a feminist woman, and told with the narrative power of a secure and sagacious novelist. Smart, sure, but dramatic, too. And the story is an original one.

Not a false step anywhere. Fascinating, vivid, human as all-get-out, intense. And the ending - wow! - like, I was reduced to happy tears. Transparent, meriting repeated readings, would sure make a marvelous movie.

Impressive! It will be interesting to see where Beam goes next.

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.

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.

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.

If you are a parent just finding out about your transgender child, I would not recommend this book. I ordered it thinking it would answer some of the questions and challenges I am having as the parent. It is not that kind of a book. Having said that...it was a good read, but too heavy for what I was needing at the time.

Cris Beam lived the experiences she relates in this book and relays them without embellishment. We know this because she tape recorded every conversation described, and the few she didn't tape record she kept logs of. It is written in the form of a narrative and is written with skill and intimacy. Cris Beam explains that as we mature from children into adults there is an inexorable question we each seek to find an answer to. For a transexual youth named Dominique the question was: What drug could be so good my mother would choose it over me? For Cris the question was: What child could be so bad she's unlovable? The answer to Chris's question is answered in this book: no child. This book has widened my experience of what it is to be human and I recommend it to everyone.

When Cris Beam moved to Los Angeles so her partner could get a Ph. D., she found she needed a challenge to offset the boredom of working at home in a strange city. When she heard of Eagles, a "small, scrappy high school for gay and transgender teenagers," she decided to volunteer "maybe once or twice a week."
Like most adults, she had little idea of how transgender teenagers survive on the streets. Most could care less - they shake their heads and ignore them as they pass by, or else they stop and become the kids' prostitution customers. Ms. Beam's experience with them over the next several years, chronicled in Transparent, sheds new light on their lives.
Her story is not about child abuse or exploitation, yet it reflects a great deal of both. While we hear a lot about physical and sexual abuse of children, reading this book raised several questions in my mind. What is child abuse?
Is it destroying all your 11 year-olds possessions, and then throwing him out on the street?
Is it refusing to recognize your child's identity and forcing them into a role against their will?
Is it throwing a child in jail for fighting back against abusive classmates or teachers?
Is it incarcerating transgirls in the male section of the juvenile hall or prison?
In many ways, Transparent is about children reacting to abusive authority figures of all kinds - parents, school personnel, law enforcement, social services, and medical professionals. Unloved or rejected by their birth parents because they do not fit societal norms, they find acceptance on the street. Their survival is often through prostitution and the concurrent drug use that makes it possible. This book is about survival - the struggles of unloved, rejected, cast-off children to survive and mature in whatever way they can.
Transparent also serves as a primer for dealing openly and supportively with these kids. They need acceptance and family - and they find it on the streets with their "drag mothers," and gender variant brothers, and sisters. They need love. Cris beam shows just how much they need love and how difficult it is to overcome their natural fear of adults and authority figures. Transparent shows the impact a single, concerned, loving person can have on their lives.
We need more such people.

I love this book! I just finished reading it and I couldn't put it down, even though nonfiction can rarely keep me enthralled like that. The author gives deep(and sometimes scary) insight into the lives of the transgender girls she worked with and loved. I highly recommend this book for anyone with empathy for those who are on the fringes of our society and need help.

This book deals primarily with transgendered teens, a subject which may make many people uncomfortable. Cris Beam does, however, humanize the entire phenomenon as she tells the story of four teenagers who are intimately involved in the transition from one gender to the opposite. I suggest it is a particularly valuable book for any family who is facing this type of situation as well as any reader who is interested in the "why's" and "wherefores" of transgenderism. This phenomenon is not unknown to history nor to anthropology. It is, in other words, not a uniquely contemporary or American phenomenon; nor is it the result of the so-called "sexual revolution" of the 1960s. It was not unknown in ancient Greek and Roman times and it has been uncovered in studies of other cultures ranging from the Mojave Indians to the natives of Tahiti.

Whether or not the transgendered phenomenon is biologically based or psychologically determined, a matter of nature or nurture, or a matter of genetic influences or environmental construction remains, at least in my considered opinion, unknown. I think much of the present controversy over transgenderism is misguided since no definitive and empirically validated evidence exists as to its genesis. To her credit, the author refrains from attempting to explain or justify or rationalize the question. Beam spends the bulk of her time simply describing what these teenagers are experiencing. That, at this point in the discussion at least, is about as much as anyone can do. And one can't help but sympathize with what these teens are going through even if one doesn't exactly relate to the circumstances they face.

Can there really be such a thing as a woman's psychological being within a man's physical body? Can nature be so cruel as to give one male genitals but a female psychology? Can a child really "think" that his or her physical gender is a mistake and he or she ought to be of the opposite gender even in spite of physical evidence to the contrary? I have no idea and Beam, in my opinion, doesn't make a solid case regarding any of this. On the other hand, I don't know how to refute someone who says, "I feel like I'm really a female imprisoned in a man's body." Such a mental state is a subjective experience and one which no "outsider" can truly share. Contrary to the assertion of a former U.S. president, I cannot feel your pain. Your pain is yours and yours alone. I may be able to vicariously identify with it to the extent that I've had a similar pain but, no, I cannot feel your pain. Similarly, I cannot say that your thinking that you're a woman (or man) trapped in the wrong physical body is untrue, or disingenuous, or a matter of your "arbitrary choice."

There is a point upon which I must disagree with Beam if I understand her correctly: Genitalia are irrelevant to determining a person's sex. This is flatly false. Except in the rare cases where a child may be born with both male and female genitalia, the sex of a child is wholly determined by the presence of either male or female sex organs. However, it could be argued, I think, that "gender" is another matter. Sex organs determine male and female from a strictly physiological perspective but, I think it can reasonably be argued, "gender" describes masculinity and femininity or a degree thereof. Masculinity and femininity tend to be "psychological" or "mental" states and do not necessitate a physical dimension. Thus, one could be transgendered without being a transsexual, I would propose. If this has any efficacy, then the difference between one's "sex" and one's "gender" might be better explained and elucidated.

(As a sidebar to the above, it is interesting to note that while most languages seem to allow for only two "sexes," many languages have words categorized into three or four "genders." English is one of the latter and nouns can be designated as masculine, feminine, neutral, or common.)

The main difficulty I had with the book, although Beam's prose is fluid and easily read, is with the pronouns "he" and "she" which are ascribed to the transgendering subjects at various stages of their development and can confuse the reader as to who or what is being addressed at any specific time. Our language is obviously deficient when it comes to describing a phenomenon such as this and one can get confused as to the gender of the subject being discussed. Sometimes one of the teens insists on being addressed as "she," only to revert to his original physical gender and be addressed as "he." Sorting it all out and keeping the narrative consistent can be somewhat difficult.

Nevertheless, regardless of one's personal opinion or attitude toward transgendered teens (or adults, for that matter), there is a story here to be told and Beam does a fine job of telling it. Besides the personal narratives provided, Beam includes some valuable information about transgenderism from both the psychological and medical perspectives. She also includes some important resources at the end of the book, as well as an informative bibliography.

While I cannot pretend to fully understand why anyone, especially a young teenage boy, wants to become a member of the opposite sex or feels the desire to do so, the fact remains that such is the reality regarding some young members of our society and culture. It would seem worthy of us as human beings, therefore, to put aside any qualms about this matter and attempt to try to understand it without resorting -- which is all too common the case -- to moralizing about it or passing premature judgments on it. These young people, as Beam describes them in her book, are facing struggles and challenges of a sometimes horrendous nature and at least deserve a hearing and our empathy as fellow human beings. Furthermore, Beam is to be commended for her compassionate approach to this difficult subject.

This is definitely one of the best books I have read in quite some time. Beam is a great writer and will absolutely draw you in, and probably make you laugh, and almost certainly make you cry. I think we all should read more books like this, it could change the way you think about life. Seriously.