Transparent: Love, Family, and Living the T with Transgender Teenagers
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When Cris Beam first moved to Los Angeles, she thought she might put in just a few hours volunteering at a school for gay and transgender kids while she got settled. Instead, she found herself drawn, more deeply than she could ever have imagined, into the pained and powerful group of transgirls she discovered. In Transparent she introduces four of them - Christina, Dominique, Foxxjazell, and Ariel. As she earns their trust she 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 - 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. Publishers Weekly 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 2006 Reed Business Information.
Contents PART ONE School Eduardo/ Geri/ Christina Mothers Arriving Body Boyfriends PART TWO Lockdown Skidmarks Violence Change Commencement Author’s Note Endnotes Selected Bibliography Acknowledgments