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

by Cris Beam

Book Overview

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... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0151011966
• ISBN13: 9780151011964
• Release Date: January 2007
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
• Length: 323 Pages
• Weight: 1.14 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.2" x 5.8" x 8.5"
• Age Range: 14 years and up
• Grade Range: Grade 9 and higher

Customer Reviews

Excellent primer for dealing openly and supportively with transgender teenagers

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.

Can't wait for the movie!

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.

Sharing your heart

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.

A truly exquisite and deeply kind book you simply must read!

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

a brave and courageous account of trans youth in L.A.

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.