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

Title: Transparent: Love, Family and Living the T with Transgender Teenagers
Author: Cris Beam
Publisher: Harcourt, Inc
Length: Novel, 323 pages
Buy the book: Powells

Blurb:

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.

Review:

“I can’t,” she said, “It’s right next to me. I’m in the sink.”

“In the sink? the kitchen sink?”

“Girl, shut up!” Christina said. She was chewing something furiously that was making a loud crunching sound. “This place is big!”

She meant the apartment felt too spacious, too quiet, too consuming. The sink was somewhere that could contain her. I pictured her perched there like a bird, with her legs crumpled beneath her, and I stifled a laugh. “Are you eating Doritos?”

One of the best things about browsing in the stacks of a very large and well-appointed library is that you will climb slowly to the third floor, where they keep all the most interesting books–the new fiction, the sports memoirs, the LGBT books, the YA section–clutching a scrap of paper on which you have scribbled a call number and possibly, if you had enough coffee that morning, a partial title, or the author’s name. And in peering at the tiny typed labels on the books in that section, you will suddenly discover that the scrap of paper in your hand is not what you are after at all.

You have been unexpectedly drawn into a treasure hunt, and followed the dashed line on a yellowed, crumbling map to where X marks the spot.

Or T, as the case may be.

Funnily enough, pretty much the same thing happened to Cris Beam, but her crumbling map described Los Angeles, and the treasure she found were four young transwomen who invited her into their lives and allowed her to document their stories, little realizing that her concepts of both gender and family would be radically altered.

Beam moved to Los Angeles with the avowed intent of only staying the five years it would take her partner to complete a graduate degree. In addition to freelance writing, Beam began volunteering at an LGBT alternative-high school in one of the dicier parts of town and, in order to stop the kids there from working on each other’s hair and nails, dancing and setting things on fire, taught them how to tell their stories.

Beam’s tenancy at the school didn’t last; the school itself was underfunded and doomed to fail in the awesome way endemic to the vast majority California school systems, but by the time Beam left, she’d become entranced with the students and intrigued by the concept of transgender youths.

And right from the start, Beam lays out the terms she uses frequently throughout the book: transgender, transsexual, transgirl, transboy–but notes that more than anything, “All of these kids were called the pronoun of their choice.”

After Beam’s stint at the school ends, she keeps up with the stories of four transgirls: Christina, Domineque, Foxxjazelle and Ariel. Not all of their stories have happy endings, but all are fascinating and heartbreaking in turn, and Beam very skillfully weaves their narratives in with a world-culture history of transgendered people and a stark and cutting picture of modern-day L.A. as seen through the eyes of all the kids who wander the city’s streets.

Then, halfway through the book, something amazing happens. Beam stops being chronicler and winds up in the middle of her own story. She takes in Christina and attempts to save her from her life on the streets (at one point even assuming her legal guardianship) and from there on out, Beam manages to twine her life-story, trying to save Christina from her own darker impulses, with the stories of the other three girls, transgender legal policy and an expose of LGBT issues in the California foster-family system.

Oh y’all, I wept like an infant.

This book will make you cry. Whether it’s when Christina is sleeping out on her mother’s patio with the family’s new puppies because she has nowhere else to go, or when Foxx is forced to part with her beloved guinea pigs because she fears her violent boyfriend will harm them, or when Cris and Christina take on the the DMV, something here will make you sob.

And such a huge part of the book is really showing how the drug-fueled lack of parenting that swept the U.S. in the 1970s and 80s doomed so many kids to lives of despair and neglect. Time and time again, Beam tells tales of how these children’s parents abandoned them to pursue drug-fueled love affairs without giving any thought to who would parent in their place:

Domineque and Lenora were both foster kids, both transgender, both of Mexican descent, both experienced with poverty and the streets of Los Angeles. And yet, at seventeen, Lenora was working every day after school and sending money home to her grandparents in Puerto Vallarta. Domineque was doing drugs and going in and out of juvenile hall. Their behavior had nothing to do with being transgender. It had to do with whether they had a constant loving family in their early years. Domineque was looking to fill what had long ago been scooped out of her.

No one caught these children. LGBT kids were out on the street with straight ones; everyone was hustling and no one was eating on a regular basis.

And while the book is important on that score alone, it’s even more vital as an attempt to document the experience of growing up as a transwoman in America. While Beam makes a point of saying “this is more memoir than social science”, the social science and history that she presents is important in that it’s well researched, well presented and not readily available elsewhere.

Moreover, the four stories presented here are not ones I’ve found documented elsewhere, and that’s a shame, because they’re authentic American voices, vibrant threads in the tapestry of this country and LGBT history as a whole.

‘T’ is a letter-word that urban transkids use for all kinds of circumstances. It stands, of course, for transgender, but it also stands for ‘truth’. When a kid says, ‘Here’s the T,’ she means, Be quiet and listen: I’m about to get real. This, I think, is remarkable. The letter that has come to signify difference–T–also means total honesty.

We need more stars for this kind of story.