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“A remarkable book—captivating, powerful, funny, and wise. Without ever upstaging her subjects, Beam explains how she fell in love with them, and so allows us to do the same. This is literature of the first order.”—Andrew Solomon, author of The Noonday Demon

Introduction to the Book
        When Cris Beam first contacted the Eagles program, a school for gay and transgender teenagers in Los Angeles, she simply wanted to volunteer for a few hours. She didn’t know that most Eagles volunteers lasted just a few weeks or a few months; she stayed to teach journalism there for two and a half years. She also didn’t know that Eagles would lead her to become more than a teacher: She would also become a lifeline, an advocate, and eventually a foster parent.

        In Transparent, Beam introduces us to Christina, Domineque, Foxxjazell, and Ariel, transgirls who were born genetically “male” but who know themselves as unmistakably female in their souls, minds, and core identities. As we enter the world of these four teenagers, we encounter all of the familiar elements of adolescence—cliques, crushes, rebellion, and powerful friendships. But, because these girls are rejected by parents, traditional-school students, or society in general, their world also comprises the elements of a gritty life on the streets: the sex trade, drug trafficking, gangs, and the nightmarish bureaucracy of shelters and foster homes. By turns heartbreaking and exhilarating, the scenes in Transparent capture the essence of these unforgettable youths, who spin, sabotage, and continuously reinvent dreams for their futures.

        In telling the girls’ stories, Beam delivers riveting reporting and a tender memoir. Though she discusses current medical and psychological research, she does not attempt to create a comprehensive study or clinical analysis of all transgender populations. Instead, she tells us about a particular community, one that caused her to confront even her own misconceptions. The work she undertakes at Eagles also leads her to face the memory of her mother, who abandoned her at a crucial time in her life.

        This is a book that may reinforce or dispel your notions about gender. It may cause you to rethink your definitions of family. It may open your eyes to the often misunderstood world of homeless teens. One thing is certain: It will spark meaningful conversation about the ways we as a society can ease despair and celebrate the power of individuality and the courage it takes to be one’s self.

1.School

Excerpt
The following is an excerpt from the book Transparent: Love, Family and Living the T with Transgender Teenagers
by Cris Beam

        Here’s what you see when you drive down Los Angeles’s Santa Monica Boulevard just east of La Brea: a 7-Eleven, a Shakey’s Pizza, a low concrete building with fish painted on the side, and a taco stand. There’s a Chinese takeout place and a triple-X video rental shop, a filling station, and four lanes of traffic, two in each direction. Old people waiting for the bus. Young mothers dragging children in flip-flops. A discount dollar store, a Laundromat, and a bunch of teenagers standing around and smoking. If you stare for more than a minute, you may note that most of these teenagers are girls, and that they’re more ethnically varied than other cliques in this segregated town. But that’s it. Santa Monica Boulevard’s got the sun-bleached, chain-store feeling of most of L.A.

        If you’re a transgender girl (meaning you were born male but live as a female), you might notice something extra along this stretch of Santa Monica. It’s here that you’ll find girls trading secrets about how to shoot up the black-market hormones purchased from the swap meets in East L.A. If the hormones don’t work fast enough to manifest your inner vision of wider hips and C cups, you can find out about “pumping parties” out in the Valley, where a former veterinarian or a “surgeon’s wife” from Florida will shoot free-floating industrial-grade silicone into hips, butts, breasts, knees -- even cheeks and foreheads. Of course, this is dangerous when the oils shift and form hard lumps in the armpits and thighs, but you’ll look good for a while.

        On Santa Monica, you can learn which dance clubs, like Arena (with its crudely painted ocean mural on the outside), let in underage kids and have go-go boxes for dancing. You can learn which motels, one block up on Sunset, are safe and clean and have weekly rates. You can find out about the telemarketing company that hires transgender youth, no matter what they look like, to sell garbage bags and first-aid kits over the telephone. Of course, for the job you’ll have to memorize a script saying that you’re handicapped and that these household items are offered at higher prices because they provide employment to mentally handicapped people like yourself. And though it makes you sick to say it, this technically won’t be a lie; transgender people are still dubbed “mentally ill” by the medical community, the way gay people were in the seventies. This is how the telemarketing firm gets away with cheap labor.

        On Santa Monica, you can walk with a friend to the Jeff Griffith Youth Center -- one of the few outreach agencies that knows about, and feeds, struggling transgender kids under twenty-four. It’s right on the corner of Sycamore; you’ll recognize it by the thick bars on the windows and the hand-drawn sign that says NO FIGHTING. Here you can sign up for a shower or get free bus tokens or a subsidized meal on a tray that looks just like the kind served in the high school cafeteria you ran from. There’s also a big TV and a pool table with no billiard balls, and you can hang out until the place closes at six o’clock, without cars stopping you on the street and asking, “How much?”

        And when the center closes, you can traipse over to Benito’s, the twenty-four-hour clapboard outdoor food stand and “Home of the Rolled Taco,” for yet another dinner. Teenagers can always eat.

        At Benito’s, over the sizzle and pop of day-old grease, kids preen and throw insults and drink oversize sodas from waxy paper cups and look into cars for cute boys who might roll by. As the girls wait for night, when the dance clubs open, the Benito’s parking lot fills with them, laughing and squealing and running up to one another with halfway air-kissy hugs, like they haven’t seen each other in ages and yet don’t want to muss their clothes. Most look nothing like the drag queens or cross dressers that stereotypes dictate or outsiders expect. They’re young and soft faced and wear jeans and T-shirts or, if it’s a Saturday night, clingy dresses and big hoop earrings.

        “Tracy, girl, I haven’t seen you since like last month! You look good! Where you staying at?” This is the kind of banter one might hear as girls bump into each other buying post-taco Slurpees at the 7-Eleven.

        “Angel! I know, it’s been a long time -- that’s ’cause I’m not staying in Hollywood no more, chica. I got me a husband and we moved over to Culver City.”

        A husband is a stretch, but it’s a term kids commonly fling around in an attempt at permanence or stability. When Tracy asks Angel more questions about her man, Angel will likely demur unless the two are legitimately good friends. Teenagers are known for stealing one another’s boyfriends, especially when there’s a perceived scarcity, like there is in this community.

        Standing on the corner of Highland and Santa Monica, you can feel positively cultured, as canned classical music is piped out of a loudspeaker and into the parking lot all night long. I heard that it was the Chinese restaurant that put this in, in an oddly misguided attempt to curb loitering. But teenagers like Vivaldi as much as anyone else, and they gather there, shouting over its trills, bobbing their heads in four-four time. Gossip speeds along the sidewalk, as kids swap secrets about crushes and losses, and dish about what no-good ho stole another girl’s man. Some kids, though certainly not all, climb in and out of cars -- hustling for cash. In this crowd there’s competition for men and money and good clothes and popularity just like at any high school in America, and on the Boulevard you can find out who’s winning. The Boulevard is also where you can hear about who just got her breasts pumped and looks damn good, and who went back home to live with her mother, becoming a boy again. It’s where you can learn from the older girls that not everyone has surgery and not everyone wants it, because a woman can have a penis and -- girl! -- no one can tell her she can’t. It’s where you can listen to the new Pink CD on your friend’s Walkman and play video games at the all-night Donut Time. It’s where you can feel normal, connected, hip. It’s where you can be a teenager.

        Around the corner from Santa Monica and up the street, on Highland, is an unremarkable brown office building. It’s the kind of place that houses dozens of low-rent and high-turnaround businesses: limo services, temp agencies, computer repair places, accounting firms. Every weekday morning a handful of transgender kids stumble in with the rumpled brown suits and briefcased folks, because in the basement of this building is a high school, of sorts. Or was, when I became a teacher there.

        I don’t even remember how I first heard about Eagles, the small, scrappy high school for gay and transgender teenagers. Probably just from a new acquaintance in a passing conversation. But it had piqued my interest; I was curious who would go there, since when I was a kid, there was no such thing as a gay school, and hardly any such thing as a gay student. Would these kids be harassed, troubled, in need? I wondered if I could help in any way. By then I had been living in Los Angeles for six months, and an itchy boredom with the town had begun to creep up my spine. Having moved from New York so my partner, Robin, could get a Ph.D., I was missing an urban edge and lonesome for community beyond my dining-room table. I worked at home as a freelance magazine writer, and I had extra time to volunteer, maybe once a week, maybe twice. So that winter (which didn’t really feel like a winter at all), I rang up the school.

        “Eagles!” a gruff voice answered my call. And then, “Fiona! Put down that straighten iron! The outlet is for the coffee pot!” I heard a muffled crash. “I’m sorry. Eagles Academy. Can I help you?”

        “Yes,” I said. “My name is Cris Beam. I’m a writer who just moved into town, and I’m calling to find out about your school: what it’s about and whether you need --”

        “Fiona!!” the person shouted, without covering the phone. The voice was masculine sounding, but without the deep tones of a man -- like an adolescent boy whose voice hadn’t changed, except this person was clearly an adult. I detected a slight German accent. “I’m sorry. I’m going to have to call you back.”

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

An Interview with Cris Beam

1. When did you realize the story of Christina and her friends would become a book? What were the most challenging scenes to write?

        I actually thought about writing a book about transgender teenagers several months into my teaching at Eagles, both because the kids there were so interesting and because they wanted to see themselves reflected in the media so badly. They kept urging me to make a “transgender Seventeen” magazine, with lots of photographs.

        When I started getting close to Christina, I thought at first, “Uh-oh, I’ve lost all my journalistic distance. Better keep her out of the book.” But then, slowly, I realized Christina was the book. I realized we had come into each other’s lives to teach each other something, and that this relationship, this growth, was a vital part of the story. I also saw that chronicling several years in the lives of a small group of people would go a lot deeper and ultimately be more honest than superficial profiles of a giant cast of characters.

        As far as the most difficult scenes to write, I would say the ones where Christina was really being self-destructive—such as when she stole the car or went back on drugs. These were hard to live through, let alone recapture in print! I was aware, much as I tried not to be, that she’d be reading them someday, and I was worried that she’d be hurt by them, or resent me for calling her out like that. And then I worried that this concern was somehow subconsciously keeping me from writing the scenes with as much grit or raw detail as I needed to. I’m a journalist by training; you’re never supposed to protect your sources—let alone love them. So I’d struggle with each word—checking and rechecking myself to make sure that I was neither softening the reality, nor overcompensating and hardening the edges. I tried to be the neutral observer, just recapturing details as a reader would see them, but this was tough because I was anything but neutral.

2. What discoveries most surprised you in your research for Transparent?

        Some of the most surprising discoveries didn’t even make it into the book! For instance, for several months, I did a bunch of research into animal behavior, reading all about rainbow parrot fish that randomly change gender throughout their lives, and bighorn sheep whose females have to act like young males to garner the attention of the older bucks. It turns out dozens of animal species have recorded examples of transgender behavior, and I was so obsessed, I scrawled out pages and pages on hooded warblers, white-tailed deer, and garter snakes. But then I realized it all started to sound too Animal Kingdom, and it had the air of justification—as if seeing transsexuality in animals was what made it “okay” or “natural” in people—and I didn’t want to add to that chorus. Transgender rights should be codified without us having to point to the northern elephant seal—a claim that could always be undermined by a quick nod to anthropomorphism.

        Doing the historical research was surprising and a bit disheartening, because of the dearth of real material (save for the work from a few brave, and mostly contemporary, scholars). “Women dressed as men” discovered dead on battlefields, for example, are dismissed in literature as great patriots, rather than great patriots plus a few transmen spotting an opportunity, which is probably closer to the truth. I was surprised that more historians haven’t looked back at major figures—Joan of Arc, for instance—with a more critical, or even curious, eye.

3. Give us an update on Christina. How is she doing these days? How does she feel about the book?

        Christina is great. She’s working as a case manager for young women struggling with drugs and high-risk behavior. She connects these girls with resources, teaches them about HIV prevention and safety, drives them to doctors’ appointments—whatever they need to make their lives safer and better. She keeps getting top performance reviews and raises, and I couldn’t be prouder.

        She’s also going to community college, taking one or two classes a semester at night, on top of her full-time job. Recently, she and I have been looking at masters programs in either public health or social work; right now both look interesting to her. We talk on the phone at least every other day.

        Christina read the book, as did all the major people in Transparent, in manuscript form as soon as it was finished. (This is true of everyone but Domineque, who didn’t want me to send it in pieces through prison mail, where guards would have read it and potentially given her grief. Instead I just let her know what scenes and information I was including, and let Christina be her reading proxy.) Anyway, when I sent the book to Christina, I was scared; any time you depict someone else’s life, there’s tremendous risk involved. How do you portray someone accurately, terrible warts and all?

        She read the book slowly, calling me every few days to inform me of her progress. Sometimes she was crying; always she was moved. “I didn’t know you noticed all those things, girl,” she said. “I didn’t know you were paying so much attention.”

    Christina thought she had “gotten away” with a lot of things with Robin and me—that we loved her because we hadn’t noticed she was being so bad, or doing drugs, or whatever. But when she saw herself so blatantly portrayed in Transparent, and still ultimately triumphant and deeply loved, she realized even more how worthy she is and how committed we are to her. Our relationship grew closer after she read the book.

4. How did your experience in Los Angeles shape your life as a teacher? What is it like to teach at a university after teaching in alternative high schools?

        Teaching high school in Los Angeles made me realize I wanted to incorporate teaching into my career permanently. For one thing, it helps my writing to explain the practical mechanics of what I’m doing, especially to a bunch of ADD-addled teenagers who are bored from the get-go. There’s no room for complacency in teaching, at least if you care about it. Plus, teenagers and young adults are endlessly, maddeningly creative; while they may not have the kind of discipline and follow-through it takes to actually complete a project, they also don’t have the kind of filters and internal editors that stop a lot of us from even starting. So I found I learned from their energy and impulsiveness, and I wanted to continue teaching to continue drawing from that well.

        Teaching at a university is very different from teaching high school. For one thing, students don’t threaten me with guns. (This actually happened to me once!) For another, the libraries are much better. At Columbia and New School, my colleagues are brilliant and the academic environment in general is intellectually rich and challenging. Still, I know that my students at Eagles—for a whole host of reasons including poverty, academic discrimination, lack of family support, and negative internalized belief systems—don’t generally have access to the kinds of universities where I’m teaching now. So I imagine I’ll teach some more alternative high school classes here in New York. Plus adolescents are so crazy and funny; I can’t resist their energy.

5. In the absence of a stable biological mother, who were your role models for good parenting? Before moving to the West Coast, had you and Robin ever thought about becoming parents?

        I was lucky in that when I left my mother’s house, I went to live with my father and stepmom, who had also been present throughout my early childhood. They were struggling at times in their own ways, but they were loving parents and they were stable. Among other things, my dad and stepmom were very supportive of my writing, always telling me that I was talented and smart, and showing off the books and poems I was forever doling out. This helped me know how to nurture the seeds of talent I saw and see in Christina. I also think a person can heal from early parental losses through later relationships—and I have to say, Robin taught me a lot in our fourteen years together about unconditional love, and about trust. While she obviously never parented me, Robin helped me stitch together a kind of faith in longevity, which I never had before her—and which a person certainly needs to parent teenagers. You need a very long view because the in-the-moment acting up can be quite painful.

        Before we moved to Los Angeles, Robin and I had a vague idea of wanting a family; we just didn’t know how exactly that would manifest. We had toyed with the idea of me actually carrying a baby, but then dropped that plan for a whole host of reasons. Now we’re planning to foster another teenager, probably within the next two years.

6. What are you writing now?

        I’m working on two things simultaneously. Unfortunately, Robin was diagnosed with breast cancer last April, so I’ve been writing a lot about that—about sickness, partnership, fear, and, actually, body modification from a whole other perspective. Robin’s doing well—she’s going through chemo right now—and in a way, because we’re so close, I’m going through it all with her. But then again, I’m also obviously not—she’s physically very much alone. It’s a very strange, and interesting, place from which to write.

        I’m also working on a book about the state of foster care in America. So many kids in Transparent had been in foster care at some point, and they all had so much to say (mostly about the system’s deep and abundant flaws) that I wanted to write a book just about that. There are half a million kids in foster care right now, left to dangle somewhere between adoption and family reunification, and I think their oversight (using both meanings of that word) can say a lot about our values as a culture or country.