Transparent
Love, Family, and Living the T with Transgender Teenagers
By Cris Beam
(Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Hardcover, 9780151011964, 336pp.)
Publication Date: January 2007
Other Editions of This Title: Paperback
Categories: Gender Studies, Human Sexuality, Life Stages - 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 transgender kids while she got settled. Instead she found herself drawn deeply into the pained and powerful group of transgirls she discovered. In Transparent she introduces four of them—Christina, Domineque, Foxxjazell, and Ariel—and 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—a struggle we can all identify with. Beam’s careful reporting, sensitive writing, and intimate relationship with her characters place Transparent in the ranks of the best narrative nonfiction.
CRIS BEAM is a journalist who has written for several national magazines as well as for public radio. She has an MFA in nonfiction from Columbia University and teaches creative writing at Columbia and the New School. She lives in New York.
"Transparent is 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
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