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

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by Cris Beam (Author)

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 group of transgirls she discovered. Transparent introduces four: Christina, Dominique, Foxxjazell, and Ariel. As they accept Cris into their world, she shows it to us--a dizzying mix of familiar teenage cliques and crushes and far less familiar challenges, such as 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.

Front Jacket

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.
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Back Jacket

Beam does an admirable job grappling with the complexities of gender, race, and class that shape the lives of transgender teens... Beam also manages to draw out warmth, love, and good humor in her empathetic narrative.--Out

Christina, Dominique, Foxxjazell, and Ariel s world is a dizzying mix of teenage cliques, crushes, and far less familiar challenges-- like how to morph your body on a few dollars a day. These transgender girls bravely struggle to reconcile the way they feel inside with the way the world sees them. Funny, defiant, and sometimes heartbreaking, Cris Beam s exceptional story of how these girls survive and maybe even thrive despite a world that wants to ignore them, is a wonder of storytelling and passionate engagement.

"This is a serious piece of investigative reporting... [and] will prove indispensable to the small but growing literature on transgender teens."--Curve

"Beam built a deep understanding of the psyche of disadvantaged transgendered youth, and her richly detailed, sympathetic book attempts to paint a picture of their complex lives."--Bitch

CRIS BEAM, a journalist who has written for several national magazines as well as for the public radio program "This American Life," has an MFA in nonfiction from Columbia University and teaches creative writing at Columbia and the New School. She lives in New York."