Transparent - by Cris Beam (Paperback)

About the Book

When Beam moved to Los Angeles, she was drawn deeply into the pained and powerful group of transgirls she discovered. This work shows readers their world--a dizzying mix of familiar teenage cliques and crushes with far less familiar challenges like how to morph one's body on a few dollars a day.

Book Synopsis

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.

From the Back Cover

"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."

Review Quotes

"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