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Transparent: Love, Family, and Living the T with Transgender Teenagers
by Cris Beam
Harcourt
January 2007, 336 pages, $25.00

by Sady O.


Privilege is a tactical silence. Those who lack it—immigrants, the
sexually marginalized, the poor—are relegated to the realm of the
unsaid, subject to a brutal etiquette which forbids us from
the "unpleasant" topic of how and why we are implicated in human
suffering. Cris Beam's memoir, Transparent: Love, Family, and Living
the T with Transgender Teenagers, is a book fired off into this
silence; like a flare thrown down a well, it sheds some brief,
limited light, but it also brings into focus the emptiness that
surrounds it.

Nearly every institution in the world defines gender as a two-party
system, determined by physical characteristics and especially by
genitalia. Transgender people, whose lived gender differs from the
gender listed on their birth certificates, are at a particular
disadvantage under this system; they're often victims of hate crime,
job discrimination, and police harassment, and there are several laws
designed specifically to ensure that trans men and women are less
privileged than their non-trans counterparts. Transparent, as an
account of Beam's friendships with young transgender women, moves
these facts out of the realm of social commentary to describe how
they affect and shape individual lives.

For the most part, Transparent concerns just one girl: Christina,
born Eduardo, a student that Beam befriends while teaching at a Los
Angeles high school. She soon learns that Christina's mother is a
troubled and violent woman, who refuses to accept her "son" as a
girl; so, when Christina leaves home, Beam takes her in. The book
becomes the story of their jury-rigged family, and as pure memoir,
it's an emotional, startling read. Beam is unsentimental, with a
lean, flexible prose style, and can move from storytelling to
analysis so easily that the reader never notices her shifting gears.
She's also been blessed with a great subject. Christina combines
intense vulnerability with a survivor's furious poise; on any given
day, she can swing from gushing about Geri Halliwell to carving up
her arm with a kitchen knife, but throughout it all we sense in her a
miraculous core of resilience and insight.

In describing her relationship with Christina, Beam widens her focus
to include other trans girls, and is unsparing in her descriptions of
the daily humiliations that these young women face. She shows, for
example, how difficult it is for a trans woman to avoid prostitution
when no "legitimate" company will hire her, and (some time later) how
much harder men's prison is for someone with breast implants.

If the book has a weakness, it's this: Beam doesn't provide an
accurate idea of the variety of transgender experience. She focuses
almost exclusively on Latina women from poor families. The threat to
these women—as queer females of color, they're disadvantaged in
several ways at once—makes their lives particularly harsh, and so
particularly worth addressing, but the narrowness of Beam's focus
precludes a more comprehensive understanding of transgender issues.
However, it's perhaps unfair to demand perfect and complete
representation from a single book. Transparent makes the point that
it's often far more valuable to focus on the people around us, one
life at a time.

— 28 February 2007


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