It's a trans world

The author of a new book about transgender teenagers in Los Angeles talks straight about hormone smuggling, life on the street, and the rise of America's first trans-rapper.

By Nona Willis-Aronowitz

Read more: Education, Gay Rights, Teenagers, homelessness, Life

Jan. 5, 2007 | "Transgender": Does even the word confuse you? If you were asked to define it, could you?

If not, you're hardly alone. For years, the transgender community has existed in the shadow of the gay, lesbian and bisexual rights movement -- though most trans-people agree that redefining their gender has little to do with their sexual orientation. The word is applied to everyone from drag queens and sex reassignment surgery patients to femme gay men and butch straight girls. And these days, when discussions of transgender do happen, it's usually in the context of the sex industry or debates about unisex bathrooms and gender-blind hallways in college dormitories. With such boundless, cloudy meanings, is it any surprise that even the most sex-savvy, gay-friendly, politically correct among us still have a hard time explaining the term?

Cris Beam, the author of "Transparent: Love, Family, and Living the T with Transgender Teenagers," hopes her new book will help take on some of the mysteries and misconceptions that still haunt the transgender community. Beam, now 34, moved to Los Angeles in 1997, while her girlfriend attended graduate school. Lonely in her new city, she became intrigued by Eagles, a local high school specifically for gay and transgender kids; with the time left over in her freelance writing schedule, she began to work there as a volunteer. During the two and a half years Beam taught at Eagles, she discovered a complex but marginalized tribe of transgender teens who had nowhere to go but the streets. "Transparent" chronicles those stories, and describes how, within a few years, Beam found herself deeply involved in the kids' lives, entangled in their dreams, disappointments and their search for the truth about themselves and their gender.

Weaving personal narratives with the history of sex changes and the dynamics of the black-market hormone industry, "Transparent" is anchored by the wildly unstable lives of four trans-women -- Christina, Domineque, Foxxjazell and Ariel, all of whom were Beam's students at Eagles. Beam's tale gives equal weight to Foxx's blinky-eyed aspirations to be a pop star and her struggles with her incarcerated, physically abusive boyfriend. She shuttles through Domineque's flurry of foster homes and past Ariel's heavily medicated mother, and speaks frankly about their loves, friends and mentors.

But the character Beam describes in the most searing detail is Christina, the young woman who later became the author's foster daughter. Blurring sociological research and personal experience, Beam stares down the teenager's manic highs and homeless, motherless, loveless lows. The result is a meticulous document of a subculture clamoring to be heard, and a revelation of how a sense of community and family may be the prime determinant of one's fate.

Salon sat down with Beam in New York to talk about prostitution and RuPaul, the importance of family and teenage identity, and whether America is ready for its first transgender rapper.

What was your first day like at Eagles?

The day I showed up, the people in charge -- the "office managers" -- said, "Um, can you teach?" and then they ran off. They threw me in a classroom with about eight kids. Nobody was watching them: Some were dancing in the corner and somebody else was asleep on the floor. For some reason, I said without thinking, "Do you guys want to make a magazine?" And they started gathering around, kind of interested, asking me, "What kind of magazine?" We started by talking about fashion. I really liked the kids, so I just kept coming back, and I ended up staying for two and a half years.

What kinds of kids did you meet?

The school was really just a catch-all for gay or trans street kids. There wasn't a whole lot of education going on. The population was very transient -- the kids who really wanted an education went elsewhere. The kids came there because they were homeless and had heard about it, and they would come in to get help, or they had truancy tickets and needed the cops off their back, or had been beaten up or harassed at their other schools -- a whole host of reasons. Some of them had grown up in L.A. their whole lives, but many others had traveled there from someplace else.

Why were the kids attracted to L.A.?

It's a big city -- and if you're a queer of any kind, you tend to want to go to the city, because that's where the freaks are, and maybe you can blend in. But there are reasons why L.A. is specifically attractive. Transgender kids hear rumors about hormone availability. Because they're smuggled up from Tijuana, there's a big black market based in Los Angeles. In Mexico, hormones are sold over the counter. They can be perfectly safe, but the kids want to take a lot for fast results.

They also hear that there are trans-people in L.A., and about this community of older trans-kids that "adopt" the newcomers on the street. They teach the new ones how to survive in the streets and pass as women and attract men, make friends, and sometimes even how to pick a corner to hustle. Some people just want to be stars, so there's that hope that they'd be discovered in Hollywood.

Before you met the students, what kind of preconceived notions did you have about the "transgender" community?

I hadn't known a whole lot of transgender people before -- or, at least, I didn't know it if I did. When I went to college at U.C. Santa Cruz, it was a very stridently lesbian time. You know, "womyn" with a "y," and all sorts of identity politics around women's-only space. That meant that trans-women were kept out. I also didn't know that trans people could be as young as they were, that they could be as young as 12, 13. I was really clueless, and I had been sort of blinded to the real struggles since I had come of age in Santa Cruz, where it was really discriminatory toward trans-women.

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