Transparent: Love, Family, and Living the T with Transgender Teenagers
By Cris Beam

Here is a nonfiction story that pops like a novel. This book is amazing and everyone—not just teachers, librarians, and parents—should read it. Beam writes nonfiction like a dream. She renders real people in a raw and realistic, yet literary way, with a flair for dialogue and descriptive details. Her characters are as big as life.

Beam taught briefly at Eagles Academy, a GLBT school where she met the transgender teenagers whose lives she documents. Her main subjects are Foxxjazell, Domineque, Ariel, and Christina, my favorite. Christina is destructive, smart, intense, and heartbreaking; she made me laugh and cry (no, really.) When she cries she hiccups and “sounds like a fish tank” and when she’s scared she curls up in the kitchen sink and eats Doritos. Christina burns brightly and will stick in your mind long after you’ve finished the book.

Navigating through our rigid world is fraught for transgender people. Obtaining employment, education, medical care, a driver’s license, a passport, using public bathrooms, and finding a safe romantic partner are all daily struggles. Because Transparent’s teenagers have been locked out of our limited story of gender, they can astutely critique its absurdities and constrictions. They’re pretty clear that they know what’s up with their bodies and their identities. It’s the rest of us who are confused and fighting so hard to keep everything “normal.” This book shows that transgender people aren’t reinscribing stereotypical gender roles. Being transgender is much more complicated than playing dress-up.

Beam has created a seamless narrative of transgender history, the personal lives of modern transgender teenagers, and the medical and legal travails of most transgender people. I hope this book changes minds and burrows into hearts. That’s why I’m writing this review. At my big city library transgender teenagers are treated with hostility and contempt. We need to work to protect all teenagers, especially the most vulnerable, from harassment and abuse. This book will arm its readers with more information and compassion to fight the good fight. We must keep in mind that “the pervasive self-doubt or self-hate born of a dismissive larger culture will squeeze itself out from the soul’s crack’s somewhere.”