Jan 25, 2008  |  By: ZACK ROSEN  | COMMENTS     

Lesbian author Cris Beam had to step out of several comfort zones while writing last year’s “Transparent: Love, Family and Living the T with Transgender Teenagers,” which was just released in paperback. What started out as a study on underprivileged, male-to-female transgender teenagers in Los Angeles unexpectedly morphed into a personal story when Beam became the foster mother to one of her subjects.

Beam spent more than three years volunteering at Eagles Academy, a school for transgender teens in L.A. It’s there that she met Christina, Dominique, Foxxjazell and Ariel and gained legal guardianship of Christina. Now living in New York City and teaching at Columbia University, Beam says that she wasn’t able to put the book to rest until she established enough geographical distance to view the story objectively.

“This became a real labor of love, literally. It became a memoir in addition to a reportive piece,” says Beam, who received a grant from the Point Foundation to finish the book. “I covered the lives of our transgender girls throughout seven years of their lives, but [the book also looks] at my journey as a parent and the frustrations, pain, triumphs and struggles inherent in that. It took Christina growing up and living on her own and me moving to New York to get enough distance and finish the book.”

Beam’s background is in journalism, which shows in the book’s tone. Though her strong voice and character development give the book the emotional capture of a novel, Beam’s attention to detail and objective parceling out of facts betrays her origins.

THE BOOK’S GENESIS certainly reflects Beam’s background in print media. The teens that Beam was teaching wanted to see their stories in the mainstream media, but there wasn’t an outlet for that at the time. Their dream was a sort of Seventeen magazine for transgender teenagers, but the closest Beam could come to helping them realize this was pitching an article on trans teens to several national teen magazines.

Most of the publications balked, citing the fact that the controversial subject matter would scare off advertisers, but Teen People eventually accepted the proposal. Beam followed this with a piece on National Public Radio and eventually settled on the book’s current format.

There was some initial concern on Beam’s part that she would be viewed as an outsider peering in, but the differences ended up strengthening the book.

“Anytime you tell someone else’s story and say, ‘This is your truth according to me,’ you’re in really tricky territory … But I think there’s something really challenging and beautiful about crossing traditional boundaries and saying ‘I’m gonna listen to you. Even though it’s going to be challenging and I’ll bump against my own internalized fears and I might get it wrong sometimes, it’s worth it for us to try and understand each other.’”

Beam’s sympathy for the transgender cause grew even more personal after a recent violent attack in New York City — an attack Beam believes was rooted in gender.

Taking the train home from Columbia, wearing her “professor drag” of pinstriped pants and a button-down shirt, Beam had her face smashed against a wall by a group of teenage boys who screamed “faggot” at her. There was a moment when the boys realized they were hitting a girl and began to feel bad, but they quickly started yelling, “dyke.” She says this experience only highlighted the shortsightedness of not including transgender people in legislation furthering gay rights.

“When you target people for hate crimes, it’s because of some gender violation. In that way I think there’s a lot of reasons we need to be allied … we need to have nondiscrimination policies that include all people. The bashers might have been yelling ‘faggot’ and ‘dyke,’ but what they were going after was a gender violation.”