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We
are pleased to present the following
excerpt from the book
Transparent:
Love, Family, and Living the T with
Transgender Teenagers
by Cris Beam
Harcourt - January
2007
School
Here's what you see when you drive down
Los Angeles's Santa Monica Boulevard just
east of La Brea: a 7-Eleven, a Shakey's
Pizza, a low concrete building with fish
painted on the side, and a taco stand.
There's a Chinese takeout place and a
triple-X video rental shop, a filling
station, and four lanes of traffic, two in
each direction. Old people waiting for the
bus. Young mothers dragging children in
flip-flops. A discount dollar store, a
Laundromat, and a bunch of teenagers
standing around and smoking. If you stare
for more than a minute, you may note that
most of these teenagers are girls, and
that they're more ethnically varied than
other cliques in this segregated town. But
that's it. Santa Monica Boulevard's got
the sun-bleached, chain-store feeling of
most of L.A.
If you're a transgender girl (meaning
you were born male but live as a female),
you might notice something extra along
this stretch of Santa Monica. It's here
that you'll find girls trading secrets
about how to shoot up the black-market
hormones purchased from the swap meets in
East L.A. If the hormones don't work fast
enough to manifest your inner vision of
wider hips and C cups, you can find out
about "pumping parties" out in the Valley,
where a former veterinarian or a
"surgeon's wife" from Florida will shoot
free-floating industrial-grade silicone
into hips, butts, breasts, knees -- even
cheeks and foreheads. Of course, this is
dangerous when the oils shift and form
hard lumps in the armpits and thighs, but
you'll look good for a while.
On Santa Monica, you can learn which
dance clubs, like Arena (with its crudely
painted ocean mural on the outside), let
in underage kids and have go-go boxes for
dancing. You can learn which motels, one
block up on Sunset, are safe and clean and
have weekly rates. You can find out about
the telemarketing company that hires
transgender youth, no matter what they
look like, to sell garbage bags and
first-aid kits over the telephone. Of
course, for the job you'll have to
memorize a script saying that you're
handicapped and that these household items
are offered at higher prices because they
provide employment to mentally handicapped
people like yourself. And though it makes
you sick to say it, this technically won't
be a lie; transgender people are still
dubbed "mentally ill" by the medical
community, the way gay people were in the
seventies. This is how the telemarketing
firm gets away with cheap labor.
On Santa Monica, you can walk with a
friend to the Jeff Griffith Youth Center
-- one of the few outreach agencies that
knows about, and feeds, struggling
transgender kids under twenty-four. It's
right on the corner of Sycamore; you'll
recognize it by the thick bars on the
windows and the hand-drawn sign that says
NO FIGHTING. Here you can sign up for a
shower or get free bus tokens or a
subsidized meal on a tray that looks just
like the kind served in the high school
cafeteria you ran from. There's also a big
TV and a pool table with no billiard
balls, and you can hang out until the
place closes at six o'clock, without cars
stopping you on the street and asking,
"How much?"
And when the center closes, you can
traipse over to Benito's, the
twenty-four-hour clapboard outdoor food
stand and "Home of the Rolled Taco," for
yet another dinner. Teenagers can always
eat.
At Benito's, over the sizzle and pop of
day-old grease, kids preen and throw
insults and drink oversize sodas from waxy
paper cups and look into cars for cute
boys who might roll by. As the girls wait
for night, when the dance clubs open, the
Benito's parking lot fills with them,
laughing and squealing and running up to
one another with halfway air-kissy hugs,
like they haven't seen each other in ages
and yet don't want to muss their clothes.
Most look nothing like the drag queens or
cross dressers that stereotypes dictate or
outsiders expect. They're young and soft
faced and wear jeans and T-shirts or, if
it's a Saturday night, clingy dresses and
big hoop earrings.
"Tracy, girl, I haven't seen you since
like last month! You look good!
Where you staying at?" This is the kind of
banter one might hear as girls bump into
each other buying post-taco Slurpees at
the 7-Eleven.
"Angel! I know, it's been a long time
-- that's 'cause I'm not staying in
Hollywood no more, chica. I got me
a husband and we moved over to Culver
City."
A husband is a stretch, but it's a term
kids commonly fling around in an attempt
at permanence or stability. When Tracy
asks Angel more questions about her man,
Angel will likely demur unless the two are
legitimately good friends. Teenagers are
known for stealing one another's
boyfriends, especially when there's a
perceived scarcity, like there is in this
community.
Standing on the corner of Highland and
Santa Monica, you can feel positively
cultured, as canned classical music is
piped out of a loudspeaker and into the
parking lot all night long. I heard that
it was the Chinese restaurant that put
this in, in an oddly misguided attempt to
curb loitering. But teenagers like Vivaldi
as much as anyone else, and they gather
there, shouting over its trills, bobbing
their heads in four-four time. Gossip
speeds along the sidewalk, as kids swap
secrets about crushes and losses, and dish
about what no-good ho stole another girl's
man. Some kids, though certainly not all,
climb in and out of cars -- hustling for
cash. In this crowd there's competition
for men and money and good clothes and
popularity just like at any high school in
America, and on the Boulevard you can find
out who's winning. The Boulevard is also
where you can hear about who just got her
breasts pumped and looks damn good, and
who went back home to live with her
mother, becoming a boy again. It's where
you can learn from the older girls that
not everyone has surgery and not everyone
wants it, because a woman can have a penis
and -- girl! -- no one can tell her she
can't. It's where you can listen to the
new Pink CD on your friend's Walkman and
play video games at the all-night Donut
Time. It's where you can feel normal,
connected, hip. It's where you can be a
teenager.
Around the corner from Santa Monica and
up the street, on Highland, is an
unremarkable brown office building. It's
the kind of place that houses dozens of
low-rent and high-turnaround businesses:
limo services, temp agencies, computer
repair places, accounting firms. Every
weekday morning a handful of transgender
kids stumble in with the rumpled brown
suits and briefcased folks, because in the
basement of this building is a high
school, of sorts. Or was, when I became a
teacher there.
I don't even remember how I first heard
about Eagles, the small, scrappy high
school for gay and transgender teenagers.
Probably just from a new acquaintance in a
passing conversation. But it had piqued my
interest; I was curious who would go
there, since when I was a kid, there was
no such thing as a gay school, and hardly
any such thing as a gay student.
Would these kids be harassed, troubled, in
need? I wondered if I could help in any
way. By then I had been living in Los
Angeles for six months, and an itchy
boredom with the town had begun to creep
up my spine. Having moved from New York so
my partner, Robin, could get a Ph.D., I
was missing an urban edge and lonesome for
community beyond my dining-room table. I
worked at home as a freelance magazine
writer, and I had extra time to volunteer,
maybe once a week, maybe twice. So that
winter (which didn't really feel like a
winter at all), I rang up the school.
"Eagles!" a gruff voice answered my
call. And then, "Fiona! Put down that
straighten iron! The outlet is for the
coffee pot!" I heard a muffled crash. "I'm
sorry. Eagles Academy. Can I help
you?"
"Yes," I said. "My name is Cris Beam.
I'm a writer who just moved into town, and
I'm calling to find out about your school:
what it's about and whether you need
--"
"Fiona!!" the person shouted, without
covering the phone. The voice was
masculine sounding, but without the deep
tones of a man -- like an adolescent boy
whose voice hadn't changed, except this
person was clearly an adult. I detected a
slight German accent. "I'm sorry. I'm
going to have to call you back."
Copyright
© 2007 by Cris Beam and reprinted
with permission.
Cris
Beam is a journalist who has written for
several national magazines as well as for
public radio. She has an MFA in nonfiction
from Columbia University and teaches
creative writing at Columbia and the New
School. She lives in New York.
Read Dr.
Dolhenty's Review of this Book
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