By Jeff Walsh

"Transparent: Love, Family, and Living the T with Transgender Teenagers" tells two stories, the story of young minority trans girls coming to terms with themselves in Los Angeles, and author Cris Beam's journey from being someone who ran away from her own mother at a young age who becomes the foster mother of Christina, the main subject of the book. Cris and I recently chatted about how she started writing this book, what it taught her, and what she hoped people could learn from it.

The thing that was interesting to me in the book was... as much as I work with youth, it's all online, so there's a built-in distance. And reading your book, there was no way I would have been able to deal with everything. It was way too much drama for me.

Yeah, there was a lot of drama.

Was that something you had to learn to deal with, or do you just have a better tolerance than me?

There was a lot of drama, for sure. When Christina came to live with us, I was certainly overwhelmed a lot of the time, and made a lot of mistakes. So, it was definitely tough. I got used to it gradually, I think, because I was teaching at the school. So, I acclimated in a way.

By Jeff Walsh

When I went to the San Francisco stop on the book tour for Cris Beam's "Transparent: Love, Family, and Living the T with Transgender Teenagers," I got a chance to chat with Christina, the trans girl Beam primarily wrote about in her book. While Beam was busy signing books, we went outside on Castro Street for a quick chat for Oasis. Having read about the shy, withdrawn Eduardo in the book, it was certainly a much different story being with the boisterous Christina, who had such a great energy about her:

So, you first met Cris when you were how old?

I was around... 15? 14? It was briefly that I met her at the school, the first time. As she explained, I was always running off. I never wanted to be in class. I was just not a school for learning. Everybody was doing their own thing, having their CD players, going to the computer room. The teacher was never, like, around so...

What kept you showing up at all?

Exactly, huh? When I could have hung out anywhere else? I think the fortunate thing was my parents were always implementing education on me? And even though they weren't demonstrating how, because my parents never graduated, or completed junior high.. so it just gave me a reason to keep on going. I wanted to prove how good I can be.

The following is an excerpt from the book "Transparent: Love, Family, and Living the T with Transgender Teenagers" by Cris Beam, Published by Harcourt, Inc. Reprinted with permission.

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.