Cris Beam at Cody's Books January 22, 2007

CRIS BEAM investigates TRANSPARENT: Love, Family, and Living the T with Transgender Teens. When Cris Beam first moved to Los Angeles, she thought she might put in just a few hours volunteering at the Eagles Academy, a school for transgender teens, while she got settled. Instead, she found herself drawn deeply into the pained and powerful group of transgirls (born male but living as female) she discovered. TRANSPARENT introduces four of them and shows us their world, a dizzying mix of familiar teenage cliques and crushed with far less familiar challenges like how to morph your body on a few dollars a day. Funny, heartbreaking defiant, and sometimes defeated, the girls form a singular community. But they struggle valiantly to resolve the gap between the way they feel inside and the way the world perceives them. Beam’s careful reporting, sensitive writing, and intimate relationship with her characters earned a rave from Andrew Solomon, author of The Noonday Demon, who writes, “Without ever upstaging her subjects, Beam explains how she fell in love with them, and so allows us to do the same. This is literature of the first order.” Cris Beam is a journalist and teaches creative writing at Columbia University and the New School. 7:00 PM at Cody’s Fourth Street, Berkeley

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