Transparent: love, family and living the world with transgender adolescents
I
College
Here’s what you see when you drive down Los Angeles’ Santa Monica Boulevard, east of La Brea: a 7-Eleven, a Shakey’s Pizza, a low-rise concrete building with fish painted on the side, and a taco stand. There’s a Chinese take-out place and triple-X video rental store, a gas station, and four lanes of traffic, two in each direction. Elderly waiting for the bus. Young mothers dragging their children in flip flops. A discount store, a laundromat and a group of teenagers standing and smoking. If you stare for more than a minute, you can see that most of these teens are girls and that they are more ethnically diverse than other cliques in this segregated city. But that’s it. Santa Monica Boulevard has the feeling of being bleached by the sun and of a chain of stores from most of Los Angeles
If you are a transgender girl (which means you were born a man but live as a woman), you may notice something else along this stretch of Santa Monica. It’s here that you’ll find girls trading secrets on how to fire up black market hormones bought from swap meets in East Los Angeles. If hormones aren’t working fast enough to manifest your inner vision of wider hips and C-cups, you can find out about “pump parties” in the Valley, where a former vet or “surgeon’s wife” from Florida will inject silicone. Industrial grade floating on hips, glutes, breasts, knees, even cheeks and foreheads. Of course, this is dangerous when the oils drift and form hard lumps on your armpits and thighs, but you’ll look good for a while.
In Santa Monica, you can learn which dance clubs, like Arena (with its crudely painted ocean mural on the outside), let underage kids in and have go-go boxes for dancing. You can find out which motels, one block from Sunset, are safe and clean and have weekly rates. You can find out about the telemarketing company that hires transgender youth, regardless of their appearance, to sell trash bags and first aid kits over the phone. Of course, for work you will have to memorize a script that says you are disabled and that these household items are offered at higher prices because they provide employment for people with mental disabilities like you. And although it disgusts you to say it, technically this is not a lie; Transgender people are still labeled “mentally ill” by the medical community, as were homosexuals in the 1970s. This is how the telemarketer gets away with cheap labor.
In Santa Monica, you can walk with a friend to the Jeff Griffith Youth Center, one of the few outreach agencies that knows and feeds struggling transgender children under the age of twenty-four. It is right on the corner of Sycamore; You’ll recognize it by the thick window bars and the hand-drawn NO FIGHTING sign. Here you can sign up for a shower or get free bus tokens or a subsidized meal on a tray that looks like the one served in the cafeteria at the high school you fled from. There’s also a big TV and a pool table with no pool 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 head to Benito’s, the twenty-four-hour outdoor clapboard food stand and “Home of the Rolled Taco,” for another dinner. Teens can always eat.
At Benito’s, between the sizzle and burst of grease of a day, kids strut and hurl insults and drink oversized sodas from waxy paper cups and look in cars for cute kids to pass. As the girls wait for the night, when the dance clubs open, Benito’s parking lot fills with them, laughing and screaming and running towards each other with hugs half in the air, as if they haven’t seen each other in years and still they did not. I don’t want to mess up your clothes. Most are nothing like the drag queens or transvestites stereotypes dictate or expect outsiders. They are young and soft-faced and wear jeans and T-shirts or, if it’s Saturday night, tight dresses and big hoops.
“Tracy girl, I haven’t seen you since last month! You look good! Where do you stay?” This is the kind of joke one might hear when the girls find themselves shopping for post-taco Slurpees at the 7-Eleven.
“Angel! I know, it’s been a long time, that’s because I’m not staying in Hollywood anymore, girl. I got a husband and we moved to Culver City.”
A husband is exaggerated, but it is a term that children often throw in an attempt at permanence or stability. When Tracy asks Angel more questions about her man, Angel will likely object unless the two are legitimately good friends. Teens are notorious for stealing each other’s boyfriends, especially when a shortage is perceived, as is the case in this community.
Standing on the corner of Highland and Santa Monica, you can feel positively cultured, as canned classical music blasts from a speaker and hits the parking lot all night long. Heard it was the Chinese restaurant that installed this, in a strangely misguided attempt to curb loitering. But teenagers like Vivaldi as much as anyone else, and they flock there, shouting over his trills, shaking their heads four-by-four. Gossip picks up along the sidewalk, as kids exchange secrets about crushes and losses, and talk about what a bad person stole from another girl’s man. Some children, but certainly not all, get in and out of cars, looking for cash. In this crowd there is competition for men and money and good clothes and popularity, as in any high school in America, and on the Boulevard you can find out who is winning. The Boulevard is also where you can hear about who just pumped her breasts and looks great, and who came home to live with her mother, becoming a child again. It’s where you can learn from older girls that not everyone gets surgery and not everyone wants it, because a woman can have a penis and girl! – no one can tell you that you can’t. It’s where you can listen to the new Pink CD on your friend’s Walkman and play video games at Donut Time that stays open all night. It is where you can feel normal, connected, modern. It is where you can be a teenager.
Around the corner from Santa Monica and up the street in Highland is an inconspicuous brown office building. It’s the kind of place that houses dozens of low-cost, high-turnover businesses: limousine services, temp agencies, computer repair places, accounting firms. Every weekday morning, a bunch of transgender kids stumble in in wrinkled brown suits and people with briefcases, because there’s some kind of high school in the basement of this building. Or was it, when I became a teacher there.
I don’t even remember how I first heard about Eagles, the run down little high school for gay and transgender teens. Probably just from a new acquaintance in a passing conversation. But it had piqued my interest; I was curious who would go there, since as a child, there was no gay school, and almost nothing that could be called a gay student. Would these children be bullied, worried, needy? I was wondering if it could help in any way. By then I had been living in Los Angeles for six months, and a nagging boredom of the city had started to creep up my spine. Having moved from New York so that my partner, Robin, could get a Ph.D., I was missing an urban flair and felt alone in the community beyond the dining room table. She worked at home as a freelance magazine writer and had extra time to volunteer, maybe once a week, maybe two. So that winter (which really didn’t feel like winter at all), I called the school.
“Eagles!” a hoarse voice answered my call. And then, “Fiona! Put down that iron! The output is for the coffee pot!” I heard a thud. “Sorry. Eagles Academy. Can I help you?”
“Yes, I said.” My name is Cris Beam. I’m a writer who just moved to town, and I’m calling to find out about your school – what it’s about and if you need … “
“Fiona !!” the person yelled, without covering the phone. The voice sounded masculine, but without the deep tones of a man, like a teenager whose voice had not changed, except that this person was clearly an adult. I detected a slight German accent. “I’m sorry. I’ll have to call you again.”
Abstract
The above is an excerpt from the Transparent book.
by Cris Beam
Published by Harcourt, Inc .; January 2007; $ 25.00US; 9780151011964
Copyright © 2007 by Cris Beam
