Living the T with Transgender Teenagers

Cris Beam wrote “Transparent: Love, Family, and Living the T with Transgender Teenagers” after volunteering at a school for gay and transgender students in Los Angeles, and becoming a foster parent to one of her students.  Cris is a journalist and lives in New York City. You can read an excerpt of her book below.

The first really great drag mother I ever met is a woman named Foxxjazell. Foxx was twenty years old when she first called me; she heard I was researching young transpeople for a book, and she wanted to be included in the project. Foxx grew up Dwight Eric in Birmingham, Alabama, and had bused her way to Los Angeles as soon as she graduated from high school and  had scraped together enough fare for the trip. She wanted to be a musician or, as she said, “the first really big international transsexual pop star.”

“You’d better hurry up,” Foxx told me in our initial telephone conversation. “I’m going to be a major star, I’d say, within three years, so if you want a shot at writing my biography, you’d better get to know me now.” She was young and confident and sounded more naive than vain when she described herself so I could recognize her when we met.

“I’m very beautiful,” she said. “I’m tall and black, with butter pecan chocolate skin and long silky hair.” She suggested we meet at the Red Lobster.

I recognized Foxx immediately when she loped through the door. She was right—she was pretty, with silver charms woven through her hair and ripped tight jeans, upon which she had scrawled the words “Latins Do It Better.” She moved her tall body slowly, like she was accustomed to being watched, and the men in the restaurant did indeed scroll their eyes up and down her figure while the women tightened their jaws. A waiter stumbled as he led us to our table.

Over a well-done steak slathered with ketchup, Foxx told me the story of her own drag mother, a drag queen named Tatiana, whom she had met only a year and a half before. Foxx had just arrived in Los Angeles, as a femmy eighteen-year-old gay boy, and was staying at a shelter for young adults called Covenant House. While hanging out in Covenant’s living room, Foxx watched a young woman with a cropped bob haircut and a summer skirt slip through the door, tossing her head and laughing with friends.

“When I first saw Tatiana, she was wearing high heels and her makeup was so fierce,” Foxx remembered. “But I couldn’t catch T; I couldn’t catch the fact that she was really a boy.”

“T” is a letter-word that urban transkids use for all kinds of circumstances. It stands, of course, for transgender, but it also stands for “truth.” When a kid says, “Here’s the T,” she means, Be quiet and listen: I’m about to get real. This, I think, is remarkable. The letter that has come to signify difference—T—also means total honesty. Somebody might say, “I didn’t spill my T,” which means she didn’t disclose her transsexuality. But she might also say, “What’s his T?”— meaning “What’s the skinny on that guy—what’s the real truth about him?” With this question he might be asking all sorts of things: is he gay, is he from here, is he available, and so on. “What’s the T?” can also be used as a generic greeting—a sort of “Wassup?” for queer kids.

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