SFWeekly.com – By Lauren Smiley
Starr shifted her weight as she stood on a mostly deserted Broadway in downtown Oakland, looking up at the second-floor windows of Historic Sweet’s Ballroom. The pounding house music taunted her, convincing her the action was already going down inside and that she was missing all of it. Yet entering presented its own risks: “I’m as nervous as hell,” she announced. “I know how the Oakland girls can be.”
Starr got off her job just three hours ago at the Ark of Refuge center in San Francisco, where she mostly works with black transgender girls like herself. Girls who, in a couple months, she’ll not only feel like, but start to look like, as the estrogen shots coax her tiny adolescent male body down the road to breasts and hips.