BlogCritics.org – Written by Damian Penny
Britain’s Daily Mail newspaper caused a stir last month with a story about a German child diagnosed as transsexual at 12 years of age. Born a boy, she now lives as a girl and receives regular hormone injections to offset the effects of adolescence. “Kim,” as she is now known, has been given the wholehearted support of her family – which makes her much more fortunate than the subjects of Cris Beam’s Transparent, a detailed look at a subject normally relegated to the tackier daytime talk shows.
Beam met and befriended several transgendered teenagers ? born male and now living as female, or vice versa ? while volunteering at a small high school for gay students in Los Angeles. Over the next four or five years, Beam became especially close to four of her male-to-female students, and chronicled their daily lives.