Privilege is a tactical silence. Those who lack it—immigrants, the sexually marginalized, the poor—are relegated to the realm of the unsaid, subject to a brutal etiquette which forbids us from the “unpleasant” topic of how and why we are implicated in human suffering. Cris Beam’s memoir, Transparent: Love, Family, and Living the T with Transgender Teenagers, is a book fired off into this silence; like a flare thrown down a well, it sheds some brief, limited light, but it also brings into focus the emptiness that surrounds it.

Nearly every institution in the world defines gender as a two-party system, determined by physical characteristics and especially by genitalia. Transgender people, whose lived gender differs from the gender listed on their birth certificates, are at a particular disadvantage under this system; they’re often victims of hate crime, job discrimination, and police harassment, and there are several laws designed specifically to ensure that trans men and women are less privileged than their non-trans counterparts. Transparent, as an account of Beam’s friendships with young transgender women, moves these facts out of the realm of social commentary to describe how they affect and shape individual lives.

For the most part, Transparent concerns just one girl: Christina, born Eduardo, a student that Beam befriends while teaching at a Los Angeles high school. She soon learns that Christina’s mother is a troubled and violent woman, who refuses to accept her “son” as a girl; so, when Christina leaves home, Beam takes her in. The book becomes the story of their jury-rigged family, and as pure memoir, it’s an emotional, startling read. Beam is unsentimental, with a lean, flexible prose style, and can move from storytelling to analysis so easily that the reader never notices her shifting gears. She’s also been blessed with a great subject. Christina combines intense vulnerability with a survivor’s furious poise; on any given day, she can swing from gushing about Geri Halliwell to carving up her arm with a kitchen knife, but throughout it all we sense in her a miraculous core of resilience and insight.

In describing her relationship with Christina, Beam widens her focus to include other trans girls, and is unsparing in her descriptions of the daily humiliations that these young women face. She shows, for example, how difficult it is for a trans woman to avoid prostitution when no “legitimate” company will hire her, and (some time later) how much harder men’s prison is for someone with breast implants.

If the book has a weakness, it’s this: Beam doesn’t provide an accurate idea of the variety of transgender experience. She focuses almost exclusively on Latina women from poor families. The threat to these women—as queer females of color, they’re disadvantaged in several ways at once—makes their lives particularly harsh, and so particularly worth addressing, but the narrowness of Beam’s focus precludes a more comprehensive understanding of transgender issues. However, it’s perhaps unfair to demand perfect and complete representation from a single book. Transparent makes the point that it’s often far more valuable to focus on the people around us, one life at a time.