In getting to know the teens, she saw that it was key that their parents understand and accept them. She replied, ‘I know what comes next.’ We laughed and cried together there was a warm feeling amongst all of us.” “The mom had not read the chapter so I said, ‘why don’t you start reading it now?’ She started reading and started crying, saying, ‘ You read it.’ I said, ‘I‘ll pick out the fun parts.’ Still she cried. Susan describes an interaction between a mother and daughter who came to her apartment for a photo shoot. Overall, Susan says the teens enjoyed the collaborative creative process. “I shaped the words of the book sort a like an artist using found objects on a canvas.” “I had to turn the material into narratives, but also stay true to what the kids were saying,” she says. She then took the tapes, transcribed them, laid out the book and went back to the youth to fill in the gaps. The interviews ran about six to eight hours, with several sittings. “I would bring my tape recorder and sometimes my camera and they would talk about their lives,” she says.

Knowing that confidentiality would be important, she teamed up with a psychologist at the organization who selected individual youth that might be a good fit with the project.

She told them she was looking for a group of diverse youth, both in terms of how they experience gender but also race, socioeconomic status and other areas. She hunted around and found the Callen-Lord Community Health Center in New York, a clinic that supports transgender youth and their families, and invited them to collaborate. “It parents want to learn how transgender teens feel, they should learn it from the kids’ point of view,” she says. Susan wanted to create a book that would give voice to the youth. Her recent book, Beyond Magenta: Transgender Teens Speak Out, is a series of photographs and personal essays, mostly told in the first person, about each teenager’s experience being transgender. “That got me thinking more and more about the fluidity of gender, enough to make me want to know more,” Susan says. Susan’s cousin told her about a transgender friend who explained that for her, it wasn’t the gender that counted, it was the person. But it was only recently that she first started thinking about a group that is still marginalized, both in North America and around the world. Susan Kuklin, author of Beyond Magenta: Transgender Teens Speak Out, talks about putting together this eye-opening book.Īmerican author Susan Kuklin comes from a long line of social activists and has written about human rights throughout her career.

Beyond magenta book