Confronted by his mother over the truancy, J then runs away from home. The unfortunate side effect of that decision is that everyone who knows him knows him as a girl and thinks he is lesbian because he is romantically interested in women and dresses like a guy.Īn altercation with his best friend prompts J to skip school. “I Am J” is a tender, surprisingly relatable story that is at its core about a girl who is struggling to figure out who she is. Transsexualism is a natural if unusual subject for young-adult literature, geared as it is to teen readers whose bodies are already forcing them to think about budding sexuality. The new young adult novel “I Am J” by Cris Beam is a wonderful addition to the few novels that have dared to tackle a subject that has long lived in the cultural margins. Invariably, it’s fraught with conflict, as transsexual individuals wrestle with their self identity and struggle to fit into a society that prefers clear-cut gender roles. It is a situation that sometimes leads to gender reassignment surgery. When individuals identify with the opposite gender instead of their biological sex, it is often misunderstood, vilified or worse.Īlthough transsexualism is often confused with homosexuality, it is really about being born with body parts that don’t match an individual’s gender perspective.
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