“The most important thing is that we show these kids that they are loved and protected and affirmed exactly as they are, and we tell them over and over again,” said journalist and author of American Teenager Nico Lang.
“I wish being trans wasn’t my whole life—because it’s really not—but it does affect a lot of my life.”
So says Wyatt—a 15 year old South Dakota teen, one of the seven central voices in Nico Lang’s American Teenager: How Trans Kids are Surviving Hate and Finding Joy in a Turbulent Era (out Oct. 8 from Abrams Press). The book spans states and perspectives, speaking with transgender teenagers from all walks of life—a girl in Florida who’s trying to figure out who she is while helping support her family financially; a boy in Chicago who’s excitedly planning for his first year of college in a city far away; kids who’ve been advocates since the were in diapers; and kids who just want to live their lives, away from the limelight.
As both Lang and venerable historian and academic Susan Stryker (who wrote the foreword) note, these teens are trying to live their lives in a pretty terrifying time. From the hundreds of anti-trans bills targeting trans kids’ rights to access essential, life-saving gender-affirming healthcare and play on the sports team that matches their gender in states across the country; to the ever-mounting crisis of anti-trans violence, these kids have a lot on their plate. But as Lang writes in the introduction, they’re still “carving out lives of fulfillment and splendor” while navigating this political maelstrom.
“They are creating safe spaces at their schools, trying out for the senior play, going on first dates, falling in love, getting their hearts broken, patching them up again, and realizing what it means to be a person with all the resplendent complications that humanity entails.”
The kids of American Teenager don’t want much. They’re not all activists, and they’re certainly not all perfect—mostly, they want space to make mistakes, to be messy, to live their lives. In many ways they still are just living their lives—a lot of the challenges the kids end up talking about have absolutely nothing to do with being trans.
“I’m just some boring dude with not a lot going on,” Clint, a seventeen-year-old living in Chicago, told Lang. “I hope people think, ‘I wasted my life reading this chapter.’”
Ms. spoke with Lang about the current state of the anti-trans movement, why children are an oppressed class, and what it means to foreground trans joy in a moment when institutionalized anti-trans hate is at an all-time high.
Oliver Haug: When it comes to the topic of trans teens, I feel like there’s been a whole lot of media coverage, lots of journalism—but not necessarily that many actual books exploring their experiences in-depth. What led you to want to write this kind of book in particular?
Nico Lang: I found a lot of the representation that existed on trans youth to be wanting—not because people had done a bad job, but because I felt like we hadn’t really gotten the chance, as journalists, to go as in depth as I know the stories of trans youth to be. So rather than continually looking at the tip of the iceberg, which is what I feel like journalists often have to do—because you have a word count, you have a deadline, you have to explain things in a way that has to be really digestible to a general audience—I wanted to examine the rest of the iceberg, to allow people to get to really know these kids.
When readers leave this book, I want them to feel like they have spent time with these kids, with the way that I did. For each kid, for two and a half weeks I’m doing what are essentially in-depth therapy sessions with these kids almost every day, talking about some of the worst things that happened in their lives, but also their joys, their hopes, their dreams, and just hanging out with them as they go about their day. And I think when you have that level of intense conversation and interesting conversation and funny conversation, you get so much more out of it.
I felt like this needed to be written right now, because we needed that level of engagement—this is the time when the average person needs to understand what kids are going through, and their thoughts and perspectives. Because if we don’t, we’re going to keep passing the same horrible policies over and over again that are taking away these kids’ rights to exist. To me, it felt like this was a moment for an intervention, to say, ‘Something needs to change.’ And I don’t know if this book is going to do it, but I hope it helps us get there.
Haug: I feel like personal storytelling has a power to do that in a way that statistics really doesn’t. I was really impressed with how deep so many of these kids were willing to go with essentially someone they had just met! How did you find these families, and how did you convince them to get into it with you?
Lang: You get a good sense of that in the chapter on Kylie. Building that trust with her was really hard—you know, we did just meet, and she’s now being expected to open up to this person that she doesn’t know from Adam! It was really tough for her to give away not just that kind of trust, but to have that level of vulnerability.
For me, it’s just about being open and engaged with them and just being as much of a person as I could. As a reporter, I try to be just really human with people—I think it helps people to see that I’m not just a reporter doing my job, I’m a person sharing space with them. I tried to really let out that side of myself, to really be human with these kids—to laugh with them, to joke with them, watch movies with them, and just show them that I’m here, I care, and I’m a person experiencing the world the way that they are, right? I think it helps break down some of those barriers.
But even with that, it took so much work of just having conversation after conversation, of really actively listening to show these kids that I’m here, I’m engaging with them, and I understand what they’re going through. And even if I don’t understand everything, I’m trying.
And I think that makes a really big difference to these kids, because they haven’t always felt like other people are listening, or even trying to listen. If you look at lawmakers across the country, if you go to these legislative sessions, you see people testify to the legislature, and a lot of the Republicans who need to hear this message don’t show up. And if they do, they’re on their cell phones, or ignoring it, right? And these kids really internalize that—that sense that nobody cares. I think it helped to have someone who cared. I think that mattered to them.
When it comes to the actual process of finding these families, this is a boring answer, but a lot of it was referrals, and families where I already had a connection, who I had covered at some level previously, and that I knew had a story to tell. I tried to find stories that really interested me or that I felt like needed to be told. It wasn’t about necessarily checking a box, but about finding families who I felt like had a story to share, and that I also had a bond with.
It took so much work of just having conversation after conversation, of really actively listening to show these kids that I’m here, I’m engaging with them… I think that makes a really big difference to these kids, because they haven’t always felt like other people are listening, or even trying to listen.
Nico Lang
Haug: I feel like you’re right that what this work requires is a level of listening that goes beyond what we might bring to more traditional reporting. Something I took away from this was that actually, it’s not just trans kids that aren’t listened to—kids as a whole are kind of an oppressed class! They’re not listened to at all, and trans kids are just an example where this is playing out in an extreme way. And on the whole, we’d all benefit from listening to kids a lot more.
Lang: I never even thought about it that way! But you’re totally right—kids, the perspectives of children, are just generally so dismissed and ignored. Adults go, ‘Oh, you’re so young. There’s no way you could possibly have an opinion about things, or be politically minded, or want things for yourself, because you’re 14, and all your opinions on this are going to change.’ We really belittle kids so often, we really infantilize them. And you just see that really profoundly with trans kids, because their rights are at stake. It becomes very much part of the conversation in that people are then exploiting those kinds of biases we already have about these kids to then say, ‘Oh, well, these children, they don’t deserve rights, protections, or even basic medical treatment, because they’re just kids. So what do they even know.’
Haug: And if we take this cause of autonomy for trans kids and extrapolate it further, we can see that all kids deserve these rights, and we’re depriving the autonomy of children in so many ways.
Lang: I love that you said that because to me, so much of this book was about giving children that autonomy, and the right to tell their own stories, to be the driving force in their own lives. If this book was going to work, it needed to be the voices of the kids that were front and center. It couldn’t be me leading. It couldn’t be the parents leading. It had to organically, holistically, feel like them. They’re fighting for their own freedom and their own liberation and the ability to make their own choices and be their own people, and they’re being denied that over and over again. So me, as the writer who’s helping them tell their stories, how could I deny that to them too?
I hope that doing this proves something to readers about these kids: that they do know what they want. They do know their gender, they do know how they deserve to be treated, and they deserve to have their opinions respected, rather than just dismissed until they turn 18. When you hear directly from these kids, and put a face and a voice to them, it just makes it so much harder to dismiss. You get to see how smart these kids are, how self possessed they are, how interesting and funny and lovely they are, and you get to see yourself in them. I think that recognition can help break down some of those biases that we see marginalizing these kids all the time.
Haug: Is there anything that surprised you about the process of researching and writing the book?
Lang: Honestly, how hard it was! I knew how hard it would be to write a book—but I think when you’re doing this kind of reporting in person with people, I mean, you’re sharing this level of space with them and getting to know them really well, and also processing extreme trauma that they’ve been through. It really took a toll on me—this was probably the most stressed I’ve ever been in my entire life, just because I was vicariously experiencing the trauma of seven families over and over again. By the end of it, it became really weary. I don’t want to emphasize my own pain and my own struggle here, because it really is about these families. But I think, for me, this book and working on it reinstilled in me the need as journalists for better conversations about mental health, because we are all doing this all the time.
Haug: That’s so real—so much about being a queer journalist in this moment is really hard to navigate, especially when you’re reporting on your own rights being taken away.
Lang: For the kids too, you also see the toll that this is taking on them. It’s just so hard to be a kid and be trying to figure yourself out and also what you want to do for the rest of your life, but also you’re fighting for your rights and your existence at the same time. So many of these kids really struggle with depression, with anxiety, and just like a host of other mental health issues. I think that sometimes Republicans look at things like that, and they’re just like, ‘Oh, trans people are just mentally ill, and that’s what it comes down to.’ And it’s like, no, you’re just trying to survive in a world that doesn’t want you to exist. And that’s really hard, and it really takes a toll on you, and it takes a toll on these kids the same way that it does adults.
I don’t think we’ve ever really had a conversation about the kinds of mental health traumas that these kids are experiencing. We have data from the Trevor Project, and that’s really helpful. But when have we really had stories that make it real for folks, that show them what people are going through, not just telling them? I think that telling them in terms of data is important. But for me, this book was all about show, don’t tell. I wanted the kids’ lives and their stories to really speak for themselves.
And I think, or I hope, rather, that their like mental health struggles kind of do the same thing. That when people read this book, they can really see the toll that all of this is taking on these kids, and that readers can then do whatever is in their power to stop it, to realize that they have some responsibility in this too, that we don’t make laws or policies ourselves, but we can be activists in our communities. We can educate others, we can get involved, we can volunteer, we can phone bank. There are all of these things that we do have the power to do. And I hope that this motivates people, and shows them how important it is to get out there and to fight for other people in the same way that I think we would hope they would fight for us.
Haug: Is there anything else besides that that allies can do to support these kids?
Lang: Sometimes we don’t recognize what a powerful force we are. So many people have been really afraid, I think, to engage with conversations around trans kids and the rights that they deserve, because they don’t know these kids. They just might not know a trans kid, or the issues seem too complex and overwhelming, or they just don’t feel knowledgeable. But this book should remind people that humanity is the most important thing. The most important thing is that we show these kids that they are loved and protected and affirmed exactly as they are, and we tell them over and over again.
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