Young people today have more ways than ever before to describe themselves when it comes to gender and sexuality: asexual, bi, gender queer or gender non-conforming, gender expansive being just a few of them.
For some, understanding all of this can be confusing or even threatening. And some of those feelings have led to legislation across the country especially targeted at the transgender community.
Nico Lang has reported on those issues for more than a decade but wanted to focus instead on just the voices and experiences of trans teens in their new book, “American Teenager: How Trans Kids Are Surviving Hate and Finding Joy in a Turbulent Era.” They joined the Standard to share more.
This transcript has been edited lightly for clarity:
Texas Standard: You identify as non-binary, and as I mentioned, there are a variety of gender expressions and experiences. Why focus in particular here on the trans experience?
Nico Lang: Sure. I felt like it was important to know about these kids’ lives because we’re hearing so much about them in the media, but we’re very rarely ever hearing directly from them. And this is a book that entirely centers trans kids in their own stories.
And I just feel like when we put trans kids at the center of the frame and we give them the ability to talk about their experiences, talk about their hopes, their dreams, who they are, it makes their life seem less scary. It’s a lot harder to dehumanize them if you see them as human.
With this book, I wanted readers to realize that these kids are just kids. They’re humans just like they are. We seem to somehow have lost that recognition that these kids are just people.
And when folks finish this book, I hope just that’s what they remember and that they hold close to them, that these kids are people and they deserve rights like people do.
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In your book, you introduce us to eight teens and in separate sections, you give us a peek into their lives and experiences through sort of this narrative design. Why was this how you wanted to approach this topic?
Yeah, I took a lot of inspiration from this from my own career in that when I first started like really doing queer reporting back in 2016, one of the first stories that I ever did was HB 2 in North Carolina – which for folks who aren’t familiar, it was the anti-trans bathroom law that was passed there, which at the time was the first of its kind in U.S. history.
And I was reading these stories about what was going on there. But I feel like I wasn’t really understanding the issue because I wasn’t hearing from trans people. I wasn’t hearing about how it would impact their lives.
So what I did is I paid for my own bus ticket to go to North Carolina myself and meet people who were directly impacted to like, share meals with them, to, like, meet their families, to just, like, see how they live and also hear from them personally about how this law was going to hurt them.
I needed to walk on the same earth that they do, and you just can’t do that behind a laptop. They’re just not going to be real to you in the same way. You need that face-to-face.
So with this, I wanted to give readers the same opportunity to get to see these kids up close, to get to see their lives up close, because you get so much about how these laws impact their lives and make it harder for them to exist as themselves. But you get to see just the normal mundane kid things that they do every day.
Like we watch movies together, we go to the homecoming game together. If they wanted to go scuba diving, I would have done that. Like you just get to see their like daily lives. And I think there’s so much value in that, because you might realize that their daily lives aren’t all that different than yours.
Well, the teens are from all over the U.S., including Ruby from Houston. Could you tell us just a little about her?
Yeah. I loved getting to tell Ruby’s story because in a lot of ways, it was a love story. It’s so wild to me that this happened. But shortly after I came to Houston to start profiling Ruby for this book, she was asked out by the boy that she likes. And it went very well, as people will read in the book. They very quickly fell in love with each other. And I got to document that.
And that felt really special, because I feel like trans people and trans kids especially never get to see themselves that way. They never get to see themselves as being lovable, the kind of person that someone could love.
And folks internalize that sometimes, right? You come to think that you aren’t lovable, that no one could ever love you and that maybe there’s no one out there for you. And when you’re 17, that really hurts, right? No one wants to, you know, to think that they’ll never find someone right, that they’ll have to walk along this earth lonely.
So here was this story where you see that this very lucky girl doesn’t have to think her life is that way because she has proof that it’s not. And it’s not just her boyfriend – like, she has a mother who loves her very much. Her grandmother is like 96 but loves her very much.
She has this wonderful community that’s affirmed her her entire life. When she came out in her church, they threw her a coming out party. It’s called the Renaming Liturgy in the Episcopal Church. And you sort of like discard your old name in favor of the person that you were meant to be.
So for this chapter, I really wanted to celebrate that. I wanted to celebrate a kid being supported for who they are and just seen for who they are and show how much that matters. It matters to validate these kids. It matters that their parents and their communities show up for them and provide resources for them, because then they get to thrive.
Like that’s how we get people to thrive when we’re allies to them, when we walk alongside them. The trouble is that a lot of kids don’t have that.
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You had an October 2024 publish date. What did it mean to you to debut this book so close to a significant election?
Because it’s an election book. It’s been so interesting, you know, pitching this this book to different publications because, you know, it’s not just enough for the book to come out. People have to cover it, right? That’s how you get readers to read it.
And so many outlets will tell us that they’re focused on the election right now. So like, “sorry, that’s where all of our resources are.” But this is an election book. This is a book about not only what will happen in November, but how what will happen in November shapes the rest of these kids’ lives.
There are so many families that are talking about fleeing the country. And like, frankly, I don’t blame them. If I were in a similar situation, I would do the same thing. But the thing is is that a lot of folks won’t have those resources. They won’t have that privilege, and they’ll just have to suffer.
I wonder or maybe if you hope that the experiences in your book may be vastly different than those of future generations. And if this is maybe a time capsule of this particular moment for trans American teens.
My greatest wish is that this book is immediately outdated, that we’re just depicting a unique moment in time that’s very, very, very hard. I don’t know how we got to this place. I’ve been reporting on the LGBTQ+ community for a long time, and I still when I think back on it, I don’t really know how we got here. I don’t know how things got this bad.
But I do have some hope that we get out of it. I do have some hope that things change, or I wouldn’t have written this book, right? I would just, like, go crawl in a hole somewhere. So for me, the way I fight is writing this book, and I hope to see our political leaders and people in power and gatekeepers to fight the same way, to fight for these kids.
The only way that that we change these things and we build a better America for these kids is if we fight for them. And right now, too many people just aren’t doing it.