Wyatt, a sensitive 15-year-old transgender boy from South Dakota, is part of a growing number of trans youths in the U.S. facing harassment and discrimination. Although he has loving parents who founded a statewide advocacy group for trans kids after he came out, Wyatt has faced rejection from his church, shunning from neighbors and bullying at school.
Despite feeling lonely and misunderstood, Wyatt cherishes his home state and wanted to build a life and family there.
Unfortunately, anti-trans legislation took that opportunity away from him. To live as the boy he knows he is, Wyatt ultimately had to leave the state. His experience is unfortunately not uncommon. According to the Human Rights Campaign, more than 39 percent of transgender youth in the U.S. currently live in states with bans on gender-affirming care. Because of these bans on best practice medical care, as well as other legislative attacks on trans youth — including sports bans, bathroom bans and the censorship of LGBTQ-inclusive curriculum — nearly half of trans youth and their families have considered moving out of states that have passed anti-LGBTQ laws and many families have been forced to flee their homes.
These anti-trans laws also have a detrimental effect on LGBTQ youth mental health. According to a 2024 survey by the Trevor Project, 46 percent of transgender and nonbinary people have seriously considered attempting suicide in the past year and, in 2023, nearly 1 in 3 LGBTQ young people said their mental health was poor due to anti-LGBTQ policies and legislation.
These statistics show how incredibly challenging it is for trans kids to thrive in the U.S. However, they fail to capture the complex, joyful and nuanced experiences of being a trans teenager. In the new book American Teenager: How Trans Kids are Surviving Hate and Finding Joy in a Turbulent Era, award-winning journalist Nico Lang fills this gap by telling the stories of transgender youth and their families, “surviving despite every attempt to eradicate them.”
“It’s impossible to measure the human cost of the war being waged on transgender youth, the homes and communities destroyed and the dreams indefinitely delayed,” Lang writes. “For a transgender child taking their first steps into the person they were meant to be, few blows are more devastating than losing access to the medical treatments that help them become themselves.”
The interviews with seven families from seven states featured in American Teenager span nine months and resist the dehumanizing generalization of trans teens often perpetuated by mainstream media and politicians. Lang shows that their subjects cannot be flattened into statistics — revealing the hard, messy and beautiful nuances of being a trans kid in the U.S. today.
In this exclusive interview with Truthout, Lang explores the impact of anti-trans laws on trans youth and their families and emphasizes the importance of voting, resisting and organizing for trans rights — now more than ever.
Zane McNeill: The past few years have been really taxing for transgender people — especially trans youth and the people who love them. This book introduces readers not only to the detrimental effect of anti-trans laws on trans youth, but also the lengths families have gone to in order to protect their kids. What inspired you to tackle this topic and write this book?
Nico Lang
Nico Lang: I wrote this book because I have seen up close the impact of the Trump years and their aftermath on the lives of LGBTQ+ kids across the country. I felt that subject had been underexplored and largely left undocumented. So many queer children, and especially trans youth, have grown up in the shadow of politicized hatred, often of their own identities. They have had to watch lawmakers take away rights and protections that, until very recently, seemed impenetrable and witness their own communities and schools become more hostile to their very existence. Through all that, they are figuring themselves out, not only in navigating their nascent queerness but also the mundane concerns that bedevil all kids: Who am I supposed to be in the world? What do I do with my time in this place?
“It’s impossible to measure the human cost of the war being waged on transgender youth, the homes and communities destroyed and the dreams indefinitely delayed.”
There’s so much beauty and richness in the complications of the stories of LGBTQ+ kids, and thus far, writers and journalists have only scratched the surface. I wanted to write this book because I felt like it was time to go deeper and, in so doing, provide a more nuanced, authentic, but also joyful portrayal of trans adolescence than we are used to seeing in the media. While the modern Republican party has cast such incredible darkness over these kids’ lives and then forced them to make their way through it, the lives of trans young people are not hopeless. Although American Teenager doesn’t shy away from the tough moments and the hard conversations families have, this book also makes space for the light in between: laughter, play, silliness and finding a spare moment of peace through it all.
Personally speaking, I miss when hope was a political priority of ours. I wrote this book because I needed to feel that again, and I imagine that the people I wrote about needed that, too. We found it in each other, I think.
How are the bans on gender-affirming care shaking up the lives of transgender, nonbinary and gender-expansive youth? What kind of ripple effects are we seeing?
We can see the effects of gender-affirming care bans very literally in the book. Of the eight trans teens whose lives and experiences are documented in American Teenager, half have experienced extreme negative consequences as the result of gender-affirming care bans. Wyatt, 15, was forced to leave South Dakota to pursue continuing his medical transition in another state. Rhydian, 18, had his top surgery delayed by Alabama’s medical care ban, causing him anxiety, depression and dysphoria as he began to fear that his body wouldn’t match his internal image of his gender in time for prom. Ruby, 19, is pursuing college outside of Texas to escape the reach of the state’s anti-trans legislation, jeopardizing her future with the boy she loves. Jack, also 19, was forcibly detransitioned by the State of Florida when she lost access to her hormones through Medicaid and had to watch the body she’d worked so hard for rapidly disappear.
Republican lawmakers have been able to pass so many anti-trans laws in such a short amount of time by treating the harm they cause as theoretical. Because they don’t personally know any of the kids who would be impacted and haven’t bothered to get to know them, they can pretend that their policy decisions are victimless crimes. Even when trans youth are brave enough to testify to their state legislatures about the severe dangers of these bills — the lives that will be lost and the kids that will be irreparably traumatized — GOP politicians often don’t show up to the hearings. If they do, they don’t listen. This book, I hope, makes it much harder to ignore the damage they are doing. It will take Jack years to recover from being detransitioned against her will and from the pain of having her own body taken away from her. No child should ever have to go through this, especially not in the name of so-called “family values.”
The cover of American Teenager: How Trans Kids Are Surviving Hate and Finding Joy in a Turbulent Era (Abrams Press, 2024).
What were the toughest parts of covering this topic?
The toughest part of writing the book actually was the emotional challenge. I’ve been working on what one might call the LGBTQ+ trauma beat for many years, but you often don’t have the time to linger in emotions with people. You have deadlines you have to meet, and because of the news cycle, you’re always moving onto the next story. I think the vicarious trauma used to bother me, but my body acclimated to the machine of it, in the same way that our bodies did for the industrial revolution and the machine revolution. I became molded to my environment and my profession.
But when you’re essentially the private therapist of seven families for nearly an entire year, you don’t get to let go of emotions so easily. You’re forced to really sit in the muck with people who have experienced incredible hardship firsthand. I had to get a therapist to help me process so many of the feelings and emotions I was taking on because I really started to struggle. And even when the writing of the book was over, it took me a long time to recover. My body is very different now than it used to be. I have a harder time with crowds and loud noises. My heart, in a nonmetaphoric sense, is a lot more sensitive. I can’t drink caffeine anymore because I can’t handle it. This book, and the effects of writing it, will stay with me for years. At an almost atomic level, I’m different from when I started this process.
I don’t say this to invite pity or to get any kind of reaction. I just want to be very honest that being a journalist, particularly one who covers marginalized communities, is mentally and emotionally strenuous, especially when you don’t have a newsroom to support you. Mental health support is already basically nonexistent for reporters. When you’re a freelancer or an author, there’s even less for you. There need to be greater resources because it’s too much to handle on your own.
What impact are you hoping your book will have on the conversation around gender-affirming care and LGBTQ+ rights?
American Teenager should be a reminder to people of the importance of centering trans kids in their own stories. Too often decisions about their lives are made without considering them or even bothering to consult them, and you see it in legislatures across the country. These incredibly brave kids will come testify in an attempt to educate lawmakers and literally beg them not to discriminate against vulnerable young people like themselves, and politicians don’t listen. They check their emails and their text messages during their testimonies. They look up at the ceiling, or maybe they just don’t come to the hearing at all, anything to avoid looking these kids in the eye or seeing them as human. It’s a lot harder to take away someone’s rights if you acknowledge their humanity.
With this book, I wanted it to be about the humanity of trans kids, almost solely. There’s no glossary, and I explain very little throughout the book. We don’t pause to tell the reader what it means to be genderfluid or nonbinary because these kids are tired of needing to be explained to people. It’s exhausting. If readers have questions at the end of the book, they are absolutely free to google them or to read the dozens, if not hundreds of books, that will do a great job answering those questions. Instead of getting bogged down in more Trans 101, I wanted to simply remind the public that trans people are people, and they should be treated that way. The same is true for trans kids, and we keep forgetting that somehow. All of that explaining is undoubtedly important and has a critical place in the dialogue, but it doesn’t mean that much if we don’t begin with seeing trans kids as human. Establishing that means we can then move onto do that greater education work.
Honestly, it’s really sad that we need a whole book to teach people, especially grown adults, to treat children with dignity and respect in 2024, but here we are.
