Nico Lang On Finding Space For Queer Joy In His Extraordinary New Book
Nico Lang’s extraordinary American Teenager: How Trans Kids Are Surviving Hate and Finding Joy in a Turbulent Era dives into the lives of seven families of trans and nonbinary youth in seven different states. Lang, an award-winning journalist whose work has appeared in Rolling Stone and The New York Times, spent weeks with each of the families, interviewing various family members and learning about the details of their daily life. The result is a compassionate examination of what it is like to grow up trans today, whether it’s navigating the typical problems of adolescence or the effect of anti-trans laws on every apsect of their family life. Critics have met American Teenager with rapturous praise. The Washington Post called it “a necessary work of patient, dogged reportage” and BookPage hailed it as a “series of complex, sometimes searing and always sensitive portraits of young people whose right to existence currently hangs in the balance.” Lang spoke to us about the book’s origins, the advocacy work of the different families, and holding space for queer joy in the book.
Can you talk about what was the project of the book when you began writing?
I feel like trans youth have been erased in the story of their own lives. There are very often these policies that are passed in so many states across the country, and they’re passed without consulting trans kids or even thinking all that much about how those policies would affect their daily lives. This year, more than 650 bills have been introduced in states all across the country seeking to take away basic rights and protections for trans people. The majority of these proposals target kids.
When lawmakers put those bills forward, they don’t talk to trans kids, they don’t even bother to get to know them. And if those people aren’t people to you, it makes it easier to pursue these really dehumanizing laws that make [trans people] second class citizens in their own state. Even worse, I think they’re treated as if they don’t really have rights at all, because they’re kids and they don’t have the wherewithal to make these kinds of decisions about their lives, right? So it’s okay for adults to do whatever they want to them.
For those lawmakers, I really wanted them to think mindfully about what they’re doing. I wanted to humanize the kinds of populations that they are demonizing. I wanted them to be forced to get to know these kids, because these kids have been trying to introduce themselves for years. You see this in states like West Virginia, where I went to the [state] legislature to watch kids attempt to testify on an anti-trans medical care ban. A Republican lobbyist got up and said what everybody already knew, that the bill was going to get passed, and it didn’t matter what those kids did. He said that it’s a red state, this is a priority for the Republican Party, and if lawmakers didn’t pass the bill, they’re going to get voted out. You could tell in the room that day, because none of those lawmakers even showed up to hear the kids speak, and if they did, they probably weren’t paying attention, right? Their minds were already made up. And the fact that that these folks are so hardened against kids just really sickens me. That they’re so unwilling to learn about the lives of children sickens me.
As a journalist, I’m here to tell the truth, and the truth is that we’re hurting kids. Kids are being harmed. I wanted to make very clear those harms, but I also wanted to give kids the chance to just express themselves and talk about their lives, show us who they are. Because if these kids are real to us, if their problems in their lives are real to us, I think it makes it a lot more difficult to then treat them in this way. I think the only way we get out of this is by humanizing people, and that’s really what this book is about, just reinforcing our own humanity.
That’s one of the things that’s so moving about the book, just in terms of dropping into these kid’s lives, meeting them, and seeing how they express themselves. I know this is a population that you’ve worked with and written a lot about in the past several years, but I was curious if there was anything with interviewing these eight kids that surprised you or that you weren’t expecting when you interviewed them?
I wouldn’t say there’s much that shocked me, but there were things I was reminded of that I’d forgotten. I’d forgotten how hard it is to be a kid, right? I haven’t been sixteen in a long time (laughs). Intellectually, I kind of remember what it was like, but not really. I needed a refresher on how difficult and how messy those years are, how scary it can be to grow up. It’s so interesting, because people want to talk about, “Oh, these kids are just confused. They don’t really know who they are, so they can’t go making these decisions.” When it comes to who they are, their gender, that’s the thing they do know, right? It’s everything else that is really confusing and hard and messy.
You were a sixteen-year-old at one time. Imagine going through all that stuff—all the messy feelings—and then on top of that, your lawmakers are trying to keep you from being you. You have to go to the legislature multiple times a year to beg for the ability to be yourself. That’s a horrible thing to do to anyone, let alone a child. These kids all across the country are being forced to do this year after year after year. I don’t think I fully appreciated just how hard that is, what a toll it takes on them, and how much they just don’t want to do this. Because there were kids in the book who were really forthright about the fact that they don’t want to be activists. They stood their ground in asserting that they shouldn’t have to do this. They see what it does to their friends, right? They see the toll that it takes on this very young community of people who should just get to live their lives. They should just get to be kids, and we’re stripping that right away from them all across the country.
And for me with this book, I really wanted to fight for their ability to get to be kids. Republican lawmakers keep saying over and over again that the reason they’re passing gender affirming medical care bans and all these other things is that they want kids to be kids, but that’s the very right that they’re taking away from them. These kids can’t be kids when they’re also fighting all of these very adult fights.
That level of self-advocacy that trans kids are asked to do really comes across in the book. We also see the ways that a lot of their parents are stepping up to be advocates. As much as the book is about the teenagers, we also get a glimpse into the lives of their parents. Can you talk about why you chose to include the parents’ stories in the in the book?
For me, it was about striking a balance. When there are publications who print stories about trans kids, it’s very rarely trans kids who get to speak for themselves. It’s often their parents who have to speak for them. I get why it has to be that way, because their parents are rightfully concerned about their kid’s safety. They’re concerned that if their kids are too much out there, or they’re too much of a face on this issue, that something horrible could happen to them, right? So many families have faced death threats. They’ve been stalked, they’ve been followed, they’ve had their information leaked online. They’ve really been through the ringer, and no parent wants to put their child through that, right? But when we don’t hear from the kids themselves, I think it allows misinformation to flourish in a way. Because then right-wing folks can say, “Oh, it’s the parents who are pushing it on their kids.” With this book, I wanted to show how much these kids are the driving force in their own lives, that they do have agency. It’s them who are making these decisions for themselves, deciding who they get to be in this role. It’s what all of us should have the right, the opportunity, to do.
But there are going to be parents who read this book for guidance. They’ll read this book to see how other families made it through, and also to feel less alone. It can be profoundly lonely to raise a trans kid, especially in places where there just aren’t a lot of other families like you, or you don’t have resources or a network of support. In Clint’s chapter [that takes place] in Illinois, his mom runs a support group for parents of South Asian kids across the country called Desi Rainbow. One meeting these parents came, and they expressed just how profoundly scared they were because they didn’t have any other parents to consult in their own community about this. Their child was quite young, eight or nine, and they felt like they were doing all of this on their own. They loved their kid and they wanted to be strong for them, but the weight of what they were taking on became so crushing, because it can be hard when you feel like you’re doing it all by yourself. For parents who pick up this book, I want them to see that they’re not doing it alone, that there are all these other parents who have done the work and have done a fabulous job for their kids. And [also show] other parents who are still learning. Not everyone’s perfect. Not everyone is going to be this person who marches on the front line with their kids. They might just be a parent who’s doing the best that they can, and that’s okay. Whatever way you’re showing up, whatever way you’re trying, I think that’s good. With this book, I just wanted to create space for parents to not feel afraid, to feel that whatever way they’re supporting their child, as long as they’re doing the work, it’s okay. Because their kids need them, they just need them to show up. They need them to try, and the rest we can figure out later.
One thing I was really struck by was how it felt like with a lot of these stories, the kids’ process of coming out as trans kind of mirrored the parents’ journey of self-discovery. Many of the chapters have stories where the parents step into a new role or acknowledge something about their own life.
There’s this common thing that a lot of parents say—and I avoided repeating it because I didn’t want to fall back on too many cliches—but a lot of parents say that your kid transitions, but you also transition along with them. It’s the family who are often doing more work in that regard, because you have to do so much deprogramming. You have to do so much unlearning of all of the things that you’ve known before, all the things that society has taught you about men and women, about gender, about the way that we’re supposed to be. Your kid forces you to learn all of that over again in order to be a good parent to them, to be a good sibling to them. I think sometimes there’s more transformation that you have to do just as an ally. You see throughout the book that so many of the parents here started not knowing anything about trans people, not even having heard the word transgender. But then they come such a long way, like Susan, who’s Wyatt’s mom in South Dakota. She’d never heard the word transgender before. She didn’t really know it meant. But then suddenly she had this son who was her son and she had to educate herself. She read every book on the subject in existence. She began educating family members as well. From there, that work grew into a statewide support group for trans kids, the largest in South Dakota. It’s an incredibly valuable thing to do, because so many families don’t have that kind of resource, right? When they come out, they don’t really know they can turn to, but now they can turn to Susan. You see so many other families go on this kind of journey, who end up doing this incredible work, not just for their own kids, but for kids all across their state, all across the country. It’s such like life-giving, incredible work, and I’m so in awe of it. I think those parents sometimes don’t get enough credit for doing all of that and then also raising kids on top of it. As if raising your family wasn’t hard enough, it’s like, now you’re helping lead this nationwide movement. It’s a lot, but they’re doing it with such grace.
As challenging as a lot of the obstacles these kids are facing, the book is really funny. The reader gets to see the kids being normal, goofy, smart teenagers. Can you talk about finding the space for queer joy in this book, and why it was important for you to include that?
I think it’s just because as a journalist, I write about the world and how people live life, and I don’t think people experience tragedy without joy. It’s not like these things are so binary that if you’re going through a really hard time, you can’t laugh or have a nice moment. Often these things are so intertwined, but we treat them as being these totally disparate things. To write this book about trauma and pain and suffering and all the things that these kids have been through, you can’t tell that story without joy. Because a lot of the time joy becomes a coping mechanism, right? That laughter that you hear throughout the book, that’s sort of the terms of their survival, that’s how they get through it. I don’t think you can understand how difficult it has been for kids to survive this very divisive era without understanding their joy, because then you wouldn’t know what’s made it through, right? It would only be part of the puzzle. But for me, the story that I’m most interested in is the thing that’s between tragedy and joy, and that’s healing. Because that’s how you get from one to another, right? If you start from a place of trauma, but you get to somewhere where you’re happy, the way you do that is by healing. I think we as queer people don’t get to tell stories about healing enough. As a journalist, I feel very committed to that work, to talking about healing, to talk about the things that helped each of us make it through. Because I think that’s how you make it possible for other people. We can all be possibility models, just by sharing how we healed.
I wanted to ask about how you structured the book. I really loved how as a reader, I was led through all these stories.
It was really just about figuring out what worked schedule-wise for these folks, because all of them have a lot going on in their lives. As a mom or a dad, you’re shuttling your kids around all the time, to soccer games and choir practices, and then you have family vacations and birthdays and all these other things going on. There was nothing more than the fact that all of these people happened to be free at these specific times. It was really just the way that things shook out, but I felt like there were a lot of little happy accidents. I loved getting to tell Wyatt’s story first, because I knew their family so well already. I had known Susan because we worked together for a number of years on articles that I’ve written. She’s probably my most consistent source in South Dakota, because she’s really doing the work there. She knows everybody, and she’s also just so sweet and kind. I got to be with them for three weeks while we figured out together what this book would be. There was so much trust built in because we knew each other already that I felt like I could be vulnerable with them and say, “I don’t have this all figured out yet. What do you think? What do you think this book should be?” We sort of all figured it out together. I don’t think I could have done that the same way with another family, because they just didn’t know me as well, right?
So much of the book was just kismet in the best way. I look back at all the experiences I had in the way this all was written, and it feels like I went in with more of a plan. It feels like there was this guiding force through it, and there really wasn’t. It just all worked out, I think, the way that it was supposed to. There’s this philosopher, Schopenhauer, who says that if you look back over the course of your life, there are all of these little acts of fate that happen, and these things that at the time seem to you to be freak accidents. But when you really think about it, it almost feels like there was this invisible hand guiding the whole thing. I really felt that invisible hand throughout this book. I think you can call it what you want, like fate or God or divine intervention, but I’m just really happy that it all worked out the way it did. I couldn’t be more grateful for this experience and for getting to have it with these families.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
Tags: gender diverse youth, lgbt youth, LGBTQIA, Nico Lang, Serving Gender Diverse Youth in the Library
