Although state legislatures and lawmakers have introduced hundreds of bills aimed at trans people — trans youth, in particular — over the last few years, most people have yet to hear from those directly affected by those bills. The stories of trans youth go largely ignored by the American public in our cultural conversations about their lives, but Nico Lang is giving everyone a chance to change that with their new book, American Teenager: How Trans Kids Are Surviving Hate and Finding Joy in a Turbulent Era.
For over a year, Lang traveled across the country to get to know, interview, and document the lives of eight trans teens, aged 15 to 19. In American Teenager, we don’t just get to read about the kids’ experiences dealing with these debates about them and their bodies. We also get an intimate look at their lives as kids who, like all other kids, are trying to figure out their futures, get through school, navigate friendships and romantic relationships, and grow up on their own terms.
To celebrate the release of the book, Lang graciously agreed to speak to me about the experience of writing it, their hopes for what the book can do out in the world, and how they approached writing it.
Stef: Before we get into the format and content of the book, I wanted to ask you about the title. After reading it, I understood you were trying to convey that being trans was only one aspect of these young trans people’s lives, and there’s just so much more to their experiences of being young and alive in this country right now. But can you tell me a little bit about where the title came from and what you were hoping the title would convey to people, especially to people who might be reluctant to pick up the book?
Nico: The title was kind of a happy accident because it took me a really long time to figure out what this book would be called. And we went through a lot of really terrible titles. I think one of them was “The Trans Kids Are All Right,” which is awful in retrospect, but I was totally stumped. Then, one day, I was sitting in the car while my husband went to get coffee, and the song “American Teenager” by Ethel Cain came on the radio.
I have this thing: I really love romantic comedies. I’m a major romantic comedy stan. I watch them all, even the really bad ones. More bad than good ones, sadly. But there’s this trope in romcoms that they’re often named after pop songs. A lot of the time, it’ll be old Motown songs, or just these songs you really love that are already part of your life. With this book, I wanted it to feel really different, and to read really differently than what you would expect. Because I think going in, people might look at a book like this and think it’s going to be really sad or that it’s going to be “trauma porn” and depressing. All these things that I didn’t want the book to be. I wanted it to be lighter and funnier and just more nimble than folks would expect, and giving it a different title than I think you would anticipate from a book like this — that wasn’t a trans pun and doesn’t even necessarily explicitly name being trans in the title — it just gives it a different tone.
But there was also a political bent to calling it American Teenager. Being trans is important, because it dictates how they see the world, it dictates how other people treat them, and just how they move about this existence. It’s an incredibly important thing. We should absolutely talk about it, but it’s not the only thing. I wanted to make sure to make space for all those other things to sit alongside being trans and to be in conversation with that. Sometimes these other things have to do with being trans a little bit. Sometimes they don’t have anything to do with being trans at all. A lot of the time in the book is just sitting and watching movies with these kids and experiencing the things they like, these experiences that are so quintessentially teenager-y. And we’ve denied those sorts of things to trans kids for such a long time by suggesting that because you are a trans child, you don’t really get access to a childhood the same way that cishet kids do. I wanted to carve out space to give them that gift. So, for me, the title “American Teenager” is about expressing the universality of these stories, but it’s also cementing that they are just kids, and they deserve to experience being a kid.
Stef: It might be that I’m biased because I’m from South Florida, but I really appreciated the scope of your book. Many of the kids you got to know and wrote about are from places that people wouldn’t necessarily call “metropolitan” or “culturally relevant” or “important,” aside from what we’re seeing in the news about them in regards to trans rights. What drew you to these specific places, and what was the thought process like when you were trying to decide whose story to tell, and from where?
Nico: I always think that as a storyteller, there’s just so much value to telling stories from communities that are really underrepresented, or that we just haven’t heard as much from. So, I loved getting to tell two AAPI stories in the book. I love that I got to tell the story of a Black, gender-fluid teen in rural Appalachia, because I’d just never seen a story like that before. I just know that if I have a hunger for this kind of representation, then readers do, too. They’re going to appreciate seeing these voices and these perspectives represented. But it was also always about feeling really connected to these people’s stories. I had intersections that I wanted to explore in mind and these parts of the country that I knew that I needed focus on. I knew I needed a Texas story, I knew I needed a Florida story, because of everything that’s happening in both of those states right now. This book just would have felt really incomplete without them.
More than anything, it was always about finding families whose stories I felt really connected to, because we just weren’t going to have a lot of time together. There’s a challenge in that you have to build a lot of trust in two and a half weeks to get these folks to go to really vulnerable places with you. I’m asking them as a journalist to give away a lot. We’re talking about some of the worst things that have ever happened to them. We’re talking about their pain, their heartache, their hopes and dreams for themselves. That’s a lot to entrust to somebody that you just don’t really know that well. All the folks I picked were people who, when I spoke to them over the phone, we had a really easy camaraderie right away. We were joking with each other and laughing, we were instantly just sharing stories, and we felt just really human in that space. And I always listened to that, and that was always the most important thing. And I also think it’s just better storytelling, that when the readers read this book, they can tell how engaged I am with these stories and how engaged I am with these families. I think it means the reader gets to be more engaged, too. I want readers to be able to empathize. I want them to be able to go deep with these families and feel like they really get to know them.
So much of what I’m fighting with this book is political dehumanization. These families, their stories are taken away from them. They’re erased, and they’re treated as if their opinions and voices don’t matter. I wanted to give that back to them, and I wanted to make them feel really human in the book. By putting these stories out there in such a rich, nuanced, and deep way, it can prevent others from having their voices be taken away, too.
Stef: Since you’re already talking about it, can you describe the process of gathering the stories and working with the kids and their families and just how you gained that proximity you needed in order to tell their stories?
Nico: I think what makes me effective at my job is that I’m not really what people expect as a reporter. In my personal life, I’m not always a very serious person. I have such a serious job that I just don’t want to be weighed down all the time. I want to have a nice, well-rounded life. And I think that I bring that kind of vibe into the interview space, of somebody who’s not entirely super serious. They can see me as someone who isn’t just there to do a job or to get talking points out of them, but somebody who’s human. And I intentionally bring that into the space. I make jokes with these folks, and I let the idiosyncratic side to my personality out. I’m a little quirky. I think, with that, it helps people let their guard down. It helps them feel like they can trust me when they see that I’m a person here with them, and not a little question robot. Whenever I’m doing an interview with somebody, I hang out for as long as I’m needed. You get to a place that’s a lot more meaningful, not just for me the interviewer because they really get to explore some feelings and emotions, and work out some stuff that they maybe haven’t been able to before or that they haven’t talked about with anyone before.
And with these kids, it was really similar. I was human with them. I laughed with them. We went to movies together, and we joked around and goofed off. It becomes almost this mode of therapy or social work when we’re sitting down for such a long time and we’re just sharing space together, and I’m just giving them the opportunity to just work out their feelings wherever those feelings go. I was never trying to decide what the narrative would be or decide what their story was. My goal was to let them figure it out and just listen and guide them along the way. That was really my process of all this: just reminding them that we’re two people sharing space, and then with that space, letting them use it for whatever they wanted to.
I wanted this book, at the end of the day, to feel like a reflection of them. I wanted it to feel like something they look back 20 years from now and they’re really proud of, rather than feeling like their voice was taken away again.
Stef: Actually, that goes straight into the next question that I have. One thing that I thought was really interesting is all the different approaches and different viewpoints the kids have about their identities, how they want to approach their identities in the future, and talk about their identities, and how they want to make the world a little bit better for other people who are like them. There are kids like Mykah, who seem kind of compelled to do that kind of work. And then on the other hand, we have kids like Clint and Kylie who are, as of right now, less attracted to doing that kind of stuff. And I liked that those stories were included in the book also. As a writer, you have a choice to include those parts or not. What were you hoping people might learn from all these disparate experiences and desires and from the differences in their stories?
Nico: I think part of it’s my own frustration with representation politics, in a way. In that as queer people, I feel like we’re so often expected to speak on behalf of the entire community, or that your life becomes a microcosm for everybody. And I know personally, I just don’t want to live with that kind of responsibility. I don’t want to represent everybody; I want to represent myself. And it’s the same with these kids. I heard really early on from them in the process of writing this book that they didn’t want me to offer throughlines too much between the chapters. I asked them if they wanted me to draw these overarching narratives or say the ways in which they’re in common or make these explicit connections for the readers. Overwhelmingly, the kids said that they didn’t want that. They didn’t want to be told how they’re similar to each other or have their experience flattened. They wanted to just get to be themselves because, really, that’s what they’re fighting for. They’re fighting for the ability to have their own self-determined life, to have a childhood that’s on their own terms, and to get to be their own person. For these kids, that’s what we deny them. We say that they don’t have a right to be their own person. They don’t have a right to their own medical care. They don’t have a right to use the name they want to use or the pronouns they want to use or play on the sports team that they want to. It just feels like so much freedom and control is taken away from them. And that’s what they wanted with this book. They wanted that freedom and control back. So, I just gave that to them, and I tried really hard to just let all of the chapters stand alone. Rather than emphasizing the similarities between all these kids, I emphasized the differences.
I don’t think these kids should have to be the same as other people to have rights. If readers read this book and they really identify with these kids and they feel like these kids’ stories are their stories, that’s great, and I openly encourage that. But if readers read this book and they don’t identify with these kids at all, those people should still recognize these kids deserve equality anyway. They still get the opportunity to lead those lives.
Stef: Did you find that when you were having these conversations with them that the main thing they were pushing for or trying to express to you was that they just want to kind of be left alone, they just want to be able to be who they are and that’s it?
Nico: Yes. It’s really interesting, because when we sent out this book to early readers, when we were still in the process of editing it and shaping it and making it into what it became, we got a lot of feedback from people. And what was really fascinating to me is that the kids who didn’t want to be activists, who just saw their journeys as very different from that goal, were pretty universally referred to as being unlikable.
Stef: They were some of my favorites.
Nico: Mine, too. They were some of my favorite chapters to write because I just found them so fascinating, and they’re just so real to me. All of us have these things about us that are thorny, or these parts of ourselves that maybe other people wouldn’t like if we expressed them. But here you had these kids that were just willing to put themselves out there like that and to be fully vulnerable and authentic. I crave that authenticity as a journalist. Being able to have kids that were willing to go there with you, that just felt so cool, and I was really grateful for that. What’s really fascinating, though, is I think that that kind of reading of the book misses the point in a way. These kids shouldn’t have to be activists. They shouldn’t have to do that. That’s not what anyone’s required to do, and most of the kids who do that don’t want to do it. Very few kids in this book, I think, would want to be activists if they had a choice not to be. They would rather just live their lives, just be kids, just go to the movies, go to the beach, play video games, do all the things that all other kids do. And what I hope people take away from this book is that we need to give kids a choice.
The problem is that a kid like Mykah in West Virginia, who you mentioned earlier, doesn’t really have a choice whether to be an activist or not, because there’s so few people who have the opportunity to do it, who can put themselves out there that way. They don’t have a choice. Because if those folks don’t speak out, no one’s going to be speaking out. But they shouldn’t be burdened with that responsibility. They should get to decide. Folks like Clint have just been stressing that they not only deserve to make that choice for themselves, but they deserve the opportunity to say “No” and we should respect that.
We should respect them saying no and saying, “Living the life of an activist, that’s not for me.” But also there are so many kinds of activism. I think some of their most important activism isn’t even just speaking out in front of the legislature or participating in this book. It’s just being who they are in a place that’s really hostile to their very existence. That everyday visibility of just being yourself in a space that you might not be wanted is so powerful.
Stef: Something that you mention in the book a couple of times about the kids — and honestly something that rings true in regards to my own experiences growing up — is the fact that they have to grow up, or they’re forced to grow up, a lot quicker than the kids around them. In Jack and Augie’s chapter, you mention Augie feeling responsible for the emotions of the people around them all the time. And in Wyatt’s chapter, you made a joke about being a “babysitter for their peers” and the people around them. This quick growth comes all of a sudden from recognizing that you’re different, but then also the people around you put this pressure on you to be grown up about it. What are you hoping people might take away from these kinds of discussions of the kids’ emotional health, and what made you want to make it so clear here that this is happening in the first place?
Nico: By including those bits, I was trying to express that we often credit children as being mature by saying that they’re wise beyond their years. That’s a nice thing in a way, but for these kids, it’s a backhanded compliment. The reason they have to be so mature, so adult, is that they have no choice but to grow up really quickly because they haven’t had the kinds of childhoods that other people have, that their cishet peers have. They’ve spent their adolescence protecting their rights and the rights of other kids. They don’t want to be mature. They just want to be kids.
Poor Augie doesn’t want to have to be the emotional support animal of everyone in their family. Wyatt doesn’t want to have to feel like he’s babysitting everyone around him without pay. They want to be silly and immature like everyone else. I want that for these kids, too, because they haven’t gotten that opportunity. They haven’t really gotten that privilege. Talking about how fast they’ve been forced to grow up, I hope readers question what made them that way and how we can change that. How do we give trans kids a childhood? What do we do to protect their childhood? Because clearly it’s not being done.
Stef: I appreciated that you included some of the parents’ stories. Not their entire story, but you included some parts with the parents, and I know that it’s just a small fraction of each kid’s story in the book. It’s one chapter out of this section. But I do think it was a really important decision. I think people might feel differently than me and might have some negative feelings about parents being part of the story. So, I thought you could address the thought that you put behind that, and what you’re hoping can be revealed to people through those particular sections.
Nico: My thought was that I felt like the parents’ stories were important, but they weren’t the most important thing because the most important thing for this book is that the kids are centered. It’s not the parents driving it for them. I wanted it to feel powerfully like the kids were leading the stories in every chapter, to always feel so much like this is coming from them, and it’s not coming from anyone else. But parents do have a role in that because they’ve walked along with these kids on their journeys and they’ve seen them grow and seen them mature. From them, you get this outside perspective.
But also, there are going to be parents who read this book, and I wanted them to feel like they had possibility models. If they’re not very far along in this journey, let’s say their kid just came out and they just don’t know what to do, they’re really scared, I just wanted to show them that they can do this. Like, “Here’s a flashlight. As you walk along, you can get there. It might take some learning, some growing, but you can do it, because all these other people have done it, too.”
I loved Mykah’s mom’s story in that, because it can sometimes be hard to talk about parents who really want to do the best for their kids but don’t know the right language and don’t know the right words to say. She beats herself up so much because she just can’t get those things right. And I don’t want to excuse it, but rather than needing to make an excuse for it, I just wanted to represent it, and I wanted to present trying as being a good thing because you’ll get better at something or you’ll move along in your journey, you’ll just improve, and it gets you closer to where you’re going. At some point, you do have to hold people accountable. You can’t just let people off the hook because they’re “trying.” But I do think trying is a great place to start. For those parents who read this and they feel really nervous, because they don’t want to do the wrong thing or say the wrong thing or not be everything for these kids, just try. Don’t stop yourself from trying because that’s the worst thing. The worst thing is to not try at all.
Stef: I can imagine there were some challenges in getting this book written and published because it’s just such a huge piece of reporting. So I imagine you came up against a few challenges. What were the biggest challenges in getting this out in the world? And were there any wins — besides actually releasing it — that you might want to talk about?
Nico: Honestly, that is the biggest one, that this actually worked. A book like this has never really been written before. Not in this way, and not in the way that I approached it. So I didn’t even know if this book would work. I didn’t know if it would be good. When I started out doing this, the book hadn’t even been picked up yet by a publisher. It was really a wing and a prayer. I was living off my savings, what was left of my savings, and just hoping that it would all work out for me, and that wasn’t guaranteed. I’m shocked that we found a publisher to pick it up, and I’m shocked that it turned out as well as it did. I still don’t know how that happened, in a way, except that I’m extremely stubborn and I’m an extremely hard worker, so I was never going to put out anything that was anything less than the best I could possibly do.
We sent it out to all these publishing houses, and everyone was so complimentary of the writing. No one had anything bad to say about how it was written but we were turned down by almost everyone because they didn’t see a market for a book like this. They just felt like there must not be an audience for it, because if there was, then it would have been written. It’s sort of like a weird catch 22. And because of that, almost no one was willing to take a chance on us. It really showed me what queer and trans writers are up against and how hard it is to get our feet in the door. If someone like me who has so much journalism experience, who has all these awards, and who has so many industry connections can’t get a book like this picked up when everybody agrees that the writing is stellar, then who can get their foot in the door? Who can do it?
It just makes me wonder, why is no one taking a chance on stories like this? Why aren’t we giving queer and trans people more space to share their stories and to share authentic representation of our community? Clearly, the demand is there. Clearly people want this. So, what do we need to do to change things?
We have to fight so much harder for everything as queer and trans people, and we especially have to fight so much harder to tell stories in the way we know they need to be told. I hope we do get that space to tell more of our stories, to represent ourselves in the way that we know how, because we can represent ourselves best. I’m seeing the impact it can have. I can see how much it means to people. It means the world, it’s so life giving, and I just want more of it.
Stef: The last question I have is just more of a personal question for you. What’s the most important thing that you learned, either about yourself or about the experience of being a young trans person right now, that you encountered throughout the writing of this book? What are you walking away from this experience with?
Nico: What this book reaffirmed is the harm that Republican lawmakers are inflicting on trans kids. The reason that they pretend that these kids don’t exist is because they don’t want to recognize what they’re doing to them. They don’t want to recognize that their decisions impact real people who have real lives. It’s easier to just pretend like none of this is happening, all of it’s just invisible. But getting to spend time with Jack in Florida, who was the trans girl who was detransitioned by the state, I got to see the real harm that these policies do, and I got to see it up close. She should be having fun. She should be out living her life. She shouldn’t be dealing with this level of excessive trauma, but that’s being done to kids all across the country, whether we’ve heard their stories or not. And I hope that when people read this book, Jack’s story stays with them. I hope they don’t forget it. A book like this should never need to be written again. We should never need to write another one in 10 or five years. This should be it. No child should ever go through this again. And I hope we do everything in our power to stop that from happening.
American Teenager: How Trans Kids Are Surviving Hate and Finding Joy in a Turbulent Era by Nico Lang is out now.
