Queer journalist Nico Lang's new book American Teenager: How Trans Kids Are Surviving Hate and Finding Joy in a Turbulent Era is out now. Below is an excerpt from the book: Its foreword, which trans studies scholar Susan Stryker wrote. The book is available at major books retailers.
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Behind every headline about some new law—several hundred of which have been proposed and dozens passed in recent years—that makes being transgender in America more difficult, especially for young people, are untold thousands of individual lives upended by this legislative onslaught. According to one recent study,somewhere between 130,000 and 260,000 trans Americans and their family members have already become internal refugees, relocating from hostile states to more supportive ones to escape this recent tsunami of repressive laws and policies. Depending on how the presidential election goes in November 2024, that wave could well inundate the entire county.
Award-winning journalist Nico Lang puts names and faces to eight individuals who make up a tiny fraction of those troubling statistics, all of whom are teenagers sprinkled from coast to coast and border to border. Lang offers space for them to tell their own stories while providing helpful context for the audience. The stories Lang’s subjects tell are heartbreaking, sweet, infuriating, and inspiring in equal measure. They are stories of ordinary kids fumbling toward adulthood in all the usual ways while burdened by extraordinary historical circumstances that demand of them unusual levels of grit and clarity. Their stories can inform and enlighten; they should also be wake-up calls for anybody who hasn’t fully tuned in to what’s happening to trans folks in this country these days, and galvanizing calls to further action for everybody who already has.
I had a chance not long ago to speak with the parents of trans youth at a meeting of my local chapter of PFLAG, a national advocacy organization for families with LGBTQ+ members. They wanted me, as both a historian of trans life and a sixty-something-year-old Boomer-generation trans woman who transitioned decades ago, to put our present difficulties in perspective. I told them it was unlike anything I’d ever directly experienced myself or studied in our longer past.
So much of the rhetoric one hears these days is about how trans youth are part of a fad, caught up in a social contagion, victims of made-up maladies like “rapid onset gender dysphoria,” innocent dupes of agenda-driven medical providers out to make a few unscrupulous bucks, even the hapless prey of predatory groomers and pedophiles. Trans people are represented as harming women and girls by our mere existence, threatening sexual violence simply by using sex-segregated public facilities, destroying fair competition in sports every time we lace up our athletic shoes. One powerful way to upend those false and misleading narratives is simply to listen to trans young people themselves, like the eight in this book, and to take what they have to say about themselves seriously.
I was once one of those trans kids. I know there’s nothing new, nothing chosen, nothing malicious about being trans. I know my life would have been really different if I’d been able to transition at five when I realized this about myself, or twelve when I freaked out about puberty, or nineteen when I first came out privately to a romantic partner, instead of having to wait another decade before it felt possible to become publicly who I privately always knew myself to be. I also know that my life has been worth living, even though I had to wait. There’s hope and solace in that knowledge, as we face a future when gender transition undoubtedly will be more difficult than it has been in recent decades. But I also know it would be a better life for the eight young people profiled in this book, and for the thousands of others in similar circumstances, if they didn’t have to wait, and we had their backs far better than we do today.
