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Check out more from Read Me, our queer literature column, here.
Back in 2016, journalist Nico Lang was convinced they would be out of a job after the presidential election. A longtime LGBTQ+ reporter with a career that has since included a year-long stint as Them’s news editor, they were certain that Hillary Clinton would win by a landslide, that major wins for equality would soon be secured, and that they’d eventually run out of pressing issues to report on. “Oh God,” they reflect now. “What a time of delusion that was.”
Things didn’t go quite that way, to put it lightly. A few months after Donald Trump was inaugurated as president, Lang reported their first story on the legal and cultural challenges facing trans youth. Since then, they’ve become one of the foremost chroniclers of the lives of trans children and their families in the United States, penning intimate, detail-rich profiles that humanize a group that is often dismissed as irrational or reduced to a political football. Lang portrays trans youth not as abstract data points but as full-fledged human beings. That may seem like the bare minimum, but such portraits are desperately needed in the contemporary sociopolitical landscape, especially when even progressive allies often don’t seem as interested in listening to trans kids as they are in speaking for them.
Enter their book-length nonfiction project American Teenager, out October 8 from Abrams Books. Over the course of a year, Lang embedded themself in the lives of eight trans kids and their families for two weeks at a time, trekking from California to West Virginia and nearly everywhere in between, condensing each visit into a chapter. The result is an incredibly intimate, varied look into the lives of American trans youth, from their worries about not being able to get top surgery before prom to the joys of finding home in a queer summer camp to the bittersweet feeling of leaving one’s home state to pursue futures that would otherwise be impossible.
Ahead of the book’s release, Lang talked with Them by phone about the importance of uplifting the voices of trans youth and their families, the lifelong bonds they developed on their travels, and how they manage to maintain hope in these bleak times.
How did you find sources who were willing to let you embed yourself in their lives for two weeks at a time?
A lot of the families I already knew from my previous reporting. But then [for] the other families, it was a bunch of referrals. All the stories that are in the book were families who I really connected to right away. We would sit on Zoom calls and talk for a really long time, and we just had this instant spark. I knew that there needed to be some immediate trust there to be able to go as deeply as I wanted to [in two weeks], because I didn’t want it to be surface-level. By the end of the book, I wanted readers to feel like they really got to know these kids.
The chapters in the book are named after the trans kids, but they end up being more holistic portraits of their families, including their parents’ histories. What drove that choice?
The most important thing was to center these kids in their own lives. I wanted them to be heard in this really unvarnished, authentic way. But I did feel like the parent perspective was an important secondary plot, in that there are going to be parents who read this book.
I wanted [those readers] to have a real diversity of perspectives that they could connect to: Susan in South Dakota, who is Wyatt’s mom, got it pretty early. Her son comes out, she does all this research, and she gets on board. And you compare that to Mykah’s mom in West Virginia, Dawn, who’s a white lesbian of an earlier generation, and she’s really struggled with things like pronouns, or just respecting the fullness of Mykah’s identity.
I [wanted to show] the different ways in which people can be supportive, but often in imperfect ways. We can do a lot of good by just recognizing where people are at in order to encourage them to move forward and make progress. More than anything, I wanted this book to feel really humanizing for everybody who reads it and for the people who are in it.
Absolutely. Even as someone who’s covered anti-trans legislation for four years, I was like, “Oh, this is still a closer look at who’s actually impacted by this than anything I’ve ever read before.”
Initially, what the book was about was [the fact] that one of the reasons Republicans have been so effective at passing anti-trans legislation is that they’ve been able to completely ignore the human toll of all this. If you really think about it, it’s wild how many anti-trans laws they’ve been able to pass in such a short amount of time. The reason they’ve been able to be so effective is they’ve been able to talk about all this in the theoretical.
With this book, I needed to say that people’s lives aren’t theoretical; they are real, and people are trying to live them in spite of everything that’s happening to them. Writing this book reminded me that being a kid is really, really, really hard, and when we’re adding all of these burdens on top of it, for trans kids, it can feel insurmountable. Even the kids who are really lucky and who have certain privileges really struggle under the weight of all this.
You hear it in the book over and over again: There are times that they don’t think that they’re going to be able to keep going, and Republicans are able to continue pushing to take these kids’ rights away from them, and pushing to make things even harder, because the legislation doesn’t even talk about them a lot of the time. It doesn’t use words like “trans.” It doesn’t acknowledge the real impact this is going to have on people’s lives.
Was there anything that surprised you about the process of either writing or reporting the book?
How hard it was. Any queer journalist knows that it’s hard to write about your community’s rights and protections being stripped away again and again. What makes it more livable is that you’re able to move on from one thing to another. There’s something happening in Georgia, and you focus on it for a day, but then you have to move on to this thing that’s happening in Kansas, and then this thing that’s happening in Texas. You often don’t really have the time to dwell on your feelings, because you’re always moving.
But with these families, I had to really sit in it with them for two years. It’s not even just that we spent a year writing a book together, and then it was done. I have this bond with them forever. I will be feeling what they’re feeling forever, because we’re part of a community. I can’t just move on from that in the same way. I don’t want to overemphasize my pain here, because it’s really about theirs. But it was really hard to experience such extreme vicarious trauma.
What self-care pointers do you have for not just fellow queer journalists, but queer and trans people in general who feel overwhelmed by the news cycle?
Something that’s been helpful for me recently is that I started going to a Buddhist temple every Sunday. That’s been really nice to just be in a space every week that is for my own healing and for my own mental health. More than anything, I would recommend to other folks to find that space for your healing. If you don’t have a Buddhist temple or that doesn’t really resonate with you, that’s totally fine. Many queer people are religious, and that’s really important. But if you’re not, ask yourself: What can be that for you? It’s about finding that thing that lightens your load, because if not, it just gets heavier and heavier until it crushes you.
What do you want readers to take away from American Teenager?
I hope, rather than trying to tack closure onto these kids’ lives, that people reading this ask what they can do to give themselves closure. If you read this book and you felt something for these kids, then it becomes incumbent on you to do something. You have the ability to volunteer in your local community. You have the ability to support community organizations that are fighting on the frontlines. If, for some reason, those things aren’t for you, you can do something really small and freaking vote. I know presidential politics isn’t for everybody, and I’m not going to scold you about who to vote for there, but there is an entire down ballot. There are local, statewide, and school board candidates.
It’s such a cliché, but it’s really important: We forget that there are more of us than there are of them. I think we get demoralized by how much there is to fight, and how horrible the world seems sometimes. It’s easy to look at the news cycle right now and feel hopeless. But there’s always hope. That hope is us. That hope is these kids. I think when we find our connection to each other, when we learn to show up for each other and support each other and vote for each other, it’s not going to fix everything, but it at least gets us a little bit closer.
This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
American Teenager is available October 8 via Abrams.
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