Trans kids are more than their genders. ‘American Teenager’ invites us into their dynamic lives.

In January 2023, Rhydian Gonzalez-Herrero learned that due to a variety of logistical concerns, their top surgery had been postponed for the second time. The previous year, it was delayed due to new legislation that promised a ten-year prison sentence for any parents or doctors helping minors obtain gender affirming surgery in their state. Like any other teen boy, all Gonzalez-Herrero wanted was the simple experience of wearing a well-fitting suit to prom, but politicians continued to stand in the way. 

Nico Lang centers these kinds of experiences in their new book, American Teenager: How Trans Kids Are Surviving Hate and Finding Joy in a Turbulent Era. Over several months, Lang spent time with eight trans teenagers and their families across the United States, getting to know the real people who are targeted by the legislative attacks agains trans youth. 

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Lang sheds light on the struggles trans teens face due to the shocking rise in the proposal of anti-trans bills – from just 21 proposals in 2015 to 658 so far in 2024. Just as important, however, is Lang’s depiction of their day-to-day lives, highlighting that they are, as the title suggests, just normal American teenagers. 

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American Teenager is a must-read for anyone who thinks they have never met a trans person, for anyone who is trying to understand the horror these teens are enduring, and for anyone in need of stories showcasing hope and resilience in the face of it all.

LGBTQ Nation spoke to Lang ahead of American Teenager’s release to talk about their experience writing the book, the pressure on trans kids to become activists, and the one teen’s story that has burrowed into their brain.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

LGBTQ Nation: What inspired you to write American Teenager?

Nico Lang: I knew a book like this had to be written, and I had the resources to do it. I’ve been connected to families of trans youth across the country for a really long time through my reporting, and we’ve become friends. I knew that that closeness and that kind of intimacy could breed a really special book. Because a lot of journalists have to work with their subjects to build trust. These kids needed this book. America needed this book right now.

How do you define the need the book meets?

More than 600 anti-trans bills have been put forward this year across the country, trying to strip basic rights and protections from trans youth, and in that really virulently anti-trans political environment, what we often haven’t done is actually listen to the trans youth who are being directly affected by this. We have very rarely heard their perspectives or their opinions on what’s happening to them and what’s happening to their own lives.

With this book, I wanted to center their voices. If we knew about the lives of these kids it would be a lot harder to pass these kinds of laws that treat them like they’re inhuman. That’s really what the book came down to, just reminding people that trans kids are just kids.

No two stories in the book feel the same. How did you get in touch with such a disparate group of people?

There were certain geographies of the country I knew were really important to highlight. I knew Texas and Florida had to be in this book because of everything that’s been happening there. But there were also just certain intersections that felt really important to me to highlight because I just hadn’t seen them very often.

As a reporter, I often feel like I’m telling the same story over and over again. The Florida story, the trans siblings there, I’d never gotten to read a trans sibling story before, about two trans people who are related coming together to support each other. And sure, it was absolutely a way to talk about what’s going on in Florida. But it was also a way to tell a really human story that I don’t think that trans people have gotten to really talk about that often. When we limit representation, we not only limit the voices of trans people, but we limit the ways in which they get to be seen. And the more that we can see them as people, the more we can get out of this horrible quagmire that we’re all in.

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American Teenager also deals with faith and religion. What was it like to be on the ground with families who had found acceptance or rejection from their religious community?

I loved that the stories of faith in this book were so different from one another, because it opens with Wyatt’s chapter. He’d experienced terrible rejection from his church when he came out. To live his most authentic life, they had to leave, and that’s the story of a lot of trans kids that I know. They end up losing their faith, community members, close friends, family members. And there’s just this long period of loss and grief that happens. But it wasn’t everybody, and I like getting to tell a different story, to have some balance there. It can encourage other people to engage in bad behavior when you just affirm that [rejection is] the case over and over again. By presenting more affirming faith communities, it then presents a possibility where people can be accepting because they know other people out there [are] doing it too.

You mention in the book that one editor felt it wasn’t realistic enough because none of the kids have been disowned by their parents. Did you find that the teenagers in this book have redefined what family is to them?

This book structurally ended up having to have a little bit of a traditional definition of family because I just didn’t get [to interview a teen with that] chosen family, that ends up being important to so many queer people. Because so many [kids] have experienced this rejection from the families they were born into, I needed to see a hopeful depiction of families. I needed to see their parents, siblings, and aunts and uncles accepting them. It’s a little bit of a Norman Rockwell vision of the family unit.

Trans kids need to be reminded that they can be loved or that they’re deserving of love. I think we sometimes present unilateral rejection as being the only story, right? But sometimes the story is that your family loves you and supports you, but just is struggling to do that in the most appropriate way, and that can still be really hard. It’s very rare that I’ve heard people talk about that in a really affirming way that calls people in rather than calling them out.

To me, it was about making these conversations much more nuanced and interesting than what we’ve been presented. Because those publishers that you were talking about, I think they just wanted this all to be really black and white, and that’s not the world we exist in.

There’s a divide in the teens in American Teenager between those who feel defined by their transness and those like Kylie and Clint who don’t want to have anything to do with LGBTQ+ advocacy and just want to be seen as people. How did that play out when researching the book?

I don’t think it’s an accident that Clint and Kylie hail from the most progressive states in the book. They get to choose how they engage with LGBTQ+ activism. For a lot of the other kids in this book, they aren’t really given much of a choice. They’re forced into it. And you see them feel resentful of that. They live in these environments that, to use Wyatt’s words here, are taking away their childhoods at such a young age. So, for these kids who don’t have to engage in activism, that’s kind of the goal, in a way.

In several stories, the teens open up about having considered taking their own lives at some point. How did you handle those conversations as a reporter and also as a nonbinary person yourself?

I often feel your impulse is to comfort these folks. But often, for me that’s actually the time in which I sit back and listen, I just hear them. Because often what these kids needed then, and what they need now, is to feel like they’re really being listened to and heard.

As somebody who’s experienced pseudo-suicidal ideation in my life when I was much younger, I just want to show them that I am here. You are talking about some of the worst things that have ever happened to them in their lives. It’s not necessarily my job to help them work through that. But I felt, if I was there, it’s the least I could do, right? I was able to do that as a reporter by doing my job, listening, trying to guide them to go as deep with this stuff as I possibly could, but not in a way that was exploitative. Because sometimes the journalists want that shock value, right? I wanted to instead show the emotion of this for those kids.

Some of the chapters in American Teenager focus on very specific problems that trans people face, but there are some where the focus is much more on the social dynamics of the teens and the people around them. How did you find one or the other shaping each of these narratives?

For me, the story just had to be what felt really right for the kid. Ruby is a really good example of this; her love story of her falling for this guy, that very much felt like the story. And I felt like the anti-trans legislation there was kind of like the B plot. It was really incredibly important to talk about everything happening in Texas and the way it’s affecting trans kids, the way it’s affecting Ruby. Obviously, the anti-trans legislation affects her life, but it’s not her whole life.

But then you do have other states where the anti-trans legislation is so much a part of the story. Like in Florida, Jack was detransitioned by state policy. And she went through this terrible ordeal because of it, where her mother thought that she was going to die, that her heart would stop in her sleep. But even then, that still wasn’t the only story. That’s not going to be her whole life, and it’s not even all of who she is now.

This book, to me, is about the fact that they experience life the way the rest of us do, [with] disparate likes and interests that have nothing to do necessarily with them being trans. They want to grow up and be a part of the world. I needed to hear that these kids are making it, that they are doing it for themselves, even despite all these awful things that have been thrown their way.

Was there anything that you saw or heard on this journey that particularly stuck with you, or that was a real shock that you just hadn’t expected?

The thing that has burrowed itself in my brain more than anything, when [Jack] was describing what happened to her body after she was forcibly detransitioned, after her Medicare was taken away, she described it as being some real life Cronenberg. The body that she had been fighting for was slipping away, and she didn’t know what to do. And there was just this helplessness that came from that, this just total lack of will to live.

And I’ll always remember that, because it reminds me of, not only how cruel other humans can be, but how cruel this anti-trans legislation really is. Here was a girl who really got the worst of it and it’s a traumatizing thing to have to read. Republicans seem to forget they’re doing this to kids that don’t have another choice, that don’t make laws or policies, that can’t even vote. I just don’t think that Republicans should have the ability to look away from that anymore. And I know that they’re probably not going to read this, that the people who need to hear the message most aren’t going to pay attention.

But for us at least, it’s helpful to know what our community members are going through and what they’re experiencing. We need to know exactly what we’re fighting for. So, if folks are horrified by that in the way that I was, I hope they remember that in November. I hope they vote like it.

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Nico Lang’s American Teenager is available now through Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or your favorite local bookstore. Nico Lang is currently touring to promote American Teenager, find tour dates here.

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