In Great-Grandma’s day, they hooked.
They were high-topped and dainty, too, to show off a tiny, cheeky-but-demure ankle beneath long skirts. These days, though, they Velcro, tie, strap, or you just slip your toes into whatever you put on your feet. You gotta wear your shoes but, as in the new book “American Teenager” by Nico Lang, you wish someone would walk a mile in them first.
Seven-hundred-plus. That’s how many anti-gay, anti-trans bills were presented to state legislatures around the country last year, many aimed at minors. As if being a teenager isn’t hard enough. With this in mind, Lang shadowed seven trans kids, to find out how they and their families cope with our current political landscape.
Fifteen-year-old South Dakotan Wyatt is in the 10th grade. He knows that the lawmakers in his state “will just keep turning up the boil” on trans bills and it makes him physically sick. When Lang asked Wyatt to describe himself, Wyatt couldn’t do it, as if, says Lang, he was “still in transit, not yet arrived.”
Near Birmingham, Rhydian is a good student at the Magic City Acceptance Academy, the only school in the South that specifically welcomes LGBTQIA+ students, and he enjoys the deep love and support of his parents and grandmother. But he’s frustrated: Rhydian’s been waiting for months for top surgery, which has been put on hold for reasons that are political.
Mykah identifies as gender-fluid, Black, and bi-racial and they desperately dream of a future performing career. In Houston, Ruby’s beloved church held a re-naming ceremony for her when she turned 18. Seventeen-year-old trans boy Clint is Muslim, and has managed to avoid scrutiny from his Chicago mosque.
Jack, along with her mother and nonbinary sibling, Augie, were homeless before their mother finally managed to find housing; in the meantime, Jack lost her health care. And in Los Angeles, Kylie has health care, support, friends, and an activist mother.
She has advantages that most trans kids can only wish for — and she knows it.
Acne. Peer pressure. Social media. Being a teen has always been difficult, even without anti-LGBTQIA+ legislation. In this fine work of journalism, author Nico Lang shows how a handful of kids in one group are coping with governmental policies and life in general.
Hint: You can expect the unexpected. “American Teenager” shows the highs and lows of being a teen with the added stress of politics included — and here, the individuality inside the ordinary is striking and wonderful. Lang is careful to show how these are just typical kids — good-hearted, smart, funny, sarcastic — and it rings throughout each profile how much the discrimination they endure affects their lives and relationships. That’s a clarion call, absolutely, but readers who can see between the lines will also enjoy this book’s humor, its compassion, and the sheer joy of meeting decent, thoughtful teens.
Parents will like this book for its candor, and that goes doubly for adults who love a trans kid. Start “American Teenager” and before long, you’ll be hooked.
— The Bookworm Sez
