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After a decade of covering the fight for LGBTQ+ equality, I spent nearly a year traveling the country to profile those most impacted by that ongoing struggle: trans kids. To date, more than 650 bills have been put forward in 2024 seeking to repeal basic rights and protections from members of America’s trans community, and the majority of that legislation is aimed at youth. Among them, these bills intend to deny trans children the ability to access necessary medical care, participate in school sports, use the most comfortable bathroom from them on their campuses, or even be called by their name in class. These attacks are ramping up, and lawmakers are no longer just targeting kids: Last month, Texas quietly began refusing requests to correct trans birth certificates and driver’s licenses.
Being a kid is already hard, and in American Teenager, I illustrate how much harder U.S. lawmakers are making it to be a trans kid. In this groundbreaking book, I travel to seven different states to show how trans youth and their families are surviving this unprecedented assault on their lives. Some are struggling, for reasons that do and don’t have to do with our current political environment. Jack, then 17, was effectively detransitioned after the state of Florida ended coverage of gender-affirming care for minors through its Medicaid program. Mykah, 18, experienced a severe mental health crisis after not getting into their dream college. Kylie, 17, wondered if she would ever experience the freedom of being an adult after failing her permit test.
But through it all, the trans kids whose lives are profiled in these bracingly intimate portraits are still finding ways to thrive. In this exclusive excerpt, 17-year-old Wyatt takes solace and comfort in the love of his supportive family — his mother, Susan; father, Jeremy; and sister, Elli — in spite of the discrimination and prejudice they’ve faced in their home state of South Dakota. Times are tough, but the teens of American Teenager are surviving them the best way they can.
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As we sit under the low lights of the family basement, Wyatt peruses the airbrushed artifacts of last year’s freshman yearbook, which he believes explains everything anyone would ever need to know about his high school. A sand-colored husk wrapped in cornfields that sits just outside the Sioux Falls city limits, the school is an eclectic mix. Wyatt’s fellow students include rich kids whose parents work in health care and banking, the prevailing industries of Sioux Falls; the children of farmers, some of whom drive up to an hour to attend school; and a disproportionately large population of deaf students, a byproduct of the closure of the South Dakota School for the Deaf in 2011 after years of alleged mismanagement by the state. The pictures in his yearbook reflect this hodgepodge: A senior poses with a private plane and red sports car rented by his father, while another in camouflage military dress slings a hunting rifle over his shoulders. The yearbook’s most Dadaist — and potentially criminal — entry is a student who rides a zebra while wearing a sweatshirt advertising Cheetos corn puffs. “I stole a zebra for this,” the caption deadpans.
High school, for Wyatt, is a mirthless pursuit — a place where he feels that no one really understands him, where others get to be dumb kids while he has to deal with adult problems. He isn’t fully out as transgender to his classmates, although some who went to elementary school with him are aware of his gender history. He came out in 2018 during the fourth grade, and the other kids around him were supportive, he says, because they hadn’t yet been conditioned otherwise. On the day that he came out to his classmates, Wyatt had a joyous celebration with a friend after school, throwing stuffed animals down the stairs and then jumping into the plushy mess they had made. That friend, who lives in a blue house down the street, is now a fervid supporter of former President Donald Trump.
“He welcomed me with open arms,” Wyatt says. “That’s what kids do before they’re taught. These kids all around me were just so happy to see another person be happy, and we were having fun. I was just one of the boys.”
The students who have known Wyatt for a long time, since the days when his long hair tangled itself into a maelstrom of knots due to lack of attention, are aware that he is transgender. Those he met in middle and high school usually aren’t because he rarely raises the subject, having watched people’s opinions of his identity harden over the years. His favorite teacher began regularly misgendering him after learning of his identity, and all Wyatt could think was: What are you doing to me? What did I do to deserve this? The uncertainty of who is aware — or might have been told by a friend — creates a paranoia and unease that strangles Wyatt’s school days. In the hallways between class, he feels the creep of unseen eyes following him like paintings in a haunted house, and when other students throw back at him a knowing glance as they whisper conspiratorially to each other at their desks, his loneliness begins to feel like a permanent condition.
“I’m really scared to become friends with new people,” he says with a tremble of his chin. “I don’t really get the choice of when to come out to people.”
There are out LGBTQIA+ students at Wyatt’s school, but surviving the passive bigotry of teenagers takes an unyielding confidence that his poet’s soul has not yet developed. A gregarious transgender classmate, Kris, found himself at the center of South Dakota’s debate over inclusion in athletics after making the boys’ football team — a first for the state — and the media attention only made him more popular and well-liked among his peers. After all, he was in the news, the subject of a February 2022 photo spread in GQ magazine, in which Kris’s blurry feet lift off the ground as he races across the field in his football helmet. Wyatt wishes he could emulate the defiant spirit of the queer senior who wore a full face of pastel makeup on picture day, but gesturing to the boy’s yearbook quote, Wyatt knows he’s just not that kind of person. “Being gay isn’t a choice,” the photo’s caption reads, paired with a recalcitrant smirk demonstrating that its subject knows he’s way too good for this. “It’s a game. I won.”
As thoughtful as he is shy, Wyatt just wants to be in a place where he doesn’t have to develop an entirely new personality to survive, where the person that he is can thrive. He and his parents have discussed sending him to school out of state if South Dakota — which was one of the earliest states to propose regulating transgender youth health treatments — ever passes its long-gestating medical care ban. Even if that bill is never enacted, Wyatt wants to graduate a year early so he can leave South Dakota as soon as possible, believing that this place cannot nourish him in the way he needs. In addition to the abundance of legislation targeting his right to exist, South Dakota lacks a comprehensive statewide law banning anti-LGBTQIA+ discrimination in education, housing, or health care. The only city with its own anti-bias ordinance is Brookings — a college town that’s nearly an hour from Sioux Falls in good weather, and good weather is a luxury in the upper Midwest.
Although Wyatt’s city is often described as a blue dot in a red sea, even Sioux Falls is only progressive to a point. When Wyatt came out as transgender, about half of his family’s innermost circle cut off contact, along with most worshippers at their conservative Baptist church they no longer patronize. The one-story structure isn’t much to look at — it sits across from a Jimmy John’s sandwich restaurant and resembles a pointy office building — but for eighteen years, its movable pews of plush green chairs were where Jeremy, Susan, and then their children spent Christmases and Easters, a place for making memories and saving souls.
The handful of family friends who have stuck with them say that Susan and Jeremy were “icons” in their church before the fallout: the couple that everyone wanted to be, held up as an example of the exaltations made possible by embracing God’s plan for humanity. Jeremy balanced the church’s budgets and Susan oversaw the children’s ministry until her part-time work selling Mary Kay cosmetics blossomed into a successful career. The daughter of evangelical missionaries, Susan was almost literally born into the faith — her parents met in 1971 while stationed in Brasilia, just fifteen years after construction began on the Brazilian capital. The small clinic in which Susan was brought into the world had no screens on the windows, just mosquito nets.
“For a long time, I’ve tried not to think about the church because how it all ended was so painful,” Susan tells me over the kitchen table as we share jagged bricks of her signature coffee cake, a gooey cinnamon confection that dissolves the moment it hits the tongue. “I used to play the keyboard or the piano for worship during church. Now it’s hard for me to listen to worship music. If I hear a song somewhere, it might hit me as a song that we used to sing. I have to turn it off, or I have to leave.”
These untended wounds remain so raw that Susan finds it too agonizing to drive by the church, even though it sits alongside the most convenient route to downtown. After Susan and Jeremy sent an email informing church leadership that Wyatt would be socially transitioning and using new pronouns, word quickly spread; the church received so many calls that the week’s Bible Study had to be canceled, an unprecedented occasion. In a series of closed-door meetings held to debate what should be done about this, some parishioners claimed that people who are transgender are confused and said that allowing Wyatt to express his identity was “child abuse.” The fallout continued as news of Wyatt’s transition spread in a tight-knit community: Susan lost Mary Kay clients and her coworkers stopped associating with her. She had to get a new chiropractor and even new childcare when a babysitter insisted that to use Wyatt’s name would be to reject God. “In the beginning, He created them male and female,” she told Susan in a text message, believing that the clarification would be helpful.
Ultimately, Susan and Jeremy opted to leave the church in support of their son, a choice they say they would have made a million lifetimes over. That doesn’t mean that the decision wasn’t agonizing or that they don’t still feel its punishing weight. Before they stopped driving past the church, Elli’s eyes would fill with tears each time she saw its somber façade slip through the tinted blue glass of her car window. “Oh, I miss it,” she would say, plaintively, her face pressed against her mirrored self. For weeks, Susan cried almost every single day and night — feeling as if the life she had known were suddenly taken from her and she hadn’t even had the chance to say goodbye.
The operatic emotion of those early days was a hard lesson for Wyatt in what it would mean to be transgender: that his transition would be as much about his own needs and desires as it was about other people’s reactions to them. Neighbors spent years shunning the family — over time, they’ve upgraded to a passive head nod — and it seems as if other people are mourning a person Wyatt never was. Some of his family members still hang pre-transition photos of Wyatt in their home that have his deadname printed on them, even though he has asked to take them down. When he looks at the pictures, Wyatt sees not what they see — a memorial to the past — but the acute agony of unwanted memories.
“It’s like watching a funeral from the third person,” he says, describing an out-of-body sensation that felt very literal during a summer trip to see extended family, when a seven-year-old cousin asked who the “girl” was in an old photo. “He doesn’t know I’m trans. He was one year old when I came out. He couldn’t grasp the alphabet, let alone me being trans, but he walked around asking, ‘Who is this? Did someone die?’ ”
Despite the pain his family still lives with, Wyatt insists that theirs isn’t a trauma narrative, of misery and brokenness as manifest destiny, the kind of suffering that ballet told him to worship. Their story is about finding each other, about the ways in which they are messy and imperfect and unfailingly generous toward one another as a balm for the world’s cruelty. Conversations with Wyatt are often interrupted by texts from his parents announcing the arrival of Rice Krispies Treats cooling on the stove or reminding him not to stay up too late — even though Susan and Jeremy know his thoughts will keep him awake until 2:00 a.m. — or saying “I love you” for the fifth time that day. Their hurt has taught them to be generous: with affection, with words of affirmation, and even with the assigning of nicknames. After several days of standing in the backyard together in hopes of catching the faint glimpse of constellations in South Dakota’s big skies, they gift me the endearment “Uncle Nico,” a sign that family means so much that they are always willing to expand theirs.
Wyatt frequently describes his household’s singular warmth as “wholesome,” echoing a manufactured nostalgia for an America that never really existed. And yet, as a guest in their home, it’s easy to believe that the television dream promised by family sitcoms like Leave It to Beaver was real, not just a flimsy cardboard set. Among the family’s myriad winsome qualities is their sometimes laborious dedication to family tradition, with no occasion too small to merit its own generations-spanning ritual. Every family dinner ends with Rocky, who was adopted as an emotional support animal for Wyatt, cheerfully licking away the leftovers — a mutually understood sign that the meal has finished. “He’s the best dishwasher in the house,” Jeremy says, an oft-deployed line that would be accompanied by a laugh track on the silver screen. When children among Wyatt’s extended family reach their teen years, the aunts, uncles, and grandparents celebrate the imminence of adulthood with a group vacation, although the destinations tend to be humble in their ambition. Wyatt’s trip was to Omaha.
Tradition was a major part of Jeremy’s upbringing in a rural area of south-central Nebraska, where he grew up the child of corn farmers. His family never went on vacations and only dined out once a year, at the all-you-can-eat buffet at Bonanza Steakhouse, a once-ubiquitous restaurant chain with just three locations left in the entire U.S.; the treat was unveiled as part of an annual advent calendar counting down to Christmas. “In each little envelope was a slip of paper,” Jeremy says over the dining room table. “We did something special every day in December. One day it would be, ‘Let’s put up the Christmas tree!’ One day would be like, ‘Hey, open up a gift early!’ One of them was almost always: ‘Let’s go to Bonanza.’ ”
That love of custom carried over into how Jeremy raised his children. Each year, they plan a family Halloween costume, although the 2021 attempt at paying homage to the escapist teen truancy fantasy Ferris Bueller’s Day Off was thwarted when Elli — ever the iconoclast — dressed up as a plague doctor instead. Christmas can be an all-day affair; family tradition holds that each gift giver hands out presents one by one, along with an explanation as to why the item was selected. Jeremy swears the unwrapping ceremony gets shorter every year, but Wyatt disputes that characterization. “It took eight hours last year,” he interjects, “with three breaks!”
As a temporary constituent of the family, I am invited to partake in celebrating the seventy-third birthday of Susan’s father, a retired pastor and mechanical engineer everyone calls “Papa Terry.” The family’s sing-songy pronunciation makes the sobriquet sound almost Italian to my ears, somewhere in the range of Papa-tierri, a mondegreen that elicits no shortage of laughter among celebrants. Before Papa Terry blows out the candles on a green-and-white-frosted cake bearing the logo of John Deere, an agricultural manufacturing company that has achieved God-like status in South Dakota, the mutually understood rules dictate that each family member says one thing they appreciate about the celebrant.
Going around in a circle, Wyatt offers the first tribute, thanking Papa Terry for teaching him how to drive and how to collect wood for the fireplace, although presumably not at the same time. Jeremy adds, in the same vein, that he admires Papa Terry’s willingness to be an extra hand around the house whenever it’s needed. “You’re always willing to find a way to make something work,” he says. I was warned ahead of time that someone always cries during gift-giving, and today is Susan’s turn. “I didn’t know how much like you I was,” she says, holding back a sniffle. She praises her father for continuing to volunteer at the church following a very short-lived retirement, while also driving a bus twenty to thirty hours a week. “One of the things I learned from you was work ethic. I always put everything into my work, and I got that from you.”
There’s an unofficial motto that has carried their family through both good times and bad, one passed down from Papa Terry: “We don’t quit.” The saying was inspired by his father, a stoic farmer who worked long hours in the field and had a pragmatic approach to injuries. One time when Susan was a child, she broke her arm after she fell off a horse, but the injury wasn’t bleeding and didn’t look swollen; after her grandmother fashioned a sling with a homemade dish towel, her grandfather sent her back out to finish mowing the grass. “We used to tease your dad that he would still be farming and die out in the field because he couldn’t get it out of his blood,” Susan tells Papa Terry. “That’s ingrained in me, and you as well.”
Susan pauses for a moment to consider the implications of her latter remark, and twisting her neck to face Wyatt, she offers a curt warning. “Don’t let that happen,” she says, her eyes uncharacteristically intense. Every pulsing bruise they have endured to get to this moment — the doleful phone calls with the church, the melancholy holidays of that first year, the harsh gaze of Wyatt’s classmates — flashes across his face, and he smiles. “It’s a bit too late for that,” he says.
Excerpted from American Teenager: How Trans Kids Are Surviving Hate and Finding Joy in a Turbulent Era by Nico Lang. Copyright © 2024 by Nico Lang. Published and reprinted by permission of Abrams Press, an imprint of ABRAMS. All rights reserved.
