Read Susan Stryker’s foreword to Nico Lang’s book on trans youth, American Teenager (exclusive)

Award-winning journalist Nico Lang lists the names and faces of eight people who account for just a small part of these alarming statistics, all of whom are involved in a number of dots from coast to coast and border to border. These are teenagers who live in Japan. Lang provides useful context for the audience while providing space for them to tell their own stories. The stories Lang’s subjects tell are heartbreaking, tender, infuriating, and moving in equal measure. These are stories of ordinary children fumbling their way to adulthood in the usual ways, beset by extraordinary historical circumstances that require extraordinary levels of grit and clarity. Their stories can inform and enlighten. It’s also a wake-up call to those who don’t fully understand what’s happening to transgender people in this country these days, and a call to action for those who already know. There should be.

Recently, I had the opportunity to speak with parents of transgender youth at a meeting of the local chapter of PFLAG, a national advocacy group for families with LGBTQ+ family members. They wanted me, a historian of trans lives and a 60-something boomer trans woman who transitioned decades ago, to put our current difficulties into perspective. Ta. I told them that it was completely different from anything I had ever experienced firsthand or studied in the long past.

Much of the rhetoric we hear these days is about how trans youth are part of an epidemic, caught up in social contagion, victims of manufactured diseases like “rapid-onset gender dysphoria.” and about being the innocent suckers of agenda-driven health care providers. Whether it’s the hapless prey of a predatory groomer or a pedophile, to make a few dirty bucks. Transgender people harm women and girls just by existing, face the threat of sexual violence just by using gender-segregated public facilities, and fight for fairness in sports every time we lace up our athletic shoes. is described as destroying competitive competition. One powerful way to overturn those false and misleading narratives is to listen to the voices of transgender young people themselves, like the eight people featured in this book, and to take what they say about themselves seriously. It’s about accepting it.

I was once one of the transgender kids. We know that there is nothing new, chosen, or malicious about being transgender. If I had been able to change myself instead, at the age of 5 when I realized this about myself, or at the age of 12 when I was distraught during adolescence, or at 19 when I came out privately to my lover for the first time. I know that life would have been really different. I had to wait another 10 years before I felt like I could be the person I always thought I was in my personal life. I also know that my life was worth living, even if I had to wait. There is hope and comfort in that knowledge as we face a future in which gender transition is arguably more difficult than it has been in recent decades. But if they didn’t have to wait, and if we had their backs much better than we do today, for the eight young people profiled in this book, and for others in similar situations. I also know that life will be better for thousands of people. .