Opinion: The Truth About Being a Transgender Kid in America

Published Oct. 05, 2024 8:01AM EDT 

It’s impossible to measure the human cost of the war being waged on transgender kids, the homes and communities destroyed, and the dreams indefinitely delayed. For a transgender child taking their first steps into the person they were meant to be, few blows are more devastating than losing access to the medical treatments that help them become themselves.

Although critics of transgender medicine allege that the field is experimental and its benefits unproven, study after study has shown that the impacts of gender-affirming care for transgender youth can be profound.

When administered safely and in the hands of medical professionals, treatments like HRT and puberty suppressors have been linked to drastically lower rates of suicidal ideation, depression, and anxiety. Even knowing that they can access gender-affirming care—that it exists and is available when they need it—is associated with improved mental health outcomes for transgender minors.

My book, American Teenager: How Trans Kids Are Surviving Hate and Finding Joy in a Turbulent Era, is an attempt to understand that toll, to survey the damage, while also aiming to tell a more authentic, nuanced story about the lives transgender youth are leading during historically challenging times.

For so long, mainstream narratives defined queer and transgender existence as inherently tragic, our lives fated to end in sorrow as punishment for defying norms that were assigned to us without our consent, the paths others expected us to take and punished us for spurning.

While the LGBTQIA+ community has in recent years reacted to these weary tropes by demanding space for joy and celebration in our storytelling, life as so many of us live it is a series of peaks and valleys, both a tragedy and a comedy unfolding on the same stage: one informed by our bliss, sorrow, and all the in-between. We are never just one thing, and neither should the stories about us be, even during our darkest moments.

Although media representation often treats transgender kids as if they were a hitherto undiscovered species lurking at the bottom of the ocean, they participate in the world just as the rest of us do, with the same preoccupations that have bedeviled the minds of teenagers for generations.

They want to be able to hang out with their friends at the beach, go to parties, and drive around on a Saturday night, on their way to nowhere. They want to get asked to homecoming by that special person they’ve had their eye on all semester and slow dance under dollar-store gymnasium streamers. They want love, belonging, and acceptance, to feel like they’re making the most of their youth while also preparing for an adulthood looming on the horizon.

People wave a Transgender Pride flag as they attend the 2023 LA Pride Parade on June 11, 2023 in Hollywood, California.

 

Robyn Beck/AFP via Getty Images

Many—but not all—cisgender kids get the chance to be young and free, to make mistakes and learn from them, and to take time figuring out what they want for themselves and their lives. Transgender youth are yearning for that same liberty, to be permitted the experience of being fully alive.

It’s hard for transgender kids to feel that they are part of society when so many are refused the acknowledgement of the names and pronouns that best tell the world who they are, the right to make decisions about their health care, and the ability to use the restroom that feels most comfortable. And yet, they are not only living but thriving even still.

Transgender youth are carving out lives of fulfillment and splendor while navigating immense challenges they never asked for: the full force of political might brought to bear on them, the banal evil of others’ prejudice. They are creating safe spaces at their schools, trying out for the senior play, going on first dates, falling in love, getting their hearts broken, making mistakes, learning from them, and realizing what it means to be a person, in all its resplendent complications.

Protesters wrapped in pride and trans pride flags sit on a wall during the trans rights demonstration outside Downing Street in London.

 

Vuk Valcic/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images

To tell the stories of transgender youth surviving despite every attempt to eradicate them, I traveled the country to document the daily lives of transgender teens and their families, spending nine months with seven families in seven states. These trips spanned the length of an entire school year, beginning in September 2022 with a visit to South Dakota, where a sensitive high school student struggled with his unrequited love for his home state.

My journeys took me to Alabama, where a popular senior worried he wouldn’t be ready for prom; to West Virginia, where a lonely theater kid yearned for community; and to Texas, where a community college student met her dream guy at the worst possible time. They continued in Illinois, where a Muslim teenager claimed space for himself in his faith; in Florida, where two siblings were helping each other live to see their adulthood; and finally in California, where a spoiled seventeen-year-old enjoyed the perks of her liberal bubble, even as it appeared ready to burst.

I hope my conversations with transgender kids and their families are as myriad and wide-ranging as the community they represent. Estimates suggest that, on the very low end, around 1.6 million Americans are transgender, a population that often has little in common with one another aside from their desire to express their fullest selves, without apology.

Transgender narratives span geographies urban and rural, conservative and liberal, religious and secular, and everywhere in between; they traverse divides of race, class, and national origin, and so do these dense volumes. No single work can represent the endless fullness of transgender experience, and as a nonbinary person navigating my personal privilege in my non-professional life, I do not pretend this one does. This book is merely a beginning, a gesture toward the stories that remain, a prayer that many more works like it come to fruition.

My aim was to find the universal in the anecdotal and the anecdotal in the universal. Rather than putting forward a grand unified theory of transgender teendom or exploiting these stories to advance a polemical argument, I hope to avoid flattening the complexity of their experiences. This book eschews sweeping statements in favor of the small moments that illuminate a life, sidesteps over-generalizations in favor of the rich detail of human experience, and attempts, whenever possible, to give the platform to transgender kids themselves.

The transgender flag is seen during the New York City Pride Parade on June 26, 2022 in New York City.

 

Noam Galai/Getty Images

Anti-LGBTQIA+ lawmakers have been able to dehumanize transgender people and their communities through the power of omission. By excluding transgender kids from the story of their own lives and denying them agency, that silencing permits politicians to fill the void with misinformation, fear, and lies, to scare the public into discriminating against children. I hope my book, in some small way, to return their voices to them, to restore a stolen power.

Any person truly curious about whether transgender kids are being abused or mistreated by parents who affirm their identities need not wonder. They would tell you, except that they aren’t used to being asked. (They are instead accustomed to people who don’t know them and have never met them speaking on their behalf.)

This is, in part, because most Americans still say they do not have transgender people in their lives—not as coworkers or casual acquaintances, let alone friends or family members—and fewer still are personally acquainted with a transgender child. Research shows that when a cisgender person knows someone who is transgender, whether a young person or an adult, they are more likely to support their right to exist, to believe that they should have the same legal protections they do, and to vote for their ability to lead full, abundant lives.

For those who do not personally know a transgender young person, I hope that in reading American Teenager you feel as if you do, that you feel as if you are part of the fabric of these kids’ extraordinary, ordinary lives. I hope that you laugh with them, you cry with them, that you share in their hopes and desires, that you can learn something about yourself and the world by seeing life through their eyes.

I hope that you see them as profoundly human, that you recognize parts of yourself in their thoughts and their words. For those who do know and love a transgender child, I hope my book is a small comfort during hard times, a document of survival and resilience.

And for transgender children themselves, let American Teenager be a reminder that you are not alone, that you deserve to be loved just as you are, that you are a blessed gift to a country that desperately needs you. The title of this book is not an accident; it is your continued presence that makes America great, not the genocidal erasure that demagogues and charlatans so eagerly seek.