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Assigned Media: It’s a little different interviewing someone out here in a restaurant, but nice to share a meal. A ways back I did a book of interviews with affirming parents who had to flee red states called, When Loving Your Kid Is a Crime, but in your blockbuster new book American Teenager: How Trans Kids Are Surviving Hate and Finding Joy in a Turbulent Era, you actually lived with many of these families. What was that like for you?
Nico Lang: It was like having roommates again. You're getting to know each other and getting to know each other's habits, and it was really intimate. But I got a level of intimacy that we couldn't have had otherwise if I was just going over and visiting them for a half hour a day. Sometimes I would go to school with these kids which was a wonderful experience. It's really a commitment to getting to know these kids.
AM: You write about one of my heroes, Kimberley Shappley, who started out—not just as a white Christian conservative—but as an evangelical preacher, before her daughter Kai came out and her whole world turned upside down. As she says in your book, she was one of the loudest pro-trans pro-care voices in Texas, until they criminalized being an affirming parent overnight, and suddenly she’s saying to herself—I don't know what to do. I don't know where to go—over and over again. One parent I interviewed also fled Texas with three kids, two cats, and three lizards and drove her van straight through to Connecticut, a sanctuary state. But when she got there, it was Kimberly who was waiting and helped her get settled.
NL: For me, the seed for this book was planted in 2021 when Texas put forward a bill that would criminalize parents of trans kids as child abusers if they allow their children to transition socially or medically transition.
I'd always operated under this naive assumption that there is some good faith at the center of the conversation that we all wanted what was best for trans kids. And I realized that that wasn't true, that there are a lot of people who are operating under terrible bad faith.
The thing that really shocked me, which Kimberly says, is that so many of the moms she talks to in Connecticut have no idea what's going on with trans kids and their families in Texas. When she would explain it, moms would say, That's not right, that that can't be correct. Or are you sure? And it's like, of course she's sure, she lived it. She had to flee the state. There are so many well-meaning Americans who have no clue what it's like.
AM: You interview Susan and her son Wyatt in South Dakota fighting bills and testifying in the legislature. And she was often successful. In Texas parents would tell me that they’d schlep to Austin to testify, and Republicans would be checking their phones, yawning, laughing at their faces. But in South Dakota, you found they’d fought off nearly 90% of the anti-trans bills.
NL: They're an amazing organization doing incredible work. But it's also a reminder of how many bills are being put forward in different states that are really just throwing everything against the wall to see what sticks. So if you've got 15 or 16 bills in the same year and one of them passes then most of them fail—but it still means one of them became law. What Republicans do really effectively is, they repeat this cycle over and over again, year after year. In Ohio the bathroom bill didn't move for years until it did. The trans medical care ban didn't move for years until it did.
These state organizations are doing great work but it's hard if they're like up against this incredible Goliath. Even in South Dakota they did pass a lot of those anti-trans laws. Because the sad fact is, as amazing as Susan is, and as incredible as the work she's doing is, she can't really do it by herself when the entire state apparatus is designed to not give her a say in the process and not give her a real voice because they can just do whatever they want. And they did.
AM: I just read that 50 anti-trans bills have just been pre-filed in Texas for 2025. I think we're just shy of 1600 bills nationally over the last five years. Over 600 each of the last couple years alone. It’s a kind of legislative insanity. I have to believe that kind of hate is learned.
NL: I hear all the time that when kids come out very young as trans and tell their friends about it, it’s no big deal. It's never an issue like Ew, that's gross or I'm going to misgender you or call you by your old name. They get it really quickly. In Wyatt's chapter There's all this talk from the right about saving the children, protecting the children. But the children don't care. So why are we caring so much for them?
AM: You make the point about Kylie Yamamoto who uses the girls’ locker room and nobody cares. I feel like the whole point I think of American Teenager is that there are two stories about what it's like to be a trans kid in America that split right down the middle. If you live in a blue state you have one experience. If you live in a red state, you have a completely different one. For my book, I interviewed parents from blue states but they never never made it in because there was literally no story there. When their kid came out, I’d ask what happened next: did kids harass them? Did teachers misgender them? Were they stopped from using the bathroom or locker-room? And they’d say, Well, there was this one kid but he backed off and that was it. That was it. There's no story and nothing to write. And then you have these incredibly gothic tales from kids in red states which American Teenager documents so well.
NL: Politically it's definitely like A and B and never the twain shall meet. But I also tell the inspiring story of Ruby in Texas, where you have this girl who in a really conservative state, who hasn't really experienced a lot of bigotry outside of the legislature regarding her gender identity, When Ruby came out to her parents, they’d had figured it out years ago and already been educating themselves and reading all the books and they were prepared. At her Episcopal church, they threw her a coming out party and she got to have her renaming liturgy there. She's been celebrated for being trans in the same way that she was celebrated before when she came out to her boyfriend. It wasn't an issue. He said, Okay, well, I like you anyway and still kept dating her. So you have this girl who has who's had so much going right for her pretty much her entire life, where it's like her family, her community, her friends, everybody's been on her side. But it doesn't make a difference if her state isn't also that supportive, if her legislature isn't willing to, like, pass laws that make it possible for her to exist or not pass laws that erase her and force her out of her own state, because the ultimate choice that Ruby has to make was to flee Texas.
She would often tell me that it was really hard to visualize a future, or think about a future, and that's not a way to live. So she had to get out to California to have that future. The really sad fact is that now that Trump's been elected, she doesn't know what the future looks like again. So instead of fleeing Texas for California, she's fleeing the country. She's in the process of moving to France.
Here you had this girl who had everything right. Her family did everything right. They were in a really good place, and it just all got thrown away because of politically motivated bigotry.
AM: One of the problems in red states is there are these urban liberal ghettos where everything is as blue as Manhattan. Houston elected Annise Parker, a lesbian Latina, as mayor. But you drive 20 miles in any direction you’re in southern Mississippi. And now even folks in the liberal cities and states are wondering if they’re safe.
AM: You talk about this one couple Susan and Jeremy, who were deacons in their church and then had to end up leaving it to support their trans child. One day they were church-going Republican-voting Christians. And then their kid comes out and they have to make these heart-rending choices. You know, a lot of parents choose the church. They're not about to leave where they are.
NL: You see that over and over again, you see that with Kimberly Shappley. She was a right wing evangelical preacher. And then suddenly this trans thing is very much a part of her life. I was a Republican in high school until one of my really close friends was sexually assaulted, and she needed to be able to get abortion care. She needed to get a morning after pill in order to prevent a possible pregnancy. And seeing everything that she dealt with and she had to face opened my eyes to how marginalized people are treated in horrific emergency situations. You have one party that seems to care about those issues and is trying to get people the care they need and another party that doesn't give a shit about that.
AM: You also say in the book how important it is to get past the whole idea of trans is a life of suffering and sturm und drang and engage with gender euphoria.
NL: I do think that there's a different lens on tragedy in this book that is sort of the classic narrative of like trans people having these tragic lives, right? It's like transness that is inherently coded as tragic. And I think in American Teenager, you see that these people don't have inherently tragic lives. They have pretty, joyful, wonderful lives. They have these families that love them. They often have supportive communities. They have good friends.
When we were pitching this book I found out a lot about the lens through which people view trans people. One publisher, Macmillan, actually told us that the book wasn't realistic because none of the kids rejected their families. As a writer, I just didn't think that story was necessary for me to tell because it had been told so many times. I wanted to tell stories that I'd never heard before and that I'd never seen before: families supporting their kids, often in flawed ways, and learning and growing along the way.
AM: You've also written extensively about comedian Dave Chappelle’s attacks on trans people. You ask the question, Why does he insist on using his position to punch down? And your answer is, Because he likes it. He’s enjoying punching down at what he calls “the alphabet people” and making fun of trans people specifically. It's been a great career move. We’re back to Eddie Murphy buying street cred and milking laughs by making jokes about gay people getting AIDS.
NL: Even Eddie Murphy learned, you know. And Chappelle, they're not even that different in age, right? They're about the same age. Why can Eddie Murphy learn and Dave Chappelle can't?
AM: Well, Murphy was also caught patronizing transgender prostitutes, which kind of eroded the public line that he was anti-LGBTQ+.
NL: This is really a brand pivot for Chappelle. There were a couple years where Dave Chappelle was really out of the public consciousness, and now he's making so much money off this. He's making $20 million a special and arguably he's bigger than ever. He’s won several Grammys and major awards while airing these incredibly transphobic specials.
AM: It's interesting that this kind of humor works at a time when studies say 40% or more of LGBTQ+ youth have contemplated suicide, and 1-in-4 trans kids have attempted suicide in the last year. But it's still funny to make fun of transgender kids.
NL: It makes me sad because I think that Dave Chappelle is a really smart person
Trans people are going through so much already: why would you want to make their day harder? Why would you want to make life worse for these trans kids who are already suffering so much right now?
AM: The sense is that all these attacks on trans people politically are just the prelude to attacking gay folks. That the idea was always to use trans to reignite a culture war whose real target is always The Homosexual. We’re already seeing this in Europe, especially in Italy and Hungary. Are they going to start coming for gay people next?
NL: They already are. During the last Trump administration. They denied citizenship rights to the children born, quote unquote, out of wedlock of gay couples. It was a huge story. These poor families and their kids who were put in the crosshairs of this tyrannical administration and it’s going to happen again. I think we're going to see all manner of LGBTQ+ rights being eroded. Project 2025 is quite expansive and the Republican Party party platforms across the country are quite expansive and a lot of them specifically target same sex marriage. States like Tennessee that have been chipping away at marriage equality for years. So like, it's not one of those things like, Oh, you know, after the trans people they'll come after gays, They're doing it all at the same time.
AM: The gay rights movement started out about sexual orientation but today, it centers gender deviance and trans rights, which is a conversation that the movement ran from for over 40 years.
NL: It feels like people get it now in a way that they didn't 15 years ago. Queer people do. And that gives me hope, because it's like if we can educate some of those folks in our own community, who's to say we can't educate the broader public. It’s really hard right now, but I think I have to be a little optimistic. .
I have this joke that you get to take a shot every time I talk about being Buddhist. So you're going to get to take a shot because I'm going to talk about it right now. Several weeks ago someone at my temple was talking about the ways we kind of self-flagellate, when you get into anxiety or fear just cycle through it in a loop for hours. But he asked us, How often has it helped you? And the answer for me was never: it has never made me feel better, or given me more clarity, or made me happier, healthier, or stronger.
So with what’s happening in the world. I'm not blind. It's my job to know this stuff. But what I can do for myself is not to dwell on it more than I need to not make my day worse than it needs to be. Because if I'm so depressed I can't function, I can't write, I can't tell the truth about what's happening to these kids. And somebody's got to right now.
AM: Thank you. This being Florida, I'm going to go try to use the restaurant restroom now and not get arrested.
NL: Oh, yeah. Good luck with that.
Assigned Media: It’s a little different interviewing someone out here in a restaurant, but nice to share a meal. A ways back I did a book of interviews with affirming parents who had to flee red states called, When Loving Your Kid Is a Crime, but in your blockbuster new book American Teenager: How Trans Kids Are Surviving Hate and Finding Joy in a Turbulent Era, you actually lived with many of these families. What was that like for you?
Nico Lang: It was like having roommates again. You're getting to know each other and getting to know each other's habits, and it was really intimate. But I got a level of intimacy that we couldn't have had otherwise if I was just going over and visiting them for a half hour a day. Sometimes I would go to school with these kids which was a wonderful experience. It's really a commitment to getting to know these kids.
AM: You write about one of my heroes, Kimberley Shappley, who started out—not just as a white Christian conservative—but as an evangelical preacher, before her daughter Kai came out and her whole world turned upside down. As she says in your book, she was one of the loudest pro-trans pro-care voices in Texas, until they criminalized being an affirming parent overnight, and suddenly she’s saying to herself—I don't know what to do. I don't know where to go—over and over again. One parent I interviewed also fled Texas with three kids, two cats, and three lizards and drove her van straight through to Connecticut, a sanctuary state. But when she got there, it was Kimberly who was waiting and helped her get settled.
NL: For me, the seed for this book was planted in 2021 when Texas put forward a bill that would criminalize parents of trans kids as child abusers if they allow their children to transition socially or medically transition.
I'd always operated under this naive assumption that there is some good faith at the center of the conversation that we all wanted what was best for trans kids. And I realized that that wasn't true, that there are a lot of people who are operating under terrible bad faith.
The thing that really shocked me, which Kimberly says, is that so many of the moms she talks to in Connecticut have no idea what's going on with trans kids and their families in Texas. When she would explain it, moms would say, That's not right, that that can't be correct. Or are you sure? And it's like, of course she's sure, she lived it. She had to flee the state. There are so many well-meaning Americans who have no clue what it's like.
AM: You interview Susan and her son Wyatt in South Dakota fighting bills and testifying in the legislature. And she was often successful. In Texas parents would tell me that they’d schlep to Austin to testify, and Republicans would be checking their phones, yawning, laughing at their faces. But in South Dakota, you found they’d fought off nearly 90% of the anti-trans bills.
NL: They're an amazing organization doing incredible work. But it's also a reminder of how many bills are being put forward in different states that are really just throwing everything against the wall to see what sticks. So if you've got 15 or 16 bills in the same year and one of them passes then most of them fail—but it still means one of them became law. What Republicans do really effectively is, they repeat this cycle over and over again, year after year. In Ohio the bathroom bill didn't move for years until it did. The trans medical care ban didn't move for years until it did.
These state organizations are doing great work but it's hard if they're like up against this incredible Goliath. Even in South Dakota they did pass a lot of those anti-trans laws. Because the sad fact is, as amazing as Susan is, and as incredible as the work she's doing is, she can't really do it by herself when the entire state apparatus is designed to not give her a say in the process and not give her a real voice because they can just do whatever they want. And they did.
AM: I just read that 50 anti-trans bills have just been pre-filed in Texas for 2025. I think we're just shy of 1600 bills nationally over the last five years. Over 600 each of the last couple years alone. It’s a kind of legislative insanity. I have to believe that kind of hate is learned.
NL: I hear all the time that when kids come out very young as trans and tell their friends about it, it’s no big deal. It's never an issue like Ew, that's gross or I'm going to misgender you or call you by your old name. They get it really quickly. In Wyatt's chapter There's all this talk from the right about saving the children, protecting the children. But the children don't care. So why are we caring so much for them?
AM: You make the point about Kylie Yamamoto who uses the girls’ locker room and nobody cares. I feel like the whole point I think of American Teenager is that there are two stories about what it's like to be a trans kid in America that split right down the middle. If you live in a blue state you have one experience. If you live in a red state, you have a completely different one. For my book, I interviewed parents from blue states but they never never made it in because there was literally no story there. When their kid came out, I’d ask what happened next: did kids harass them? Did teachers misgender them? Were they stopped from using the bathroom or locker-room? And they’d say, Well, there was this one kid but he backed off and that was it. That was it. There's no story and nothing to write. And then you have these incredibly gothic tales from kids in red states which American Teenager documents so well.
NL: Politically it's definitely like A and B and never the twain shall meet. But I also tell the inspiring story of Ruby in Texas, where you have this girl who in a really conservative state, who hasn't really experienced a lot of bigotry outside of the legislature regarding her gender identity, When Ruby came out to her parents, they’d had figured it out years ago and already been educating themselves and reading all the books and they were prepared. At her Episcopal church, they threw her a coming out party and she got to have her renaming liturgy there. She's been celebrated for being trans in the same way that she was celebrated before when she came out to her boyfriend. It wasn't an issue. He said, Okay, well, I like you anyway and still kept dating her. So you have this girl who has who's had so much going right for her pretty much her entire life, where it's like her family, her community, her friends, everybody's been on her side. But it doesn't make a difference if her state isn't also that supportive, if her legislature isn't willing to, like, pass laws that make it possible for her to exist or not pass laws that erase her and force her out of her own state, because the ultimate choice that Ruby has to make was to flee Texas.
She would often tell me that it was really hard to visualize a future, or think about a future, and that's not a way to live. So she had to get out to California to have that future. The really sad fact is that now that Trump's been elected, she doesn't know what the future looks like again. So instead of fleeing Texas for California, she's fleeing the country. She's in the process of moving to France.
Here you had this girl who had everything right. Her family did everything right. They were in a really good place, and it just all got thrown away because of politically motivated bigotry.
AM: One of the problems in red states is there are these urban liberal ghettos where everything is as blue as Manhattan. Houston elected Annise Parker, a lesbian Latina, as mayor. But you drive 20 miles in any direction you’re in southern Mississippi. And now even folks in the liberal cities and states are wondering if they’re safe.
AM: You talk about this one couple Susan and Jeremy, who were deacons in their church and then had to end up leaving it to support their trans child. One day they were church-going Republican-voting Christians. And then their kid comes out and they have to make these heart-rending choices. You know, a lot of parents choose the church. They're not about to leave where they are.
NL: You see that over and over again, you see that with Kimberly Shappley. She was a right wing evangelical preacher. And then suddenly this trans thing is very much a part of her life. I was a Republican in high school until one of my really close friends was sexually assaulted, and she needed to be able to get abortion care. She needed to get a morning after pill in order to prevent a possible pregnancy. And seeing everything that she dealt with and she had to face opened my eyes to how marginalized people are treated in horrific emergency situations. You have one party that seems to care about those issues and is trying to get people the care they need and another party that doesn't give a shit about that.
AM: You also say in the book how important it is to get past the whole idea of trans is a life of suffering and sturm und drang and engage with gender euphoria.
NL: I do think that there's a different lens on tragedy in this book that is sort of the classic narrative of like trans people having these tragic lives, right? It's like transness that is inherently coded as tragic. And I think in American Teenager, you see that these people don't have inherently tragic lives. They have pretty, joyful, wonderful lives. They have these families that love them. They often have supportive communities. They have good friends.
When we were pitching this book I found out a lot about the lens through which people view trans people. One publisher, Macmillan, actually told us that the book wasn't realistic because none of the kids rejected their families. As a writer, I just didn't think that story was necessary for me to tell because it had been told so many times. I wanted to tell stories that I'd never heard before and that I'd never seen before: families supporting their kids, often in flawed ways, and learning and growing along the way.
AM: You've also written extensively about comedian Dave Chappelle’s attacks on trans people. You ask the question, Why does he insist on using his position to punch down? And your answer is, Because he likes it. He’s enjoying punching down at what he calls “the alphabet people” and making fun of trans people specifically. It's been a great career move. We’re back to Eddie Murphy buying street cred and milking laughs by making jokes about gay people getting AIDS.
NL: Even Eddie Murphy learned, you know. And Chappelle, they're not even that different in age, right? They're about the same age. Why can Eddie Murphy learn and Dave Chappelle can't?
AM: Well, Murphy was also caught patronizing transgender prostitutes, which kind of eroded the public line that he was anti-LGBTQ+.
NL: This is really a brand pivot for Chappelle. There were a couple years where Dave Chappelle was really out of the public consciousness, and now he's making so much money off this. He's making $20 million a special and arguably he's bigger than ever. He’s won several Grammys and major awards while airing these incredibly transphobic specials.
AM: It's interesting that this kind of humor works at a time when studies say 40% or more of LGBTQ+ youth have contemplated suicide, and 1-in-4 trans kids have attempted suicide in the last year. But it's still funny to make fun of transgender kids.
NL: It makes me sad because I think that Dave Chappelle is a really smart person
Trans people are going through so much already: why would you want to make their day harder? Why would you want to make life worse for these trans kids who are already suffering so much right now?
AM: The sense is that all these attacks on trans people politically are just the prelude to attacking gay folks. That the idea was always to use trans to reignite a culture war whose real target is always The Homosexual. We’re already seeing this in Europe, especially in Italy and Hungary. Are they going to start coming for gay people next?
NL: They already are. During the last Trump administration. They denied citizenship rights to the children born, quote unquote, out of wedlock of gay couples. It was a huge story. These poor families and their kids who were put in the crosshairs of this tyrannical administration and it’s going to happen again. I think we're going to see all manner of LGBTQ+ rights being eroded. Project 2025 is quite expansive and the Republican Party party platforms across the country are quite expansive and a lot of them specifically target same sex marriage. States like Tennessee that have been chipping away at marriage equality for years. So like, it's not one of those things like, Oh, you know, after the trans people they'll come after gays, They're doing it all at the same time.
AM: The gay rights movement started out about sexual orientation but today, it centers gender deviance and trans rights, which is a conversation that the movement ran from for over 40 years.
NL: It feels like people get it now in a way that they didn't 15 years ago. Queer people do. And that gives me hope, because it's like if we can educate some of those folks in our own community, who's to say we can't educate the broader public. It’s really hard right now, but I think I have to be a little optimistic. .
I have this joke that you get to take a shot every time I talk about being Buddhist. So you're going to get to take a shot because I'm going to talk about it right now. Several weeks ago someone at my temple was talking about the ways we kind of self-flagellate, when you get into anxiety or fear just cycle through it in a loop for hours. But he asked us, How often has it helped you? And the answer for me was never: it has never made me feel better, or given me more clarity, or made me happier, healthier, or stronger.
So with what’s happening in the world. I'm not blind. It's my job to know this stuff. But what I can do for myself is not to dwell on it more than I need to not make my day worse than it needs to be. Because if I'm so depressed I can't function, I can't write, I can't tell the truth about what's happening to these kids. And somebody's got to right now.
AM: Thank you. This being Florida, I'm going to go try to use the restaurant restroom now and not get arrested.
NL: Oh, yeah. Good luck with that.
