The following is an excerpt from the new book American Teenager: How Trans Kids Are Surviving Hate and Finding Joy in a Turbulent Era by Nico Lang, out today via Abrams Press.
As he lurches toward me, step by ponderous step, Rhydian tries his hardest not to laugh, his smile breaking a little more as he gets closer. In the classroom around him, Rhydian’s peers perform the same giggle-inducing task, maintaining strict eye contact as they march on the tips of their shoes. The endeavor is transparently silly, but Rhydian’s professor, Mr. Evans, says it serves a purpose: to make his pupils comfortable sharing personal space with one another, to teach them how to be part of a community. His goal is to see how close the students can get, whether they can be vulnerable enough to stand within inches of their classmates. Most of the group is successful, although a few grow tired of the prompt and doodle a cartoon dog on a sheet of paper on the floor instead. An arrow points toward the hound’s long, bashful face, along with a cryptic proclamation: “GUILTY.”
This exercise, like many performed that day, is adapted from a counseling 101 course that Mr. Evans took in college before joining the faculty at MCAA, a charter school nestled in the Birmingham suburb of Homewood, fewer than 500 yards outside the city. The students practice active listening by engaging in conversations, with three different objectives in mind: summarizing, paraphrasing, and asking questions. Being able to summarize and paraphrase—by parroting back something their partners just said—allows students to demonstrate their engagement, and it’s something that people typically do in conversation all the time, usually without realizing it. But many of these students were extremely isolated and detached in their previous communities, rarely having the occasion to practice these foundational social skills. Although Rhydian estimates that 70 percent of his classmates are LGBTQIA+, many came to MCAA because they have other learning needs—such as autism or severe ADHD that makes it challenging to follow along in class, even at a rudimentary level. The school has a high Latine population for the area—at around 20 percent—because so many experienced extreme racism, even violence, in their previous learning environments.
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Teaching basic socialization—such as the staring contest that Rhydian loses, blinking immediately—isn’t what one might anticipate from a civics course. But Mr. Evans, whom the students refer to by the mononym “Evans,” will tell me later that day that he saw the necessity of transforming the class into a life skills seminar after asking his seniors what they’d never learned in their twelve years of schooling. Many didn’t know how to pump gas, he says, or even scramble an egg. A request from Rhydian, always the first to raise his hand in class, summed up the general mood. “I want you to teach me how to exist in a world that makes me nervous,” he requested, to approving nods from the room.
The day that I sit in on his lecture, Evans is wearing a bright blazer in crayon purple as he attempts to get students caught up on everything they missed while marooned in their former schools. His curriculum now includes everything from how to change a tire and jump a car to what to look for when signing a lease. Later this year, he plans to take the students apartment hunting in Birmingham to show them how to spot potential warning signs—such as black mold and faulty wiring—and he says he once stopped a class when a student admitted that they felt unprepared for an upcoming job interview. “We did an entire ‘how to do an interview’ lesson,” Evans will tell me after the students depart for their next class. “We actually looked at the job, and we spent the entire class period setting this kid up for the interview.”
While most schools prepare students for the rest of their lives, Evans believes that MCAA has a different mission. Many of the students he teaches didn’t think they would live to see graduation—due to violence from others, self-harm, or a mixture of both—and they haven’t spent any time preparing for what comes after high school. A transgender student who is currently staying in Evans’s home had, at one time, planned to take her own life on her eighteenth birthday, but when that occasion arrives later this year, he and his wife are instead taking her to get her eyebrow pierced as a present, celebrating that she is still here. The school’s intention, Evans says, is to help students who have such extreme mental health challenges and emotional needs with the basic act of survival; this includes after they leave its walls. “What happens when our students leave us and we can’t protect them, guide them, and help them through a day-to-day situation?” he wonders. “A lot of our students would be lost. They really wouldn’t know what to do. That is irresponsible, for educators to leave students not knowing what would happen tomorrow if they couldn’t come to school.”
Rhydian might appear to be an outlier in that his career is already mapped out: After graduating from college, he plans to work in civil rights advocacy—whether that means becoming a judge, attorney, or politician. Alabama has only ever elected two openly LGBTQIA+ lawmakers to its legislature and just one is currently in office: state representative Neil Rafferty (D). Alabama has never been represented by an openly transgender official, and Rhydian thinks that, just maybe, could be him someday. Never one to limit himself, he has talked of aiming even higher: of becoming the first transgender Supreme Court justice—and certainly the one with the largest toy car collection.
But even as Rhydian’s life leads him toward preeminence, Evans asserts that the more practical lessons he teaches in class apply to him, too. “We only had twelve seniors last year,” Evans says, scratching his tight goatee. “I gave them all jumper cables as a senior present. I’ve gotten pictures from eight of them, saying, ‘My battery died, and I knew how to jump the car.’ If Rhydian gets stranded on the side of the road and has to wait on somebody to help, there is a good chance that a person stopping to help does not think that Rhydian should exist.”
If students’ lives are heavy outside of MCAA’s campus, you wouldn’t know it from spending a day there. After Evans’s class, students sprawl across the floor on purple throw rugs and turquoise pillows as they casually shoot texts to friends. The school’s designated support animal, a golden retriever named Firelily who wears “Safe Space” and “Y’all Means All” patches on her harness, causes a minor commotion by rolling around on her back, students crowding around her to stroke her soft belly. Walking the hallways between classes is to experience pure sartorial maximalism: pink plaids that pop like lip gloss, black jeans ripped all the way up, and hair in every conceivable (or inconceivable) color. One student infamously wears “shants”: gray skinny jeans with one leg made into shorts, as if their wearer was intending to hitch a ride in a black-and-white movie.
The school is a project of Birmingham AIDS Outreach (BAO), the largest LGBTQIA+ resource provider in the state of Alabama. MCAA first opened its doors in 2021, but the idea of a dedicated queer educational facility dates back to 2013. That year, BAO cut the proverbial ribbon on the similarly named Magic City Acceptance Center (MCAC), a drop-in space that operates in a renovated warehouse in Birmingham. MCAC’s initial purpose was to provide HIV and STI testing, but as it grew, Dr. Karen Musgrove, BAO’s executive director, tells me that her organization quickly realized its habitués needed profound care beyond its allotted services. Many of them had extremely similar stories to Rhydian before he was able to transfer to his new school: They hadn’t eaten all day because they were too terrified to sit in the lunchroom with their classmates, while others hadn’t used the restroom because they weren’t allowed to access facilities that matched their identity on campus. Some would come in and sleep for hours because they were so exhausted, or they would remove their makeup and feminine dress before their parents picked them up.
Opening a school where LGBTQIA+ youth wouldn’t need to manage daily trauma in order to access education wasn’t as easy as simply recognizing a need and meeting it, especially in Alabama. Before the school was able to open, MCAA’s charter was denied three times: first by the Birmingham Board of Education and then twice by the Alabama Public Charter School Commission. While the city’s reasons for doing so were straightforward—Birmingham doesn’t allow charter schools to operate within its limits—the state evidently took issue with the very nucleus of MCAA’s ethos. During a series of hearings held over Zoom, state commissioners referred to MCAA as a “gay school” and openly misgendered a transgender child who spoke at the meeting. If that wasn’t enough, the testimonies were Zoom-bombed by trolls who flooded the screen with gay pornography.
“The kids saw the whole thing,” Dr. Musgrove tells me as we sit in the empty cafeteria before lunch. “It reinforced what they have been telling us all along: There is no hope, adults don’t care, and this is a shitty ass place to live.”
After appealing the repeated rejections and threatening a lawsuit, MCAA was finally approved in October 2020 by just one vote, but with a major asterisk: The school had to be ready to open by August, in just ten months’ time. “The bulldozers were basically lined up at the building waiting for the vote,” Dr. Musgrove says. “That’s how serious it was.” The construction crew worked three shifts a day to prepare the building, which was once a training center for the Bell South telephone company, for opening day. But for all the chaos behind the scenes of its unveiling, the first day was completely quiet in the hallways. While parents sobbed as they dropped off their kids at the front door, students barely spoke to each other, walking in a daze as if they were afraid the school was a dream from which they would soon awaken.
That day, August 9, 2021, was particularly auspicious for Rhydian: He had never made it through the first day of school before without throwing up, an annual phenomenon at his prior campus. At MCAA, he didn’t have to worry about being outed by people he thought were his friends or about being deadnamed in front of the class. With his pronoun pin on, he could just be Rhydian, and he couldn’t remember a time when that had ever been true. “It was comforting,” he tells me as other students begin to file in for lunch, negotiating the ever-changing politics of which friends they will sit next to. “Being able to be in an environment where everyone doesn’t think twice about your pronouns or your name or the way you look, it clears up a lot of room in your brain to actually learn.”
It took two weeks before MCAA students started opening up to each other, before the hallways began to look like an average school campus: new couples walking with their hands in each other’s back pockets, friends making weekend plans to play Dungeons & Dragons. (For the truly devoted, the school even has its own club dedicated to the fantasy tabletop game.) To make those discomfiting connections, many students had to overcome their own deeply ingrained fears of letting others in—a defense mechanism developed in response to being let down by virtually everyone they’d ever known. Before enrolling at MCAA, Rhydian’s best friend, Zed, had planned to detransition and move in with his father in Texas, thinking that he had no other option but to go along with his father’s desires for his life. “His requirement was that I play the ‘pastor’s daughter role,’ ” Zed tells me as we sit outside eating in the parking lot, Rhydian’s preferred lunchtime spot. “I would probably either be dead or a shell of a person.”
Zed, a fellow senior with a mane of walnut hair, says that he’d never really had a friend before coming to MCAA, and he feels lucky that his first experience with camaraderie was Rhydian. Rhydian is beloved among his peers and viewed by faculty as a leader in the classroom—someone who makes others feel welcome and who shows others that it’s OK to be visible, to take up space. But for Zed, Rhydian is more than a possibility model: He’s been a lifeline, the only person who Zed can spend hours talking with on the phone and without finding excuses to end the call. For the only time in his life, Zed feels appreciated and seen for who he is—not broken, but simply pieces of a whole that haven’t yet been put together.
“There was one night where I was laying on my bed and we were talking about why we want to be alive,” Zed says. “I told him that I have my entire life only been living for other people. By the end of it, I made a goal: that by the end of the school year, I wanted to live for myself. I’m not saying that I would have never got there, but if I did not have him in my life, I don’t know how long it would have taken.”
As much as others say he has inspired them to be more themselves, Rhydian says that he would never have had the opportunity to be the happy, gregarious person he is now without MCAA. He remembers his first prom at the school as euphoric: Dressed as elves and lustrous mushrooms to match the enchanted forest theme, the forty or so students in attendance danced to a stream of throwback pop hits—including Nelly Furtado’s “Promiscuous” and Jennifer Lopez’s “On the Floor,” the latter of which also happens to be Mima’s ringtone. Rhydian, who wore a conservative black suit, says the experience couldn’t have been more different from his old campus, where he spent his homecoming dance hidden in the corner, terrified of being kicked out or even attacked. He could still feel that residual fear inside him: muscles tightening over his sternum like a protective shield, shoulders caving in on themselves in an attempt to disappear.
This year’s prom theme at MCAA is “starry disco midnight,” and Rhydian already has his date lined up: Callaway, a fellow classmate he’s been dating for a few months. They go horseback riding and attend parties thrown in unoccupied houses, and the morning they see M3GAN in a crowded theater, Mara and I tag along as the third and fourth wheels on their date.
But for all the eighties teen movie visions in his head of what his last prom will be—dancing with his friends as he forgets the world for just a moment—a part of him knows it will be incomplete unless he’s able to get top surgery before the dance. While getting ready for prom last year, he cried when he saw the way his suit fit over the curves of his body, the shape of which is still more womanly than he would prefer. That discomfort makes it hard for Rhydian to embrace his gender fluidity on his own terms, whether by wearing heels, painted nails, or jewelry, all of which he would like to incorporate into this year’s prom look. The issue is not femininity in and of itself, he says, but rather not being able to be feminine on his own terms; he wants to be the one who draws the lines of his gender.
When he thinks about what going to the dance as his fullest self would mean, Rhydian can barely picture it—the thought, after all this time and waiting, is too overwhelming. “I definitely will cry, just out of happiness, trying on the suit for the first time and carrying myself in a way that I don’t have to worry about what angle someone’s looking at me. Or when I’m sitting, does the suit accentuate the fact I have a chest? Does the shirt wrinkle a certain way?” he says as I eat Mara’s leftover piñon, Puerto Rico ground beef lasagna made with plantains, at lunch. “I just want to be able to enjoy myself and feel good.”
The rest of the school day breezes by: Next up is theater, where a discussion regarding the philosophy of stage acting leads into a series of games intended to test students’ performing skills. First up is Werewolf, in which players must weed out the killer among them before they are all hunted, and then a spin on Museum Night Janitor, where the goal is to stand perfectly still while a chosen custodian walks by, trying to catch them moving. In this version of the game, the class must pretend to be statues, and the perky Mr. G directs them to hold a series of different poses: arms in a Y shape, then standing on one foot. The freeze-frame exercise tests students’ ability to react and be present, while Werewolf is acting at its basest level: If the titular monster isn’t able to convince the group of their innocence, the game will be a very short one. Our last stop is math class where Rhydian is greeted with a pop quiz on fractions, percentages, and decimals. Afterward, he won’t say what he got, except that it was “not an 100 percent.”
As we walk toward Mara’s car at the end of the school day, idling in the long line of parents waiting to pick up their children, I’m glad that Rhydian was able to find somewhere that he could be so adored, that would love him the way he always deserved. One thing that Evans explained is that the school, which is as much a trauma center as it is an educational institution, isn’t a good fit for every LGBTQIA+ student. It’s geared toward the most vulnerable, the ones for whom Evans says the traditional classroom experience “absolutely did nothing.” As I look at Rhydian in the dim light of the car, already texting on his phone, he seems at ease and maybe ready for a nap. He is what so many of these kids couldn’t have pictured for themselves even a year ago: alive.
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.
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