American Teenager by Nico Lang

Author:Nico Lang
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Abrams Press
Published: 2024-07-27T00:00:00+00:00

III. LITTLE MIRACLE

The bluebonnets are in full bloom as Molly makes the long drive from Houston to Austin, a gleaming centipede of cars stacked alongside the road while their occupants stomp through the grass in search of the perfect selfie. Bluebonnet season usually begins at the end of March, but climate change has brought them to central Texas early this year, brightening the fields with inaccurately named stalks of tiny velvet bells. Indeed, some of these delicate flowers are blue, but others are a variety of glowing purples and pinks. The distinction matters little, though, to the tourists indulging in the time-honored custom of smashing them until they are flatter than this stretch of highway.

Molly has made this round trip, which clocks in at around four and half hours, countless times throughout her life, and she has these signposts thoroughly memorized. Among them is the billboard advertising personal injury services from “the attorney that rocks,” whose dreadlocks and leather jacket are surely meant as confirmation of his rock ’n’ roll credentials. There’s also the restaurant where Molly orders chicken salad to go and then cries in her sensible SUV if things don’t turn out the way she had hoped. She has spent weeks dreading this journey, with the pressure of knowing it was coming wrapping itself around her like a tight vest. Last night, she hit a breaking point: Sitting in her bathrobe, Molly kept repeating to herself, I shouldn’t have to do this, as she shook her head in disbelief. “This isn’t normal,” she told me in her living room. “I can’t believe I have to do this all over again.”

Molly is, yet again, on her way to the Texas capitol to lobby for the rights of Texas’s LGBTQIA+ community—a fight which, for her, began with SB 6, a 2017 bill seeking to force transgender people to use public restrooms that align with the sex they were assigned at birth.6 If SB 6 had been signed into law, schools and other governmental entities would have faced a maximum fine of more than ten thousand dollars if they did not refuse transgender people the right to use the restroom that corresponds with their gender identity.7 Proponents of the measure claimed that it was necessary to prevent predators from preying on children, a decades-old argument relying on at least one of two myths: 1) that transgender people pose a danger to kids and 2) if they aren’t themselves harming children, granting them equal access to public life is a slippery slope to pedophilia.8

Amid fears that overtly targeting transgender people would result in financial backlash against the state, the bill’s proponent, state senator Lois Kohlkorst (R), opted for the latter of those tactics. “I have to say that while many have made this about a transgender bill, it’s more about someone that will use this bill as an excuse to go into the most intimate places we find ourselves in,” she said during debate over SB 6.9 The lawmaker was sensitive to

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