Journal, guardian and many others, please join me. Hello, lisa. I have never ever interviewed my author. Im so excited about this fun exchange, i never talk to my authors, usually, through the beginning of the process but never in this way do we talk about it so this is a great experience for me and thank you for having me. I am happy to be here so i wanted to start out, we should start by saying how this wonderful book you have written has come to be and i will tell my side of the story. I was so in love with the proposal the way you sent it with your agent, and i was excited, i am a mother of a 10yearold boy, i had a brother and sister and was very familiar, about this, it seems like you and i have experiences with this and we look about the same age. We see generally generationally, changing the way we define ourselves. I was not the only parent who didnt have it this week, and how we should talk about it these days. To understand it for myself, and the gender discussion these days and i wasnt familiar on how to embrace that, i was superexcited, going back to how you came up with this concept of tomboy . It wasnt the most easy experience people think of. I will sit down and write a book. You drew a lot in processing and developing this idea. Guest it was not exactly linear either but i want to say thank you very much to the folks at my hometown bookstore for having me, thank you for buying my book. In the publicity department, people are working so hard, and people working really hard in this super crazy times to get the message out about this book. Started writing about this when my daughter was 3 or 4 and that was a different time when people were talking about whether you should be writing about that, trans kids were not at all a subject in the media. I was kind of naive and started writing about this kid doing Something Different and had these feelings about it. When the website was closed was never edited, it didnt cause a big stir and years went by, like you told us she was a tomboy. Someone who likes short hair and sports. And that word had never come up. Those kids were the stars of all the tv shows i watched and i have pictures of my friends and i who were not tomboyish with short hair, short shorts with white typing and striped tshirts, unisex or boys clothes and what happened to that when i looked around, my kid was probably the one pretty much like that. The beginning was noticing that and the next part of that experience, very kindly asking to change in the boys locker room or use a pronoun, things you havent asked for and i was so touched for a long time, this was wonderful progress in learning so much, but also when you ask over and over and over the same people, the adults who knew her well who seem to be expressing a kind of skepticism, lots of boys and girls, and identify as a girl. The combination of those things is very interesting and i wrote about that in the new york times. Once again invoking my naivety because i didnt know i was stepping into a massive culture war about even with the word girl means . Is that a social category or a biological category . Who gets to claim it . At first there was a big well of support. Lots of people feel seen by what i have written which is one of the major points i was writing and then there was a backlash and a lot of threats and a lot of pieces with my name in the title. I had an experience. I had to experience cancel culture and that kind of public pushback. After recovering from it enough to look through it, what is upsetting people, i am not not interested in blaming trends people but telling me i dont understand basic concepts of gender and havent considered that perspective. From there i tried to interview some people who had written things about what i had gotten wrong, lets get together and you can tell me to my face rather than on twitter. Really wonderful people complied and did that and those things together, those disparate experiences, with a complicated book. Host did you know you wanted to write about it or just exploring that anymore . Guest im always looking for the book idea. I have written hundreds and hundreds of articles and i started a lot of nonfiction proposals but i havent finished and i did start this and stop at a bunch of times. Whenever i get a book idea, there are 36 hours, this is so brilliant and i am so psyched about it and keep typing notes into my phone or on a piece of paper, this idea is great and on our 37 i dont know. By our 38 this is not a book. You and i went through a little bit of that. I will explain what i mean by that later. How did you feel, one part of the discussion was are you the right person to write this book through the lgbt q community, you started talking people, interviewing people, this would be a good book for me, how did you feel you were approaching this subject as aces gender woman with integrity, for you to write, you and i explored a lot of that but initially how did you feel confident that you were the right person to write this book . Interesting being a writer in the story movement, i dont, if i want to only write about my social category, atheist jewish left right check, that is how i was raised so as an essayist and journalist and fiction writer i want to explore other worlds and points of view. That is interesting about it in the privilege of being a writer is to be constantly learning and able to empathize with people who are different. So what i really tried to do was to marry the movement with my own exploration in that i interviewed lots of trends people, i didnt know i could do everything they said but i kept their remarks in my mind all the time to be sensitive, to be careful, to be still true to myself and my vision and my point was to create more understanding about the naturalness of gender divers and make room for kids like mine and people kept saying to me it is okay for you to write this because of your kid. That was my card i could hold up but i would prefer to use my writer card. We still need journalism and these birds i views but it is important for writers with all different privilege to be aware if you are writing about someone with less power, a group that you dont automatically have their perspective to consider that all the time if you are writing. That was my goal that was both critical and inclusive. That is what i was trying to do. Host what our discussion was was i think this book is not a book about transgender, it is a book about all the ways we define ourselves as women including the transgender community. I love the way you are able to dive in deep in terms of research, different elements of the book you pulled together because you are on a search to understand as a woman and i think to me that is why this book is so appealing and it appeals, it is not a parenting book, those who try to understand their children, where they are today, how they are thinking about life differently but it is also helping us to understand ourselves. I just thought a lot of the compelling stories in your book were your own experiences trying to help the reader see how it has shifted in terms of you have a chapter on the pink and blue divide. We talked a little bit about that. I didnt know anything else, i dont know what time when girls were not totally obsessed about pink, you grew up in a different time in a different situation, the pink and blue divide developed and tell our audience what that is. Yes. Up until 100 years ago kids were having what we would call general genderneutral childhood in that they were being dressed the same in what we think of as feminine clothing until they went to school they would be wearing dresses and would all have long hair and had a bubble period where no one wanted to talk about their actual biological sex. The reason was thinking about the bodies of the kids would make people think about being adult sexual beings so that was discouraged. You didnt want to think, they were just kids dressed according to age and their toys werent gendered. It wasnt important and it was surprising to me when i learned why that shifted in the turn of the Twentieth Century and that had to do with the evolving, understanding homosexuality and people thinking it is not about homosexual acts but as a category of person and the idea that you werent born gay, your parents could make you gave you a parenting. The prevailing ideology of child psychologists is dress your little boys like little men so they wont be gay. Incredible. Guest that is where that tradition comes from and pink and blue were not a big part of that in the beginning because pink was first of all a hard color to produce. Die technology had to evolve and when there was more money in the economy and the technology evolved and they could make clothes in more color than they were manufactured instead of going home, theyre starting to be a discussion as they started emphasizing the difference between young boys and girls, which colors are for which groups and blue was thought of the girls, because of the virgin mary and pink was a version of red which was masculine so that was followed as a boys color and that was debated for a couple decades, one theory is maybe eisenhower was so into pink as the first lady, pink bathrooms, the black trim, it started to be associated with women and that is part of womens identity, pink was for girls. Host where does the idea, if pink, where did the idea of the 50s start developing . That another chapter where you talk about not only did the girls have to transform the boys, they were becoming a little men, the boys who were not fitting into that where square little man box. In the beginning when tomboy was first applied to girls it was an insult, a girl acting like a boy in a bad way, eventually it came to be a term of pride. And there were various periods from the Nineteenth Century and the 1970s where there was active encouragement to make girls into tom boys and make sure they knew they could have access to boys world and a great example of that was in the 1970s sears catalogues they had boys to girls conversion chart so any girl could shop in the boys section but there was never a girl to boy size conversion chart, never any message in the culture of also boys, you can have access, that was in the very beginning, there has never been a term of pride equivalent to tomboy on the other side, no nice word for a boy who likes girls stuff. Host you explore every facet of the psychology, biology, where have you landed on tom boys . Is a psychological thing, biological . Does biology pay into this . What i didnt realize for a long time and maybe not even until quite recently was how much debate there is over the word gender it sells and what it means to different people at different times so there are lots of people who say gender is a construct meaning gender is stereotypes and societal norms and it is all made up and something we impose on people to oppress them and then we have people who feel the word gender is about gender identity and how masculine or feminine you are is biological and it is not a construct and some of this misunderstanding about the word gender fueling certain culture wars and i think it is pretty clear the main thing is clear as nothing is clear. I saw scientific research, the same research interpreted in completely different ways by people with different definitions of the word gender. I saw people making certain arguments and compiling all the evidence to further their arguments and ignoring anything that interrupted it and i didnt want to do that. I wanted to mix it all together and say look how messy it is, look how hard it is to determine what is biological and what is constructed because we raise children so differently, we dont have a way to know what is just from biology, and i think we know enough biology is influenced by your social experience, the brain is an organ the changes with experience, you have some natural tendencies that are shaped by what happens to you, who you play with and biology and culture interacting over the course of the lifetime in a body, culture, family, and i really want, i really wanted to be complicated and ambiguous and okay that it is that way. Host do you think the answer is to be genderneutral . There is more power for women when we are sort of we say in the book, forgive me if i mess up the term but how do we if it is a complicated system, what we need to change about the way we are thinking or talking to our children about gender, how do we live in this complication . Guest a good question. I keep saying i feel like this book is less about providing answers than asking questions because they have accepted a lot of things as fact that we should be questioning. We can decide how much to participate in this system, this gender system and engendering of childhood. I think as adults, a lot of us feel liberated to express gender however we want. We can have whatever haircuts we want or to wear whatever, theres plenty of movement for adults to be free but without realizing it we have imposed this rigid pink blue divide onto kids. Im not talking gender identity but gender in the other sense of the word in that we told them they should play with certain toys because a sex, they should play with certain friends, they should have certain personality traits, we are reinforcing it, treating them differently and we have really narrowed the boy and girl box so much not many people consider into it. My idea was that we should just stop gendering the Material World of children and the psychic world, girls are like this, girls are kind and boys are rowdy. And a nonconforming son, a son who likes to do things that are marked as feminine, and it is so common that making it remarkable, we shouldnt have to. If we stop having girls pens and boys bikes, and let people have access to develop into good human beings, it seems radical to people, but i actually think it is i presume agenda during of childhood, it is really quite radical in itself. It is strange. It is hard to break out of it. I dont consider myself where you are, i am part of the pink boom and i conform to it. Lets just be real, do we like pink or do we not like pink . We like pink. Pink is for everybody. One of the things that happened in the 1970s when there was a real promotion of tomboy is him and feminists were procreating and feminism percolating through the air in Popular Culture as a message to girls with those conversion charts and all that stuff was have access to boys world, inherent in that message was reject all the things that are marks of feminine, reject pink, leave all that behind, the message is all the stuff of child it is for everybody. We do not reject anything that is marked as feminine in this household, we dont reject anything because it is for girls and we dont believe anything is just for girls anyway and that includes pink and i dont love all shades of pink but i love most shades of pink and both my daughters have pink clothes. One often has pink hair, the more masculine one and it is hard to change the culture but a lot of people are working on that by trying to create clothes for boys, 2 pink tshirts with unicorns and work on lessening the engendering of toys, and what we do in our my main version involves renting, we are not going to do that. I dont want to participate in a system that has its roots in homophobia, but has its tentacles in limiting the healthy Psychological Development of children, dont want to do that host how does culture play . The audience is thinking that in terms of growing up in homes, very specific cultural norms and to navigate even our children outside of that. Their grandparents and their aunts and uncles are not feeling the same propaganda. How does race play into it. The experiences between black tomboys and how that is different from being a white tomboy. Theres a lot of lived experience about different kind of exploitation for black girls and white girls. For a lot of white girls, being tomboyish, being sassy, being kind of traditionally mexican masculine, that is cute, that is great, so empowered, and overstepping boundaries and you need to be punished or put back in your box and we see that in the statistics of how black girls are punished in school versus white girls and way more for the same behaviors, and tomboy is him, all kinds of women claimed the mantle of tomboy from all over the world in many many languages, many cultures but in america it has been it didnt even appear in the press related to black girls until the 1950s so it didnt appear in the black newspapers either so it was very much rooted in the discrepancy between what is encouraged for black girls and white girls. Its not for just children or young women, you have an entire part three, what that life is like. I see traits developing into adulthood and how these women are presented to the world what their challenges are. I think, like many people, when our kids going in the direction that surprised us, i think we were worried. I dont know that we know what we will worried about but that was the first emotion that bubbles up. If you like it come from a family of that in a lot of ways but youre looking at almost every other girl in preschool during one thing in your kid isnt. What is going on . I get letters from parents all the time saying they are not gender conforming, what should i do . After doing all this research, responding to those letters with you should congratulate yourself because childhood deformity is not a predictor of any particular outcome but the thing i kept saying over and over was a connection between tomboy and selfconfidence. There is research that came out last week that tomboys and whatever the boys are called that are rejecting gender nonconformity, i was like zero they become david bowie virginia woolf, the most creative people in the world because psychological and on any, having masculine and feminine traits, which is what we mark them as thats connected to creativity and gender norms, abiding by gender norms are connected to the things weve been talking about the culture about toxic masculinity for eating disorders for gross so gender homes tends to be bad for children and rejecting them tends to be good for your children. If your child is doing that without you pushing them too, you should be psyched. That is fantastic. Inspiring. I think the audience, everyone is smiling. [laughter] what was it like for you you had done the research, interviewed these people, was there anything youre experienced while writing the book, what was your writing experience like . I know i was super forward. [laughter] basically everyone came to me with the manuscript and there was like a 50 page [laughter] it wasnt 50 pages but thats how it felt. A dictionary she would put in the back of the book of all these terms and everything and i was like please dont do this but i think you just learn a lot and experience a lot so what was the writing process for you li like. It was so challenging and also, i did not have a lot of time to write it. Ironically, theres so much more i could have done but i wasnt on top of the material so in the beginning for months, i was just putting everything i had learned into these documents and at one time, is 95000 words, which is way beyond what the contract allowed for. I had just put everything in the end i didnt know how to get on top of it and i didnt know what i thought about it which is very unusual for me to not have a strong opinion about something even if i dont know anything about, i tend to have a strong opinion. When im writing an article, i feel there are two kinds. Come up with the opinion in the nobility or im just researching something and i find out the fox and i arranged them. This needed to be both but i hadnt processed synthesize the information and also didnt knoa neuroscientist so i had to get lots of people to help me and i got lots of pure review especially in the scientific section and the People Research i wrote about, a lot of them kindly went through and said youre not using this word correctly because i didnt have the training for some of the things i wrote about but i also knew i knew how to write. You are really good at taking criticism. [laughter] good at it . I think my husband is in the other room. I was just like oh, write the book you want. You kept telling me not to worry about the critics and i think that was a hard line to ride between not being concerned about making people vulnerable more affordable and catering to opinions or ideas i dont necessarily jive with completely but once i figured out my message, which was about embracing ambiguity, letting children explore and celebrating gender nonconformity and not freaking out, just being psyched and trying to get the rest of our culture to participate in encouraging it, it became much easier to cut out the 30,000 words i had to cut, its a painful amount to cut but it took a long time to get on top of the material enough to see what could go. I think once you understood what your message was, thats a lot of the conversations we had. What do want the reader to take out of this . You have all this information, it changed your perspective. Inform without over sharing or whatever . What is your message . I think to close the book and take away and add to my life or knowledge or experience from spending 300 pages with you . I think you really nailed it, its so inspirational to hear you talk about the book and we hope to start with you, you have a blurb on the cover, couldnt put them the book and you manage this unusual compelling deep dive into gender, i just really congratulate you on because it is complex and you have to package it in a way thats accessible and understandable but also allow us to sell about our transformations and how we think about gender. Cancel culture, i think your book allows more of this discussion and understanding we dont have everything figured out and that is how we move forward and continue to educate ourselves. Thank you. Thats what i want to happen, for sure. I wanted to open up the floor for our audience who has been giving me great energy on this so i feel really great about this, this is really fun. Im sorry to jump in but an audience member has questions, type your question into the chat. If you joined us late, this event is being recorded for partial broadcast on cspan later so if you want to be part of the recording, you need to be unneeded and ask your question yourself. You can send it to either of us and we can let you know its your turn to unmute if you want to. If you dont want to be part of the recording, you can just use chat. While waiting for audience questions, id love to jump in with one of my own. You and i think are pretty much of an age, i grew up in gender neutral feminists of the 70s and 80s world and also had children in 2006 is when my oldest was born. I was really shocked by how much had changed, especially in a time when in the culture that i was percolating in, i was becoming much more aware of people who are non binary, more fluid in gender and finding roles more qualified than what i experienced. I wonder if you have any sense of why the change happened in culture between 1980 2006. I think it is invisible to a lot of us unless some people who are our age say they go to buy a bike for their kid and say i dont remember i feel i just had a bike and there was not a pink and yellow, he just have a vague sense but you dont know what happened. It started slowly with what i talked about homophobia that led up to try to separate kids 100 years ago and then it goes into these interesting waves connected to all kinds of cultural ovens, changes in the economy and war and when men go off to war, women were into their roles and then theres a feminist sensibility and raise their daughters differently and have to be pushed back into their boxes when men come back and in the book, i lay out various ways of that happening but the big change we see is in the 80s, after this feminist 70s tomboy heyday, we go into the 80s and we have declining birth rates and we need to sell more stuff and feminists backlash which has been critical so those two things, we also have things like prenatal testing, there are small cultural shifts that come together and marketers find if they make pink and blue portions of things and if you cant possibly give a boy a pink version, and they can sell twice as many of them. It just comes down to capitalism and it proves to be so effective that as the years go on, it happens to more and more items and it leaks out into everythi everything. I talk about your book in 2012 legal friends is introduced. Theres nothing wrong with legal friends except it basically is girl legos, but they are basically dollhouses, they are not really construction noise spatial skills but they sold really well it comes down to lots of money from this but it is a very poor children. I have a question that pulls on that. When i was raising im still raising my children. My wife and i went to a toy store and we were thinking that ill unnecessary, what you see Going Forward . You see more of our changes happening what can we do as. Great question. I do things happening. As a group toys for toys, toys be toys. International toy is a having boy toy of the year award their Clothing Companies making pink shirts for boys, there changes in the marketplace you can dissipate demanding those changes do the thing where you grant your living room and just not participate in it. I think there is very little awareness of what happened so to most of us, the change is invisible so we didnt even know it was something we could or should object to but the research about gender norms and when they are reinforced in toys and personality traits and the way we impose gender onto children, it is so clear not only that it is bad for kids but showing children counter typical working really well. If you have legal friends with boys on the package, boys wont want to play with them. It is not that hard to make cultural shifts. Our discussion about the cover, this book cover is a beautiful book cover but it was much harder to get to and i thought it was going to be. I was like we have a great tit title, its going to be so easy to create with the cool cover with that on it but it was really difficult. I wrote an article for our newsletter about the cover because we had a lot to think about. What symbol we want to put on the cover to communicate this message . I dont think you really like that, you dont really fit that. Everyone loves converse. [laughter] and we had to think about the color. I think you are open to maybe a pink and blue cover, then it was a yellow cover so what are your thoughts to me, that was our experience together, even just packaging and marketing. One of the things you and i talked about was how i should just listen to you more often. I think its pretty common for authors and we had this discussion where you felt the way the book was a about nostalgia and how many grown women, up to 75 of women will say they were a tomboy when they were growing up, probably they werent that much but that was the memory so you wanted to tap into that and i was like when i talk to these people, they always talk about physical strengths and the story i heard most commonly is about the day their mom sat them down told them they had to start wearing a shirt because they were running around shirtless. This was the moment that changed everything for them, didnt have this power anymore to decide how they were perceived and a lot of them had been very physical, running through the fields and climbing trees so their memories were about strength and i think i wanted to communicate that but we also have this problem of wanting to really have something that was super inclusive racially geographically, you want something that included everybody. We were to women but it was hard because even with the only about Racial Inclusion but tomboys there are different sort of tomboys as you will see in the book, there is no one tomboy style, there are different ways to go about it, we also have to include transgender so it was hard, i can see why the marketing piece will continue to be a journey but a wonderful writer like you and your list, you can continue to make us aware as consumers they can possibly change and get better. Someone asked in the audience, do you have a favorite tomboy from history who inspired you. I wrote a lot of the fact of life, a kind of ridiculous 80s sitcom about a girl private boarding school but it was also very early attempt at diversity so there was kind of a fat girl and a black girl superrich white blonde girl who was kind of the billing and working class joe, fixed her own motorcycle and she had a cool hairstyle and a Leather Jacket and i think a lot of those in images in the 70s an early 80s of tomboy is, a lot of girls, all kinds of girls like them whether they were tomboys themselves or not. But i also, thinking back on it, the dichotomy between the heroin and the villain, the villain was the traditionally feminine, super blonde, superrich woman who was mostly horrible joe misbehaved also but they could fix the motorcycle, theres no comparison to that but it also shows how the girly girl and the tomboys were always pitted against each other in a way that was a false dichotomy. Going back to your question about women, adults today, i think we are aware you can be as feminine as you want traditionally or stereotypically feminine and be powerful and you dont have to choose a side, you dont have to sacrifice any part of yourself once you are an adult. I guess the idea is to make children out of that message, too. Somebody asked me really interesting question. How can kamala or what she represents, move the needle on the conversation about over engendering . I said this yesterday, two days ago, my stepfather wrote to me and said, how many of these vp pics were tomboys if you could write something. I looked for lots of news articles and i only found susan rice, so i didnt find any references to Kamala Harris as a tomboy but i just saw this clip going around of her at the kavanaugh confirmation hearing for the Supreme Court saying, can you think of any laws that restrict male bodies the way we have laws that restrict the freedoms of female bodies . He cant say a word. He has no answer. She has completely stumped him and is a brilliant moment, it may be have so much faith in her that she is going to be able to be great role model for kids of all genders. Yes, she is. Is there anything you want to leave us with this evening about baby something in your research or more what you hope to see in politics of all of this . I know you mentioned marketing and consumerism which are really important but is there anything you want to leave us with in terms of what you would like to see more of or even for us to incorporate in our lives . Positions to be you encourage us to take to further your message . I think my hopes and dreams for our nation probably sound kind of silly but what i would like this for all children to study philosophy and how knowledge is acquired and to understand people have different and competing Belief Systems, there is a way to acknowledge that without it being threatening stop being so focused on proving people wrong that we cant listen to and learn from them. I dont know, i am terrified of cancel culture, it has affected me and my writing but ive also been thinking sometimes having to not talk, there are many people in my life, when i talk less. Its forced me to listen to other perspectives. Partly because i am afraid of them and its important for me to understand the world from these different perspectives but it is really hard when you are being attacked. Who can take in complex information when they feel threatened . It is not a thing so thats why i wish the focus was on not on whose rights but who benefits and who gets limited in who gets liberated from competing Belief Systems and how do we make room for these different ways of being in the world . My goal was really to remind people that there are like this, they may grow up to be trans, or weirdly super conforming women, straight women. For many of them, they are still exploring and figuring it out. The more space we give them to do that, the more chance they have of figuring out their authentic identities so it is hard to create space when we are screaming at and threatening each other. That is my message. My messages make sure you get your copy of tomboy. [laughter] is brilliant and i promise you, it is a very engaging read as we have seen from reviews and other great author blurbs we have here but i really enjoyed working with you you have continued to inspire me to think differently and also to get more comfortable in speaking out on this topic in a way without being afraid ill get it wrong. I have learned a lot from the book and i do feel it is helping in terms of the conversations we have and i want to thank you for the work you have done, the courage it took for you to write the book, it has been a very exciting launch and im happy with the way we are seeing the word spread and everyone fully embrace the message, it is very exciting. Thank you so much. I really appreciate it. Thank you, both of you. This has been fascinating and wonderful. I could be here all night but i guess we cant. I know we all have places to get to. There was a question in the chat asking if youre adjusted in giving talks at the university send an email and i will forward it on to you. Email me and i will pass it on to lisa. Thank you. This was fascinating, its been a wonderful time. Thank you, everyone for being here in the audience is evening. We will be back here tomorrow night for a book on the future of america. Who knows what is . Come on back and we will see you then. Thank you, everyone for being. A look at books being published this week. Former cia director, john berlin reflects on his career. Former devil got a president ial candidate and mayor of south bend, indiana, pete buttigieg, trust in each other two. Margaret mcmillan impacts in our lives. Also being published this week, political commentator arguing attacking President Trump with the strength of angles. The Trump Presidency through 150 books, written about the president over the past four years, what were we thinking . A dual biography of abolitionist, john brown and Abraham Lincoln in the emancipator. Ten questions for a post pandemic world, cnns weighing in on how our lives change due to the pandemic. Watch for many authors in the near future on book tv on cspan2. History and biography sponsored by wells fargo michael