Shes also of the young adults novel lost stars anthony essays introduces written for major publication tooting that new york times, wall street journal and the garden and many others. Shes with us tonight to celebrate the release of her book yesterday tomboy. Please join me in welcoming her. Thank you. Hello, lisa. This is going to be a very unique experience for the both of us. I have never ever interviewed my author so i am so psyched and excited about this on exchange were going to have. I dont really get to talk to my authors about their books in this way. Usually we are pounding it out editorialist is the beginning stages of the process but never in this way, go back in a talk about it together, so this about a great experience for me and thank you for having me. Im so happy to be here, everyone. I wanted to start out i think maybe we should start out by saying how tomboy come this beautiful one of a book that written has come to be and i will just my side of the story i was so in love with the proposal when you sent it and with your agent, steve, who is fantastic. I was excited because i am a mother of a tenyearold boy. I didnt come up with brothers. I did have a sister and those very familiar as an 80s kid, \80{l1}s{l0}\80{l1}s{l0}, \90{l1}s{l0}\90{l1}s{l0} style about this word tomboy that it seemed like you and ipad very different experiences with that word. We look about the same age so i was just like not. It was fascinating how we see generationally how our position as girls and women are changing and the way that we define ourselves. I did not have complete handle on this gender term now and how we should talk about gender these days or even understand for myself. I felt very intimidated that is always going to get something wrong. I wasnt familiar how to even embrace that with my child. When i catch a proposal i was super excited and i thought we would just start out by going back to how you actually came up with the concept of tomboy. Okay. It was a pretty wild ride. It was at the most easy experience that people think up, i think i write a book. A lot of processing and developing this idea. And it wasnt exactly linear either. I just want to take a minute to say and you very much to the folks at north shire, hometown bookstore, for having me and take you to krishan for buying my book and to sarah at Hachette Books in the Publicity Department people are really working so hard and also to the publicist nicole dewey and betsy and all the people been working really hard initially super crazy time to get the message out about this book. So just want to start with the thank you. I started writing about this i think when my daughter was three or four. And that was a very different time he before either people were talking much of whether or not you should be writing about your children on the internet, and also trans kids were not at all a subject in the media. I think i was kind of naive when i first tried writing about i have this kid whos is doing sg different and all these feelings about that. And that was just went out into the world, went up on parenting magazine the day the website was close. It was never edited and it just didnt come it didnt cause a big stir. Years went by and my kid came home and told us that she was a tomboy. Someone had given her that word at school year and she said that was someone who like shorthair and sports. And all the time we had been watching her kind of beer away from more traditional patterns of gender and play and close and all that, that word had never come up. It was that moment i was like oh, yeah. We use that word all the time when i was little. Those kids were the stars of all the tv shows i watched and i have pictures of my friends and i who were not particularly tomboyish with shorthair and little sports shorts with white typing, and striped tshirts, all 100 unisex really boys close. Close to what happened to that when a look around my kid was pretty much the only one like that. The beginning was noticing that, and the next part of that experience though was people very, very kindly asking that she mind changing in the boys locker room . Does she want a protest . Just tried to accommodate her but for things she hadnt asked for. I was so touched for a long time. I select this is wonderful progress and we are learning so much but i was kind of like when you asked over and over and over again, the same people, the adults who knew her well who seem to be expressing a kind of skepticism that a girl could have shorthair and play with lots of boys and girls, and still identify as a girl. So the combination of those things is also very interesting and then i wrote about that in the new york times. Once again, invoking my naivete, because i didnt know i was stepping into a massive culture war about even what the word girl means, is that a social category or a biological category . Who gets to claim it . So there was at first there was a big well of support and i was like this is great, lots of people feel seen by what ive written, which is one of the major points of writing. And then there was a big backlash and a lot of threats and a lot of fake pieces with my name in the title. I just have not experienced that before. I had not experienced cancel culture or that kind of public pushback. After recovering from it enough to be able to look through it, like what is upsetting people, i am not interested in making life in the harder for trans people. Im not interested in playing trans people the people are telling me i dont understand these basic concepts of gender and that i havent considered the true perspective. So from there i tried to interview some people come people at written things about what ive gotten wrong and will him and said lets get together and you can tell me to my face better than on twitter what you think i need to know. Some people, some really wonderful people complied and did that. Those two things together the disparate experiences i wanted to synthesize into one big complicated book. Did you know you wanted to write a book about it or were you initially just explore because you want to understand your daughter more . I think im always looking for the book idea. Always wanted to write. Ive written hundreds and hundreds of articles and i started a lot of nonfiction proposals that i havent finished. I did start this and stop at whole bunch of times. Whenever i get a book idea there are about 36 hours where i think this is so brilliant and im so psyched about and they keep taking notes and a typing in a phone or anywhere i can come on a piece of paper and have all of these different notes. This idea is great. Then our 37 i am like i dont know. And by number 40 this is not a book. You and i went through a little bit of that, right . Ill explain what it mean by that later, thats our quote inside joke that we want to keep talking about. But what was it how do you feel one part of our discussion was really are you the right person to write this book because of the response you got from the lgbtq community. Once you started talking people anything people and decide hey, is a bit good book for me, how did you feel that you are approaching this subject as a cisgender woman with integrity and why did you feel confident that this is a book for you to write . You and i sort of explored a lot of that and we will get in deeper but initially how did you feel confident that you with the right person to write this book . Its interesting being a writer in the air of the movement because if i want to on write about my social category thats like atheist, jewish, lefty white chicks. Something not that interesting. Thats how i was kind of raised so as an essayist, as a journalist, as a fiction writer i want to explore other worlds and points of view. Thats whats interesting about it, and that like the privilege of being a writer is to be constantly learning and just being able to empathize with people who are different. What i really tried to do was mary v own voices move it with my own exploration in that i i interviewed lots and lots of trans people. I didnt always do everything they said but i kept the remarks in my mind all the time to be sensitive, to be careful but to be still true to myself and my vision. And mike point which i think is to create more understanding about the naturalness of gender diversity and kind of make room for kids like mine. People kept saying its 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 in that we still need journalism and we still need these kinds of birds eye views but its really, really important for writers with all different kinds of privilege to be aware of if youre writing about a group of mass power is writing about a group that you dont automatically have their perspective to make sure you consider that all the time as your writing. That was my goal to write something that was both critical and inclusive. Thats what i was trying to do. A lot of what our discussion was i think that this book is not a book about transgender. Its a book about all the ways we could find yourselves as women including an inclusive of transgender, the transgender community. I love the way that you are able to do diving deep in terms of the research, investigate it. Theres different elements of the vote to pull together because youre also on a search to understand as a woman. To me thats why this book is so appealing because it appeals to parents. Its not a parenting book i did it appeals to parents who are trying to understand their children where they are today and their friends, environment and how they are thinking about life differently from a past generation but its also helping us really understand. A lot of the compelling stories and about four your own experiences about your own experiences trying to help the reader how it is shifted in terms of you have a whole chapter on the pink and blue divide. We talked about that. I did know anything else but pink. I dont know a time when girls were not like wholly obsessed with pink. You grew up in a different time and in a different situation. You want to talk about how that pink and blue divide the battle and can, just tell the audience what that is . Yeah. Up until about 100 years ago kids were having what we would think of today as kind of radical genderneutral childhoods in that they were being addressed the same what we think of as feminine clothing. Up until the way to school it would all be wearing dresses and it would all have long hair and they had this kind of 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 like adult sexual being. That was discouraged so you just didnt, they were cute and addressed according to age and their toys were not gendered. It wasnt important to know the sex of the cute or to emphasize it. It was very surprising to me when i learned was that first shift around the turn of 20th century that had to do with evolving, understanding of homosexuality and people started to think its not about like homosexual acts but that as a category of the person and in the idea that you were not born gay. Your parents could make you gay via their parenting. The prevailing ideology of a child psychologist was dress your little boy like the lament so they will not be gay. Wow. Incredible. So thats with that tradition comes from. Pink and blue were not a big part of that in the beginning because pink was first of all it was a hard color to produce so technology had to evolve. When wendy was more money and ty could gig economy and they could make clothes more colors and they were manufactured instead of solid at home, in the started to be a discussion as we started emphasizing the difference between young boys and girls of which colors are for which group. It was often associated, light blue with the virgin marry so that was thought of as a girls color and pink was a version of red which is masculine so that was thought of as a boys color and that was debated for really a couple of decades until one there is that many eisenhower who was like so into pink may be eisenhower as the first laid and donkeys 1950 pink bathrooms, pink tiles with the black trim that are called mainly pink bathroom so just try to be associated with women and then that became sort of part of womens identity that pink was for girls. Wow, thats incredible. Where does the idea of, if pink was where did the idea of the cc start to develop . Thats another chapter you talk about, you know, not only did the girls have to transfer the boys if they really, the little men, what were the boys who were not fitting into that square little man box . Yeah, so in the beginning when tomboy was first applied to girls it was an insult because it meant a girl who was acting like a boy in a bad way and eventually they came to be kind of a term of pride. There were various periods from the 19th century and then again in the 1970s where there was pretty active encouragement to make girls into tomboys and to make sure the new they couldnt access to the boys world. A great example is in some of the 1970s sears catalogs. They had these boys to girls sizes conversion chart so any girl could shop in the boys section but there was never a girls to boys size conversion chart. There was never a message in the culture of, and also boys, you can have access to whats on that side and that was from the very beginning. Theres never been a term of pride equivalent to tomboy on the other side. There is no nice word for a boy who likes girls stuff. Wow. So in your research did you explore every sort of facet of the psychology, biology. Where have you landed on tomboys as, is it like a psychological thing, how much did biology play into this . You know, what i didnt realize for a long time and maybe not even intel quite recently was how much debate there is over the word gender itself and what it means and what it means to different people and what it is meant at different times. There are some people who come lots of people who say ginger is a construct meaning ginger is stereotypes and societal norms and its all made up and its something we impose on people to impress them. Then we are people who feel that the word gender is really about gender identity and a masculine or feminine you are is biological and its not a construct. Some of this misunderstanding about the word gender is what is fueling certain culture wars. Its pretty clear, the main thing that is clear is that nothing is clear. I saw scientific research, the same research interpreted in completely different ways by people who are different definitions of the word gender. I saw people making arguments and compiling evidence to further their arguments and ignoring anything that interrupted it. I didnt want to do that. I wanted to mix it all together and say look at how messy this is. Look at how hard it is to determine whats biological and whats constructed. Because we raise children so differently that we dont have really a way to know what is just from biology. We know enough that biology is influenced by your social experience. The brain is a plastic oregon that changes specific experience, that you get some natural tendencies that are shaped by what happens to you, that how you play into you play with, and its biology and culture interacting over the course of a lifetime in a body in a culture and a family. I really want, i really want it to be complicated and ambiguous and okay that it is that way. Yeah. Do you think the answer is to be genderneutral, like are you finding that there is more power for women when we are sort of i guess we say in the book nonconforming forgiving if i messed up a term, but like how do we if its a complicated system, how should we be looking at in terms of what we need to change about the way we are thinking or talking to our children about gender . Like, how do we live within thas complication . Thats a good question. I keep saying that if you liked this book is less about providing answers and it is about helping people ask questions because theyve accepted things as fact that we should be questioning. We can decide how much we want to participate in the system, in this gender system and then the gender in 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 where what ever. Theres plenty of movement for adults to be free. I think without realizing with imposed is rigid pink blue light onto kids. Im not talking about gender identity. Im talking about gender in other terms of the word in that weve told them that they should play with certain toys because of their sex, that they should play with certain friends, that they should of certain personality traits. We are treating them differently and weve actually really narrowed the boy and girl box so much that there are not that many people who can fit into it. My idea was we should just stop gender ring the Material World of children. And the psychic world felt , lip saying girls are like this. Girls are kind and boys are rowdy. I mean, i was in a small group yesterday on zoom talking to fight people, and two of them said i have gender nonconforming son, meaning i have a son who likes to do things that are marked as feminine. I was like really . Thats two out of five . Its so common that, like making it remarkable, we shouldnt have to. If we stop saying, having girls hands and voice bikes and girls personality traits, then we can just let kids have access to all the stuff and develop into good human beings. I think it sounds radical to people but i think thats a hyper gendering of a child and its really quite radical in itself. Yeah, i agree. Its strange. Its hard to break out of it honestly because i dont consider myself where you are because i part of the pink boom and and i conform to it. I love pink and i mean, lets just the real. I mean, do we like pink or do we not like pink, you know . Oh, no, we like pink. Pink is for everybody. One of the things that happened in the 1970s when it was a real promotion of tomboy is him and feminists were procreating and feminism percolating to the air in popular culture, a message to girls with this conversion charts and all that stuff was how that gets to boys were very inherent in the message was also reject all the things that are marked feminine, reject pink, reject, use girly as an insult and leave all that behind. When actually for me the message is all the stuff of childhood is for everybody. We do not reject anything that is marked as feminine in this household. We dont reject anything because its for girls and we dont believe anything is just for girls anyway. That includes pink. I dont love all shades of pink but i love most shades of pink. Both my daughters have pink clothes and one of them often has pink here, the more masculine one, and its really hard to change the culture but there are a lot of people working on that i trying to create clothes for boys that are like pink tshirts with unicorns and work on lessening the gendering of toys for kids can develop the skills that is associated with those toys. What we do in our house, my main version of parenting involves ranting so im just like we are not going to do that. I i just dont want to participe in a system, especially the facets roots in homophobia but also has its tentacles eliminating the healthy Psychological Development of children. I just dont want to do that to my kids. How does culture put