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 into this a lot of her audience is probably thinking about in terms of growing up in homes with very specific cultural norms. Trying to sort of navigate even our children outside of that in part because their grandparents and aunts and uncles are still in the same sort of propaganda about gender. How does culture, how does raise play into it . I know theres we discussed a lot when developing this book, the difference others experience between black tabloid and how that may be different from being a white conflict. Yeah, theres a lot of research and lived experience about different sets of expectations for black girls and white girls. For a lot of white girls being tomboyish and being sassy and traditionally masculine and being tough is my gosh, she so empowered. And then for black girls its your overstepping her boundaries and you need to be punished and you need to be back in your box. The see that in the statistics about how black girls are punished in school versus white girls. Often way more for the same behavior. Tomboyism has really all kinds of women have claim the mantle of tomboy from all over the world. Its in many, many languages, many cultures. But in america it has been very stitched to whiteness and it didnt even appear in the press related to black girls until the 1950s when sports were desegregated. It did not. And black newspapers either, so it was very much rooted in that discrepancy between whats in courage for black girls and white girls, just two totally separate standards of acceptability. Sort of values you think, there is a whole section of the back of the book. Its not just for children or just young women. You have like an entire part three of the book is about adult convoys without life is like for them. I see these traits developing into adulthood. And how these women are presented to the world and what their challenges are. Sue and thats a good question for a like many people i think we are concerned going in this direction that surprised us, i think our, we were worried. I dont know that we would know what we were worried about pretty think that was a first emotion that bubbled up. I was pie like i come from a family of nonconformance in many ways. But you are looking around almost every other girl is doing one thing your kid isnt in your thinking what is going on. And i get letters from parents all the time saying my kid is not conforming, what should i d do . After doing all of this research, i started responding to those letters with, you should congratulate yourself. Because, childhood nonconformity is not a predictor of any particular outcome. But the thing i kept seeing over, and over, and over again was a connection is research that came out this week or the boy thats rejecting gender norms, to better academically . What happens to them later, b david bowie, the most creative most credit people in the world. Psychologically and with family, god is like, created to creativity abiding by gender norms are really connected to the things we have been talking about in the culture about toxic masculinity or eating disorders for girls. So gender norms tends to be bad for children. And rejecting them tends to be good for children. So if your child is doing that without them you pushing them too, you know, he should be psyched. Well thats fantastic. That is so inspiring, lisa, i turn them off. [laughter] you know, but was it like for you, you done all the research tom interviewed all of the people. Through the experience we were writing the book. What was the writing experience like for you . No i was super forward talking. [laughter] so basically everyone, lisa came to me with the manuscript. There is like a 50 page dictionary. [laughter] thats helped out to me. I felt weighed down by the dictionary shes going to put in the back of the book of all these terms and everything prayed i said please dont do this. I think you had just learned a lot. And experience a lot. So what was the writing process for you like . So challenging. If you recall i did not have a lot of time to write it. Ironically we end up holding it all these months. Theres so much more i could have done. Was very rushed. I wasnt on top of the material. For months, and months, and months, i was putting everything i learned into these documents. At one point was 95000 words. It was way beyond the contract allowed for. [laughter] we just put everything in their. I did know how to get on top of it. And i did know what i thought about it, which is very unusual for me to it not have a very strong opinion about something. Even if i dont know anything about attend have a strong opinion. So, when i am writing articles, i feel like there are two kinds. Like i come up with the opinion person i filled in part or in just researching something and i find out the facts and arrange them. This needed to be both. But i hadnt processed or synthesize the information. I also didnt know, not a historian, not a neuroscientist, so i had get lots and lots of people to help me. I got lots of peerreviewed especially in the scientific section. The people Whose Research i wrote a route very kindly went through and said you are not using this word correctly. I didnt have the training for some the things i wrote about, but he also knew i knew how to write. See when youre very good at taking criticism. Sometimes you would forward me their thoughts. Sweeter good at it . I think my husbands in the other room. Student one contents write about. Write the book you want. You kept telling me not to worry about the critics. I think that was a hard line to right between trying to be concerned about not making Vulnerable People more vulnerable. And like catering to opinions or ideas that i dont necessarily, drive with completely. Once i figured out my method which was about embracing ambiguity, about letting children explore, and about celebrating gender nonconformity and not freaking out about it. Being psyched about it and trying to the rest of our culture to participate in encouraging, then it became much easier to cut out the 30,000 words i ended up having to cut. It took a long time to get on top of the material enough to see whats ago. Host once you understood with the message was a think thats love the conversation we had. What do we want to give the reader . When you want the reader to take out of this . You have all this information. How do you package it to inform without over sharing the index or whatever. Especially a narrative and nonfiction like this. What is it you actually want me to it close the book and take away and add to my life and my knowledge or experience from and get really nailed that. I think it is so inspirational to hear you talk about the book. You gotta start reviewing trade publication. You have peggy orenstein, who wrote a blurb on the cover that she could not put down the book. You managed to create this really unusual, compelling deep dive in their, really congratulate you on. Good to package it in a way thats not accessible and understandable. Also allowing us to celebrate our transitions and transformations and how we think about gender. Not sort of beat each other up. Like dear thing with cancel culture. Your book allows more of the discussion and understanding we still have everything figured out. Thats how we move forward prayed that is the best way to move forward. I continue to educate ourselves. That is what i want to happe happen. Sue and i when open up the floor for our audience who is really given me some great energy. I feel really great about it, its really fun. Audience numbers if you have questions, you should go ahead and type them into the chat. For joining us late this is later for cspan pretty much a part of the recording, you need to be on muted and asked the question yourself. I can let you know if its your turn to and mutes. Are waiting for audience questions, if its okay, i want to jump in with one of my own. I think you and i are pretty much of an age, i also grew up in a very gender neutral the child of the 70s and 80s world and also had children in the mid, 2006 was of my oldest was born. And really shocked by how much had changed. Especially at a time when sort of in the culture i was percolating in, i was becoming much more aware, much more fluid idea to find roles for my children so much more codified than what i had experienced. What if you have any sense of why that change happened in the culture between 1,982,006 people our age go to buy a bike for the kid and say oh, i dont remember theres a bike in there wasnt a pink pig will yellow in. You just had this big you dont know what happened. Started very slowly with wide talk about the homophobia that led us to try to separate kids 100 years ago. And then it goes in all of these like really interesting ways that are connected to all kinds of cultural events. Changes in the economy, and war, when men go off to war, women stepped into their roles and become a feminist sensibility and racer daughters differently. And have to be pushed back into their boxes by men when they come back to take the roles. On the book i lay out various ways that happen. The big change that we see is that in the 80s, go into the 80s, and we have declining birth rate. I weighed to sell more stuff. Im also have a feminist backlash. Those two things, we also things like prenatal testing. This all these small cultural shifts that come together they make pink and blue versions of things if you cant possibly give the boy a pink version they can sell twice as many of those things. So basically 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 everything until, talk of the book about 2012 when lego friends is introduced. There is nothing wrong with lego friends except its basal girl legos. But there basically dollhouses. Theyre not really construction toys that develop spatial skill skills. But they sold really, really well. So it really comes down to marketers can make lots and lots of money from this. But it really isnt very good for children. Host while. Sue mcadoo have a question that follows on that. Whereas raising my children, im still raising my children. My wife and i have a joke at the toy store this is the isle of unnecessarily gendered products. What kind of hoped we have . What you see Going Forward . Do you see more of the same . Or are changes happening . Or what can we do . Guest that is a great question. I do see changes happening. There is a group in england which really advocates for not engendering childrens toys. The International Toy association stopped a couple years ago having boys toys the girls toy of the year award. There are lots of Clothing Companies that are making more like pink shirts for boys. So there are changes in the marketplace. And you can participate in demanding more from those changes. And then to the thing we ranch in your living room about just not participate in it. I think there is very little awareness of what happens. So to most of us, this change is invisible. So we did not 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 in personality traits in the way that we impose gender onto children, is so clear, not only that is bad for kids, but showing children counter stereotypical images works really well. The colleges that a lot of work to show like if you have lego friends with boys on the package, boys went to play with them. Its actually not that hard to make these cultural shifts. Cement that just brings me to it our discussion about the book cover. A boy. Host this book covers a beautiful book cover. Does really much harder to get to than i thought it was going to be. [laughter] i mean i was like we have a great title, tomboy. Thats good. Thats going to be so easy to create a cover with that pair mom in it. But it was really difficult. I wrote an article for our newsletter this week about the cover, lisa, because we had a lot to think about. Like what symbol we want to put on the cover to communicate this message . I dont think you really liked sneakers at first. You liked converse. My position was, everyone has converse. Everyone loves converse,. [laughter] and then we had to think about the color. I think you were hoping to maybe a pink and blue cover, they might end up with this yellow cover. So like what are your thoughts . That was our experience together the packaging and marketing. The message we were giving. Guest yeah. I meet one of the things you and i recently talked about was, i should just listen to you more often. [laughter] is pretty common i think for authors. We had this discussion where you felt like the weight of marketing the book was nostalgia and how many grown women come up to 75 of women would say they were tomboy growing up. I know probably werent that much but that is their memory. And so you really wanted to tap into that. And i was like oh when i talk to these people, they always talk about physical strength. And they talk about the story i heard most commonly was about the day these tomboys, the day their mom set them down and told him they had to start wearing a shirt because they were running around shirtless. And this was the moment that changed everything for them. Or they didnt have the power anymore to decide how they were perceived. And a lot of them had been very physical, running through the fields, throwing balls, climbing trees. So their memories were about strength. And i think i wanted to communicate that. But we also had this problem of wanting to really have something that was super inclusive, racially, geographically, he wanted something that included everybody. Stomach it was hard we explore different women, i was still really hard. Because even not only thinking about racial inclusion, but tomboy there different sorts of tomboys as you will see in the book. Theres no one tomboy style. Theres just different ways to go about it. We have to also includes transgender things. So it was like really hard for the package. I can see why the marketing peace is going to continue to be a journey. I think as wonderful writers like you continue to make us aware as consumers than it could possibly change and get better. Someone asked in the audience, you have a favorite tomboy from history who inspires you . Guest , well i wrote a lot about joe from the facts of lif life. Which was kind of ridiculous 80s sitcom about a girl private school, boarding school. It is also like a very early attempt at diversity. So theres kind of a fat girl, there was a black girl. There is a super rich white blond girl who was kind of the villain. Then there was the working class joe palma check to fix her own motorcycle, she wore a leather, she had a cool hairstyle. I think a lot of those images in the 70s an early 80s of tomboys, a lot of girls, all kinds of girls liked them. Whether they were tomboys themselves or not. But it also, thinking back on it, that the economy between the kind of heroin and villain, the villain was a traditionally feminine super braun, super rich woman. So its mostly horrible. And jule entrant job misbehaved also. But she could do things like fix a motorcycle is really no comparison to that. I think it also shows how those tropes of the girly girl in the tomboy were always pitted against each other. And in a way that is kind of a false dichotomy. You can actually, going back to your question about women and liberation in adults today, i think we are aware that you can be as feminine as you want traditionally or stereotypically feminine and be powerful. And that you dont have to choose a side. You dont have to sacrifice any parts of yourself. Once you are an adult. I guess the idea is to make children have that message too. Host exactly. Someone asked a really interesting question. I dont know what your answer to this. Alex asked how can come all of, and what she represents move the needle on over gender during . What is your response to that, lisa . I said this yesterday two days ago my father wrote to me and how many of these dp pics were tomboys hoped you could write something. I looked and threw lots of massive news articles but i can only find that reference for Susan Wrightson who was super super sport he. So i dont, i just saw this clip going around of her at the kavanaugh confirmation hearing saying can you think of any laws that restrict mail bodies the way we have all these laws that restrict the females of female bodies . And you cant say a word. She has completely stumped him. It is such a brilliant moment that it made me have so much faith in her. That you know she is going to be able to be a great role model for kids. Of all genders. Yes she is. Is there anything you want to sort of leave us with this evening . About something that surprised you during your research, and or what you hope to see for talking about politics of all this . I know you mention marketing and consumerism which are really important. Is it anything you would like to see more of . Or even for us to incorporate in our lives and our dues or positions you encourage us to take to further your message. I think my hopes and dreams probably sound kind of silly. What i would like is for all children to study philosophy. And to study how knowledge is acquired. And to understand Belief Systems and there was a way to acknowledge that without it being threatening if we can stop being so focused on proving people wrong that we cant listen to and learn from them. And i dont know, im terrified of cancel culture. It has affected me and my writing. But it has also had me thinking that sometimes to not task and many people my life are psyched. But i talk also has forced me to it listen to these other perspectives. Partly because i am afraid of them. In that isnt good. And yet, its important for me to it try to understand the world from these different perspectives. Its really hard to do that when youre being attacked. You can take complex information when they feel threatened. Thats why wish the focus was on, not on who is right but who benefits and who gets limited from these competing Belief Systems. And how do we make room for these different ways of being in the world . In my goal was really to remind people that there are kids like this. They may grow up to be this they may be corrupt to be trans, they may grow up to be weirdly super can forming feminine straight women. For many of them, there is still exploring and figuring it out. Any more space we can give them to do that, the more chance they have a figuring out their authentic identities. And so, it is really hard to create space when we are screaming out and threatening each other. So i think thats my message. Its the one my messages make sure you get your copy of tombo tomboy. [laughter] it is brilliant and promise you its a great read as you can see from our reviews and from other great author blurbs that we have here. I really enjoyed working with you on this lisa. You have continued to inspire me to think differently. And also to try to get more comfortable in speaking out on this topic and away that without being afraid im going to get it wrong. I have learned a lot from the book. And i do feel it is helping my son prayed to the conversations we had about gender as a boy. I just want to thank you so much for all of the work you have done paid all of the courage it took for you to write this book. It is been a very exciting launch. I am so happy the way we were really coming to see this. The word has spread. All the ways we are seeing everyone fully embrace this message is very exciting. Guest thank you so much i really appreciate it. Thank you both of you prayed this has been fascinating and wonderful. I could talk till night but i cant stay here all night. We all have places to get to. There is a question the chat asking if youre interested in giving talks at the university about your book . Ive tell that person they should send me an email and ill forward it to you. Email me there and ill pass it on. Lisa thank you so much. It is fascinating. Thank you everyone for being in the audiences evening. Well be back here tomorrow night for a book on the future of america. Who knows what it is, 2030 by professor mauro. Please come on back we will see you then. Thank everyone for being here. Welcome to another saturday Summer Nights on book tv. It is time for our binge watch series. In this evening we are taking a look at books and programs from our archives with the late author a and essayist Christopher Hitchens. He was the author of over 20 books but he wrote about the british monarchy, mother teresa, henry kissinger, and bill and Hillary Clinton among other topics. He appeared on book tv and cspan over 100 times. And over the next several hours, will show you some of those programs. We are going to begin in 2006. Esther hitchens spoke about the public good life of thomas jefferson. This is from the key school in annapolis, maryland. It is my distinct honor and pleasure to introduce Christopher Hitchens us morning he was born in portsmouth england as was i. Just now i figured out we were actually born in the same building. Educated at oxford and anointed by the british newspaper, the guardian is on the top 100 intellects, mr. Hitchens is wrote prolifically both in books and numerous magazines that by vanity fair on subjects as wideranging as mother teresa, ronald reagan, and michael