Open several years ago and i thinkpossibly even before that. She is the author of the young adult novel lost scars and is an essayist and journalist was written for major publications including the wall street journal, guardian and many others and shes with us tonight to celebrate the release just yesterday of her book tomboy. Please join me in welcoming her. 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 fun exchange that were going to have. I dont get to talk to my authors about their books in this way. Usually where hammering it out editorially through the beginning pages of the process but never in this way can we go back in and talk about it together so this is a great experience for me and thank you forhaving me. Im so happy to be here everyone. So yeah, i wanted to start out i think maybe we should start out by saying how tomboy, this beautiful wonderful book that youve read has come to be and ill just tell my side of the story. I was so in love with the proposal when you sent it and with your agent, steve was fantastic and i was excited because i am a mother of a 10yearold boy. I didnt grow up withbrothers. I did have a sister and i was very familiar as an 80s, 90s child about this word tomboy but it seems like you and i have had very different experiences with that word. I mean, we look about the same age so i was just like, i just thought it was fascinating how we see generally and relationally our position as girls and women are changing in the way that we define ourselves and i also appreciated that i was not the only parent that didnt have a complete handle on the gender terms now and how we can talk about gender these days or even understand it for myself. I felt very intimidated that i was always going to get something wrong. And i wasnt familiar on how to even embrace that with my child so when i got your 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. Because i know its been a wild ride and it wasnt the most easy experience that people think of, all im going to sit down and write a book. You have been through a lot in processing it and developing this idea. It wasnt exactly many are either but i want to say thank you to the folks at york shire for having me and Krishan Trotman for buying my book and sarah at hatchette in the publicity department. People are working so hard and also to the publicist nicole dewey and nancy and all the people whove been working really hard in this really super crazy time. To get the message out about this book. So just start with a thankyou. And i started writing about this i think when my daughter was three or four. And that was a very different time before either people were talking much about 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. So i think i was kind of nacve and i first started writing about oak, i have this kid whos different and ihave obese feelings about that. And that was just went out into the world and went up on parenting magazines the data website was posted, it was never edited and it didnt cause a bigstir. Add years went by and my kid came home and told us that she was a tomboy. Someone had given her that word at school. And she said that was someone who had short hair and liked sports area and in all the time weve been watching her veer away from more traditional patterns of gender and play and close and all that, that word had never, and it was that moment where 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 are not particularly tomboyish with short hair and little sports shorts with white piping. And you know, strikestshirts. All 100 percent unisex or really boys close. And what happens to that when i looked around, my kid was pretty much the only one like that. So the beginning was noticing that. And the next part of that experience though was people very very kindly asking does she want to change in the boys locker room. Does she want a new pronoun, just trying to accommodate her but for things she hadnt asked for. And i was so touched for a long time and felt like this is wonderful progress and were learning so much that i was also kind of like, when you asked over and over again the same people, the adults who knew her well who seem to be expressing a kind of get this is an that a girl could have short hair and play with lots of boys and girls. And still identify as a girl. So the combination of those things was also very interesting and then i wrote about that in the new york times. Once again invoking my nacvetc, because i didnt know i was stepping into a massive culture war about even what the world word girl means, is that a biological category and whogets to claimant. And so at first there was a big well support and i was like this is great, so people will 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 things pieces with my name in the title. I just and experienced it before. And i hadnt experienced back culture and that kind of public pushback so after recovering from and not to be able to look through it, all right, what is upsetting people. I am not interested in making life any harder for trans people. Im not interested in blaming trans people but people are telling me i dont understand these concepts of gender and that i havent considered the trans perspective so from there i tried to interview some people. Some people who had written things about what ive gotten wrong and i wrote to them and i said get together and you can tell me to my face rather than on twitter what you think i need to know. And some people, some really wonderfulpeople complied ended. It was really those two things together, those disparate experiences that i wanted to sink aside into one big complicated book. Did you know you wanted to write a book or were you trying to explore because you wanted to understand more . I think as a way of looking for the book idea, ive written hundreds of articles and i started a lot of nonfiction proposals that i havent finished and i did start this and stop it a whole bunch oftimes. I think whenever i get a book idea, there are about 36 hours where i think this is so brilliant and im so psyched about it and i keep taking notes and im typing into my phone or anywhere, on a piece of paper and ive got all these different notes and im like this idea is great in our 37, im like i dont know. And by our 48 im like this is not a book. You and i went through a little bit of that. And ill explain what i mean by that later, just to start our own inside joke that wed like to talk about but what was it, how did you feel, one part of our discussion was are you the right person to write this book because of the response weve gotten from the lgbt qcommunity. Once you started talking to people, you decided this would be a good book for me, how did you feel that you were approaching this subject as a says gender woman with integrity and why did you feel confident that this was 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 in that you were the rightperson to write this book . Its interesting being a writer in the era of the own Stories Movement because if i want to only write aboutmy social category , thats atheist, jewish, fuzzy white chick. Its 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 thats like, the privilege of being a writer is to be constantly learning and just being able to empathize people who are different. So what i really tried to do was marry the own voices movement with my own exploration in that i interviewed lots and lotsof trans people. I hads sensitivity readers, i didnt always do everything they said but i kept their remarks in my mind all the time to be sensitive, to be careful. But to be still true to myself and my vision and my point which i think is to create more understanding about the natural myth of gender diversity and kind of make room for his lifetime. And people kept thanking me, its okay foryou to write this because of your kid. That was kind of my card that i could hold up but i would prefer to use my writer card. We still need journalism and we still need these kinds of birds eye views but its really important i think for writers with all different kinds of privilege to be aware of as youre writing about a group of less power, if youre 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 our discussion was this book is not a book about transgender, its a book about all the ways we can find ourselves as women including and inclusive of trans tender community. And i love the way that you are able to, you diving deep in terms of the research and investigate it, theres different elements of the book that you pull together because youre also on the search. To understand as a woman and i think to me, thats why this book is so appealing because it appeals to parents. Its not a parenting book but it appeals to parents trying to understand their children where they are today and their friends and environment and how their thinking about life differently from a past generation. But helping us understand ourselves, a lot of the compelling stories or your own experiences, really trying to help the reader see it has shifted in terms of you have a whole chapter on the pink and bluedivide. So we talk about that. I didnt know anything else but pink. I dont know what time when girls are not telling us about pink and you grew up in a different time and a different situation. You want to talk about how the pink and blue divide developed and just tell our audience whatthat is . Up until 100 years ago, kids were having what we would think of today as kind of radical genderneutral childhood and that they were being dressed the same in what we think of as eminent clothing. Up until they went to school and would all be wearing dresses and they would all have long hair and they had this kind of bubble period where no one wanted to talk about their actual biological sex. And the reason was that thinking about the bodies of the kids would make people think about being like adult sexual beings so that was discouraged. You just didnt want to think, they were just kids and they were dressed according to age and their toys works gender. It wasnt important to know the sex of the kid or to emphasize it. And it was very surprising to me when i learned why that first shifted around the turn of the 20th century and that has to do with evolving understandings of homosexuality and the people starting to think its not about sexual acts but that as a category of a person and then the idea that you werent born gay, your parents could make you gay via their parenting. So the prevailing ideology of child psychologists was dressed your little boys like little men so they wont be gay. Incredible. Yeah. So thats where this tradition come from and pink and blue worked a big part of that in the beginning because pink was first of all hard color to produce so die technology had to evolve and then when there was more money in the economy and the Technology Evolve and they could make close and more colors and they were manufactured instead of sewn at home, then there started to be a discussion as we started emphasizing the difference between young boys and girls of which colors are for which groups and blue was often associated, especially light blue the virgin mary so that was thought of as a girls color sometime and pink was a version of red which was masculine so that was thought of as a voice color and that was debated for really a couple ofdecades. Until one theory is that me many eisenhower who was so into pink as the first lady and there are these 1950 pink bathrooms, pink tiles with the black trim that are called maney pink bathrooms so it started to be associated with women and then that became sort of part of womensidentity. Pink was for girls. Thats incredible. Where does the idea of, if pink was, where did the ideas of the 50s developing, thats a whole other chapter you talk about. Not only did the girls have to transform the boys as they were becoming alittle men. What were the boys who were not fitting into that clear little man box. In the beginning, when, boy 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 it came to be kind of a termof pride. And there were various periods from the 19th century and then again in the 1970s where there was active encouragement to make girls into tom boys and to make sure they knew that they could have access to boys world and a great example of that is in some of the 1970s sears catalogues. They had these boys to girls sizes conversion chart so that any girl could shop in the boys section. But there was never a girlsto boys size conversion chart. It was never any message in the culture of and also, boys you can have access to whats on that side and that was from the very beginning and theres never been a term of pride equivalent to tomboy on theother side. There is no nice word for a boy who likes girls stuff. Joan, in your research and to explore every facet of this. Psychology, biology, where have you landed on tom boys as it affects psychological things, how much does biology playinto this . What i didnt realize for a long time and maybe not until quite recently was how much debate there is over the world gender itself and what it means and what it means to different people and what its meant atdifferent times. So there are some people who lots of people who say gender is a construct meaning gender is stereotypes and societal norms and its all made up and its something we impose on the people to oppress them. And then we have people who feel that the word gender is really about gender identity and how masculine or feminine you are is biological and is not a construct and some of this misunderstanding about the word gender is what is fueling certain culture wars. And i think its pretty clear , the main thing thats clear is that nothing is clear. I thought Scientific Research , the same research interpreted in completely different ways by people who had different definitions of the word gender and i saw people making certain arguments and compiling all the evidence to further their argument 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 this is. Look 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. And what we, i think we know enough that biology is influenced by your social experience. The brain is a plastic organ that changes experience. That you have some natural tendencies that are shaped by what happens to you. That how you play and you play with and its biology and culture interacting over the course of a lifetime and a body, in a culture, in a family and i really want it to be complicated and ambiguous and okay thatits that way. You think the answer is to be genderneutral . Like, are you finding that theres more power or for women when we are sort of i guess we say in the book nonconforming just to i dont mean to mess up theterm. How do we live . If its a complicated system how should we be looking at it in terms of what we need to change about the way where thinking or talking to our children about gender. Like, how do we live within thiscomplication . Thats a good question and you know i keep saying that i feel like this book is less about providing answers that it is about hoping people ask questions as they accepted a lot of things as fact that we should be questioning. And we can decide how much we want to participate in this system in this gender system and in the gender and childhood. So i think as adults, a lot of us dont liberated to express gender however we want. We can have whateverhaircuts we want or wear whatever. Theres plenty of movements for adults to be free but i think about realizing it, weve imposed this rigid pink blue divide on the kids and im not talking about gender identity , im talking about gender in the other sense of the word and that we fold them they should play with certain toys of their sex. They should play with certain friends, that they should have certain personality traits. We are treating them differently and weve actually really narrowed the boy and girl talk so much that there are that many peoplewho can fit into it. So my idea was that we should just stop engendering the material worlds of children. And the psychic worlds. Stop saying girls are like this. Girls are kind and boys are rowdy. I mean, i was in a small group yesterday on assume talking to five people and two of them and i have a gender nonconforming son which means i have a son who likes to do things that are marked as feminine. I was like really, thats two out of five people and the other people were parents. Its so common that making it remarkable, we shouldnt have to. So if we stop saying, having girls pens and boys fights and girls personality traits, then we can just let kids have access to all that stuff and develop into good human beings. I think it sounds radical to people but i actually think thats a hyper engendering of childhood is really quite radical initself. I agree, its strange. Its hard to break out of it honestly because i dont consider myself where you are because im part of the pink boom and i conform to it. I love pink. And i mean, 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 promotion of tomboy is in. And feminists were appropriating and there was feminism percolating through the air and popular culture, the message to girls with those conversion charts and all that stuff was half access to boys world but inherent in that message was also rejected all the things that are marked as feminine. Reject pink. Use girly as an insult and leave all that behind. When actually, for me the message is all the stuff of childhood isfor everybody. So we do not reject anything that is marked as feminine in this household. We dont reject anything its for girls and we dont believe that anything is just for girls anyway. That includes pink and i dont love all shades of pink but i love most shades of pink and my daughter have been close and one of them often has pink hair, the more masculine one. And its really hard to change the culture but there are lots of people working on that by trying to create close for boys that are like pink tshirts with unicorns and work on lessening the engendering of toys so that kids can develop the skill set associated with thosetoys. And what we do in our house, my main version of parenting involves renting so im just, were not going to do that. I just dont want to participate in system that especially that has its roots i