Our guest author this evening is lisa selin davis. She is originally from right here in fairfield new yorkand shes been a great friend for the bookstore. Really since the bookstore openseven years ago and possibly even before that with trips to manchester. She is the author of the young adult novel lost stars and is an essayist and journalist whos written for publicationsincluding the new york times, wall street journal and others and shes with us tonight to celebrate the release just yesterday of her book tom boy. Please join me in welcoming her. Thank you. Hello lisa. This is going to be a unique experience for the both of us. I have never ever interviewed my author so i am so 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 we are 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 for having me. Im so happy to be here everyone. So i wanted to start out i think maybe we should start out by saying how tomboy, this dutiful wonderful book youve written has come to be at 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 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 kid, 80s 90s child of about this word tomboy but you and i have haddifferent 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 ways we define ourselves and i appreciated that i was not the only parent that didnt have a complete handle on the gender terms now and how we could talk about gender these days or even understand it formyself. I felt very intimidated that i was always going to get something wrong in terms of the discussion these days and i wasnt familiar on how we could even embrace that with my child and 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. Its a pretty wild ride and it wasnt the most easy experience that people think of, im going to sit down and write a book. You went through a lot in processing it and developing this idea. It wasnt exactly linear either. I want to take a minute to say thank you to the folks at north shire, on hometown bookstore for having me and thank you to kershaw for buying my books and to sarah falter at the Publicity Department and adjust people are really working so hard and also to the publicist nicole zoe and betsy 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 to start with athank you. And i said in writing about this i think when my daughter wasthree or four , that was a very different time before either people were talking much about whether or not you should be writing about your children on 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 i have this kid is doing Something Different and i have all these feelings about that. That was just went out into the world. It went up on a magazine the day the website was closed and it was never edited and it can causea big stir. Years went by and my kid came home and told us that she was a tomboy. Someone had given her that term at school and she said it was someone like short hair and sports. In all the time weve been watching her kind of 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 showsi watched. And i have pictures of my friends and i who are not particularly tomboys with short hair and little sports shorts with white piping and you know, striped tshirts. All 100 percent unisex or really boys close and what happened to that when i looked around, my kid was pretty much theonly 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 but i was also like, and you ask 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 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 thatin 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 word girl means, is that a social category or a biological category and who gets to claim and so there was at first there was a big well of support and i was like this is great, lots of people youll seen by what ive written which is one of the major points of writing and there then there was a big backlash and a lot of threats and a lot of think pieces with my name in the title. I just havent experiencedit before. And i hadnt experienced this culture and kind of that public pushback. So after recovering from it and not to be able to look through it, like 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 the concept of gender and i havent considered the trans perspective so from there i tried to interview some people who had written things about what i had gotten wrong and wrote to them and said lets get together and you can tell me to my face rather than on twitter what you think i need to know. And some people really wonderful people complied and did that so it was really those two things together, those disparate experiences that i wanted to synthesize into one big complicated book. Did you know you want to write a book about it or were you initially this explorer because youwanted to understand your daughter more . I think im always 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 awhole bunch of times. I think whenever i get the 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 i can on a piece of paper and i have all these different notes and im saying this idea is great and 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 and start pulling inside jokes that we like to Start Talking about but what was it, how did you feel, what one part of our discussion was really are you the right person to write this book because of the response we got from the Lgbtq Community and once you started deciding this wouldbe a good book for me , how did you feel that you were approaching this subject as a cisgender woman with integrity and why did you feel confident that this wasa book for you to write . You and i sort of explored a lot of that and well get in deeper but initially, how did you feel confident and that you were the rightperson to write this book . Its interesting being a writer in the era of the own stories movement. Cause if i want to only write about my social category thats like atheist, jewish, left the white chick. Its just 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 relearning and being able to empathize with people 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 lots of trans people. I had 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 kids like mine and people kept saying to me its okay for you 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 kind of words ive used but its really really important i think for writers with all different kinds of privilege to be aware of ifyoure writing about a group of less power , if youre writing about a group thatyou dont automatically have their perspective , to make sure you consider that all the time in your writing. That was my goal to write something that was both critical and inclusive. Thats what i was trying to do. I guess a lot of what our discussion was is i think that 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 the transgender community. And i love the way that you are able to dive in the in terms of the research, investigative. Theres different elements of the book you pulled together because youre also on a search to understand as a woman and i think to me thats why this book is so appealing is because it appeals to parents. Its not a parenting book but it appeals to parents are trying to understand their children where they are today and their friends environment and how their thinking about life differently from a past generation but its also helping us understand ourselves and i just thought a lot of the compelling stories in the book were your own experiences really trying to help the reader see out how it had shifted in terms of you have a whole chapter onthe pink and blue divide. So we talked a little bit about that. I dont know anything else but pink. I dont know if when girls were not totally obsessed about paying and you grew up in a different time in a different situation, so do you want to talk about how the pink and blue divide developed and actually just tell ouraudience what that is . So up until about 100 years ago, kids were having what we would think of today is kind of radical genderneutral childhoods in that they were being dressed the same in what we think of as feminine clothing up until they went to school. They would all be wearing dresses and they would all have long hair and they had this kind of problem period where no one wanted to talk about their actual biological sex. And the reason was that thinking about the bodies of good kids would make people think about being 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 were engendered. 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 the first shift happened around the turn of the 20th century and that had to do with the evolving understandings of homosexuality and people starting to think its not about homosexual acts but that as a category of a person and then the idea that you were born gay, your parents could make you gay via their parenting. So the prevailing ideology of child psychologists was dress your little boys like little men so they wont be gay. And pink and blue worked a big part of that in the beginning because pink was first of all hard color to produce. Died technology had to evolve and then when there was more money in the economy and the technology evolved and they could make close and more colors and there were manufacturers instead ofs sona home, then there started to be a discussion as we started emphasizing the difference between young boys and girls of which colors are for whichgroups . Lou was associated especially light blue with the virgin mary 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 theory is maybe mainly eisenhower who was still so into pink as the first lady and there are these 1950s pink bathrooms that are like pink tiles with black trim that are called meme pink bathrooms and it just really started to be associated with women and then that became sort of part of womens identity, that pink was for girls. Thats incredible. Where does the idea of, if he was, where did the idea of the 50s start developing . Thats another chapter inthe book that you talk about. Not only did the girls have to transform the boys if they were becoming a little men, what were the boys who were not fitting into that place where little man box . 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 it came to be kind of a term of pride. There was, there were various periods rum the 19th century and then again in the 1970s where there was active encouragement to make girls into tomboys 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 have these boys to girls sizes conversion chart so that any girl could shop in the boys section. There was never a girls to boys size conversion chart. There 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, the equivalent to tomboy on the other side. Theres no nice word or a boy who likes girl stuff. In your Research Since you explore every sort of facetof this , where have you landed on tomboys . Is it biological, how much does biology play into this. What i didnt realize a long time and maybe not even until quite recently was how much debate there is over the word gender itself and what it means to different people and what its meant at different times. Though 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 imposeon 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 his biological and its 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 saw 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 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 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 rate organ that changes with experience. You have some natural tendencies that are shaped by what happens to you. Thats how you play and who 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 that its that way. Do you think that the answer is to be gender neutral . Like, are you finding that theres more power for women when we are sort of i guess nonconforming, forgive me ifi mess up the term. But how do we live, if theres a complicated system how should we be looking at it in terms of what we need to change about the way were thinking or talking to our children about gender . How do we live within this complication . Thats a good question and i keep saying that i feel like this book is less about providing answers is about helping people ask questions because theyve accepted a lot of things as facts 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 of childhood. So i think as adults, a lot of us feel liberated to express gender however we want. We can have whatever haircuts we want or wear whatever. Theres plenty of movement for adults to be free but i think without 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 that we told them that they should play with certain toys because of their sex. They should play withcertain friends, that they should have certain personality traits. Youre treating them differently and weve actually really narrowed a boy and girl talk so much that there arent that many peoplethat can fit into it. So my idea was that we should just stop engendering the material worlds ofchildren. And the psychic world. Stop saying girls are like this. Girls are kind and boys are wryly. I was in a small group yesterday on zoom talking to five people and two of them said i have a gender nonconforming son meaning i have a son who likes to do things that are marked as feminine and i was like really, thats two out of fivepeople in the other people were parents. Its so common that making it remarkable, we shouldnt have to. So if we start saying having girls bikes and girls personality traits, we can let kids have access to all that stuff and develop into good humanbeings. I think it sounds radical to people but i actually think that the hyper engendering of childhood is really quite radical in itself. 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 think or do we not like pink . Oh no, we like pink. It is for everybody. So one of the things that happened in the 1970s when there was a real promotion of tomboyism and feminist 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 have access to boys world but inherent in that message was also rejected all the things that are marked asfeminine. Reject pink, reject gurley as an insult and leave all that behind. When actually, for me the messages, all the stuff of childhoodis for everybody. So 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 that anything is just for girlsanyway. That includes pink. And i dont love all shades of pink but i love most shades of pink and both my daughters have been close and one of them often has pink hair. The more masculine ones and its really hard to change the culture but there are people working on that by trying to c