>> host: again, thank you everybody. our apologies for starting late. thank you again for tuning in this evening and a big thanks to erica and claire for being here. if you enjoyed this event you can find many more just like it on our website townhall seattle.org and we hope you'll consider making a donation to townhall as your support will allow us to continue having events like this one. if you're interested in pre-ordering a copy of erica's book which will be out july 7, you can use the link on this live stream page to focus purchase through our friends at elliott bay book company and thank you again for beinghere and we hope you have a great evening . dv continues on c-span2, television for seriousreaders . >> our guest author this evening is lisa selin davis. she's originally from right here in saratoga springs and she's been a great friend to the bookstore since our doors

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 she's 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 we're going to have. i don't 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. i'm 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 you've read has come to be and i'll 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 10-year-old boy. i didn't 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 didn't 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 wasn't 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 it's been a wild ride and it wasn't the most easy experience that people think of, all i'm going to sit down and write a book. you have been through a lot in processing it and developing this idea.

>> it wasn't 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 who've 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 who's 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 didn't 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 we've 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, strikest-shirts . 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 hadn't asked for . and i was so touched for a long time and felt like this is wonderful progress and we're 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 didn't 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 i've 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 hadn't 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. i'm not interested in blaming trans people but people are telling me i don't understand these concepts of gender and that i haven't considered the trans perspective so from there i tried to interview some people. some people who had written things about what i've 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, i've written hundreds of articles and i started a lot of nonfiction proposals that i haven't 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 i'm so psyched about it and i keep taking notes and i'm typing into my phone or anywhere, on a piece of paper and i've got all these different notes and i'm like this idea is great in our 37, i'm like i don't know. and by our 48 i'm like this

is not a book. >> you and i went through a little bit of that . and i'll explain what i mean by that later, just to start our own inside joke that we'd 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 we've 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 ? >> it's interesting being a writer in the era of the own stories movement because if i want to only write aboutmy social category , that's atheist, jewish, fuzzy white chick. it's not that interesting. that's 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 . that's what's interesting about it . and that's 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 had's sensitivity readers, i didn't 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, it's 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 it's really important i think for

writers with all different kinds of privilege to be aware of as you're writing about a group of less power, if you're writing about a group that you don't 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. that's what i was trying to do. >> a lot of our discussion was this book is not a book about transgender, it's 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, there's different elements of the book that you pull together because you're also on the search. to understand as a woman and i think to me, that's why

this book is so appealing because it appeals to parents . it's 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 didn't know anything else but pink. i don't 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 gender-neutral 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 didn't want to think, they were just kids and they were dressed according to age and their toys works gender. it wasn't 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 it's not about sexual acts but that as a category of a person and then the idea that you weren't 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 won't be gay. >> incredible. >> yeah. so that's 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 women'sidentity . pink was for girls. >> that's incredible. where does the idea of, if pink was, where did the ideas of the 50s developing, that's 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 period's 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 what's on that side and that was from the very beginning and there's 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 didn't 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 it's 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 it's all made up and it's 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 it's pretty clear , the main thing that's 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 didn't 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 what's biological and what's constructed because we raise children so differently that we don't 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 thatit's that way . >> you think the answer is to be gender-neutral? like, are you finding that there's more power or for women when we are sort of i guess we say in the book

nonconforming just to i don't mean to mess up theterm . how do we live? if it's 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 ? >> that's 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 don't liberated to express gender however we want.

we can have whateverhaircuts we want or wear whatever . there's plenty of movements for adults to be free but i think about realizing it, we've imposed this rigid pink blue divide on the kids and i'm not talking about gender identity , i'm 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 we've 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, that's two out of five people and the other people were parents. it's so common that making it remarkable, we shouldn't 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 that's a hyper engendering of childhood is really quite radical initself . >> i agree, it's strange.

it's hard to break out of it honestly because i don't consider myself where you are because i'm part of the pink boom and i conform to it. i love pink. and i mean, let's 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 don't reject anything it's for girls and we don't believe that anything is just for girls anyway. that includes pink and i don't 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 it's 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 t-shirts 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 i'm just, we're not going to do that. i just don't want to participate in system that especially that has its roots in homophobia but also has its tentacles in limiting the healthy psychological development of children. i don't want to do that tomy kids . >> i was going to ask you how does culture play into this is a lot of our audience is thinking that and growing up phones with very specific cultural more. and trying to sort of navigate even our children outside of that because their grandparents and their aunt and uncles are still feeling the same sort ofpropaganda about gender . so how does culture, how does race late into it?

i know we've discussed a lot when developing the different experiences between black, boys and how that may have different being a white tomboy. >> there's a lot of research and experience about expectations for girls and black girls. so for a lot of white girls, being a tomboy and being sassy and being out of traditionally masculine and being tough is all my gosh, that's so cute and she so empowered. and then for black girls it's your overstepping your boundaries and you need to be punished and you need to be put back in your box and we see that in the statistics about how black girls are punished in school versus white girls. and are often way more for the samebehavior .

and tomboy is some has really , all kinds of women have claimed the mantle of tomboy from all over the world. it's in many languages. many cultures. but in america, it has been very stiff to whiteness and he didn't even appear in the press related to black girls until the 1950s when ports were desegregated and it didn't appear in the black newspapers either so it was very much rooted in that discrepancy between what encouraged for black girls and white girls. just two totally separate standards of acceptability. >> my sister was a tomboy which is another reason i'm related to this. >> i remember you sayingthat . >> bill at her heart, at her core he still has the same values.

and what are the values you think that tomboy's, there's a whole section in the back of the book. this book is not again for children or just young women area you have an entire part three of the book is about adult envoys and what that life is like for them how do you cds traits developing into adulthood and how these women are presenting to the world and what their challenges are? >> that's a good question because i think like many people , i think when our kids are going in this direction that surprised us, i think we were worried and i don't know that we would know what we were worried about but i think that was the first emotion bubbled up. just, i feel like i come from a family of nonconformists in all kinds of ways but you're looking around and almost

every other girl in preschool is doing one thing and your kid isn't and you're saying what's going on? and i get letters from parents all the time saying my kid is gendernonconforming , what should i do? and after doing all this research i started responding to those letters with you should congratulate yourself. because childhood gender nonconformity is not a predictor of any particular outcome. but the thing that i kept seeing over and over and over again was a connection between tomboy-ism and self-confidence. and there's research that came out last week that tomboy and whatever we want to call the boys were rejecting gender norms also do better academically. so when i started looking into the research about what happens to them later i was like , they become david bowie. they become virginia wilkes.

they become the most created people in the world because psychological androgyny, that is having masculine and feminine traits which are remarked asmasculine and feminine, god knows why . that's really connected to creativity and gender norms, abiding by gender norms are really connected to the things we've been talking about in the culture about toxic masculinity or about eating disorders with girls. so queuing to 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 you pushing them to, you should be psyched. >> that's so inspiring lisa. i think everyone smiling. >> i turned them off, i don't know who's who.

>> what was it like for you. you had done all the research and you interviewed all these people. was there anything you experienced while you are writing thebook ? what was the writing experience like for you. i know i was super forward. amazingly everyone lisa came to me with a manuscript and there was a 50 page, it wasn't 50 pages about how it felt to me. i felt weighed down by this dictionary that she was going to put in the back of the book. of all these terms and everything and i was like these , no business but i think you learned a lot and experienced a lot so what was the writing process for you like? >> it was so challenging and also if you recall i did not

have a lot of time to writeit . ironically we ended up pulling it all these months so there's so much more i could have done but it was very rough rushed and i wasn't on top of the material so in the beginning for months and months i was just putting everything i had learned into these documents and at one point it was 95,000 words which is way beyond what the contract allowed for. and because i have just put everything in their and i didn't know how to geton top of it and i didn't know what i thought about it . which is very unusual for me to not have a very strong opinion about something even if i don't know anything about it. i tend to have a strong opinion . so when i'm writing articles, i feel like there are two kinds. i come up with the opinion first and then i fill it in or i'm just researching something and i find out the facts and i arrange them.

and this needed to be both. but i hadn't processed or synthesized the information and i also didn't know. i'm not a historian. i'mnot a neuroscientist . oh i had to get lots and lots of people to help me and i got lots of peer-reviewed especially in the scientific section and the people whose research iwrote about , a lot of them are a kindly and went through and said you're not using this word correctly because it just was, i didn't have the training for some of the things that i wrote about i also knew that i knew how to write. >> you're good at taking criticism because sometimes you would forward me their thoughts . >> good at it? i think my husband is in the other room.

>> you handled it so well at times, i was just like write the book you want, lisa. >> you kept telling me not to worry about the criticsand i didn't really , i think that was a hard line to write between trying to be concerned about not making vulnerable people more vulnerable and like, catering to opinions or ideas i don't necessarily jive with completely. but once i figured out my message which was about embracing ambiguity, about letting children explore and about celebrating gender nonconformity and not freaking out about it , just being psyched about it and trying to get the rest of our culture to participate in encouraging it, then it became much easier to cut out the 30,000 words that i ended up having to cut . which is a painful amount to cut area it took a long time

to get on top of the material enough to see what could go. >> i think once you understood what your message was, that a lot of the conversations we had. what do we want to give the reader? what do we want the reader to take out of this? you have this information and it's totally change your perspective. how can we package it to inform without over sharing in the index or whatever. and what is actually your method? i think in nonfiction most authors especially in narrative nonfiction likethis , what are the areas you want to propose the book and take away and add to my life or my knowledge or experience from any of these 300 pages. so i think you nailed that and i think it's so inspirational to hear you talk about the book and you got a start review in trance

publications. you have peggy orenstein who wrote a blurb on the cover. and you've managed to create this unusual compelling deep dive into gender that i think is, i just really congratulate you on complex like you said and you have to package it in a way that was accessible and understandable but also allowing us to celebrate our transitions and transformations and how we think about gender and not be each other up like you were saying with canceled culture. i think your book allows more of a discussion and understanding that we don't have everything figured out. and that's how we move forward, that's the best way to move forward and continue to educate ourselves . >> that's what i want to have . >> i want to open a the floor

for our audience who has really been giving me some great energy on this. so i feel really great about this, this is really fun . >> i didn't want to jump in but audience members, if you have questions you should type them into the chat. just a reminder and new information for those of us who joined us late, this is being reported on c-span so if you want to be part ofthe recording , you would need to be on muted. you can send a message to myself or to thomas who is here as well. if you don't want to be part of that recording, while were waiting for audience questions i would love to jump in with one ofmy own . you are pretty much of an age and i also grew up in that

gender-neutral phase like them and as a child of the 70s and 80s and also had children in the mid- 2006 wasn't my oldest one and it was really shocked by how much had changed. especially at a time when sort of in the culture that i was percolating in i was becoming much more aware of people are non-binary and of a much more fluid idea of gender and i'm roles for my children so much more codified than i had experience and i wondered if you had any sense of why the change happened in the culture between 1980 and 2006 . >> i think it's invisible to a lot of us. some people who are our age, they go to buy a bike for

their kid and they say i don't remember, i feel like i just had a bike and there wasn't a pink big wheel and a yellow one. and you did have this vague sense you don't know what happened. and it started very slowly with what i talked about with this homophobia that led us to try to separate kids 100 years ago. and then it goes in all these other really interesting waves that are connected to all kinds of cultural events. stages in the economy, in war and when women and men go off to war and when women stepped into their roles and kind of get a feminist sensibility and raise their daughters differently and then have to be pushed back by men when they assume their roles in the book i lay out various ways that. the big change that we see is

that in the 80s or after this kind of feminist 70s tomboy heyday, we go into the 80s and we have declining birth rates and we need to sell more stuff and we also have a feminist backlash which has been chronicled by susan from duty. so those two things and we also have things like prenatal testing. there are all of these cultural shifts that come together and marketers find that if they make egg and blue versions of things and if you can't possibly give a boy a pink version and they can sell twice as many of those things. so it 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 then it leaks out into everything until you get to,

i talk in the book about 2012 when lego friends is introduced . and there's nothing wrong with lego friends except that it's girl lycos they're basically dollhouses. they're not really construction toys develop spatial skills. but they sold really well. so it really comes down to marketers can make lots and lots of money from this . but it really is not very good for children. >> i do have a question that is on the rent when i was raising my children, my wife and i have a joke when we were in the toy store. this is the aisle unnecessarily gendered products . what kind of hope we have, what do you see going forward ? you see more of the same or what can we do as consumers?

>> that's a great question. i do see changes happening. there's a group in england called let boys the toyswhich advocate for not generating children's toys . the international point is stopped a couple of years ago having boys toy of the year and girls toy of the year awards and there are lots of clothing companies making more like pink shirts for boys. >> ..

reinforced in toys and personality traits and the way that we impose gender onto children, it's so clear not only that it is bad for kids but that showing children counter stereotypical images works rather well. psychologists have done work mo show if you have let go friends with boys on the package, boys will want to play with them. it's not that hard to make these cultural shifts. >> this brings me to our discussion about the book cover. >> oh, boy. >> this book cover is the beautiful book cover that it was really much harder to get you that i thought it was going to be. i was like we have a great title "tomboy" that would be so easy to create a physical cover but it was really difficult and i wrote an article for our newsletter for the group this

week about the cover, lisa. because we had a lot to think about. like, what symbol, what we want to put on the cover to communicate this message. i don't think you would have -- my position was everyone has converse, everyone loves converse. and then we had to think about the cover. i think you are open to maybe i think in blue cover, then we wind up with his yellow cover. what was, what are your thoughts? to me that was our experience together even packaging and marketing the message we were giving. >> yeah. one of the things you and i recently talked about was how i should just listen to you more often. i was resistant to the cover.

it's common i think for authors. we had this discussion where you felt like the way to market this book was like nostalgia and how many grown women up to 75% of women will say they were a tomboy growing up. i know probably they were not that much but that's their memory. you really would wanted to tapo that. i was like when i talk to these people, they always talk about physical strength, in the always, they talk about the story i heard most commonly was about the day these tomboys, the day their mom sat him down and told them they had to start wearing a the shirt because thy were running around shirtless. and this was the moment that changed everything for them where they didn't have this power anymore to decide how they

were perceived, and a lot of them had been very physical and running through the field and throwing balls and 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 and geographically. something that included everybody. >> it was hard for us. we explore different women and a combination of women but it was still really hard because even with natalie thinking about like racial inclusion, but tomboys, there's different sort tomboys as you will see in the book. there's no one tomboy style. there's just different ways to go about it. we have to also include transgender things.

it was like really hard to package it. i can see why the marketing piece is going to continue to be a journey, but i think as wonderful writers like you continue to make us aware as consumers, then it could possibly change and get better. someone asked in the audience, do you have a favorite tomboy from history who inspires you? >> well, i wrote a lot about joe from the facts of life, which was kind of ridiculous 80s centcom about a girl, private school, boarding school. but it is also like a very early attempt at diversity. so there was a kind of a fat girl and there was a black girl and there was a superrich white

blonde girl who was kind of the villain, then there was the working class joe who fixed her own motorcycle and she wore a leather jacket and she had a cool hairstyle. i think a lot of those images in the '70s and early '80s of tomboys, a lot of girls all kinds of girls like them, whether they were tomboys themselves or not. by also come thinking back on it, the dichotomy between the kind of heroin in the villain, but the building was the traditionally feminine super blonde superrich woman who was mostly horrible. and jo misbehaved also but she could do things like fix the motorcycle. it was no comparison to that. but i think it also shows how those tropes of the girly girl and the tomboys were always

pitted against each other and in a way this kind of false dichotomy. you can actually -- going back to question but women and liberation, adults today, i think we are aware that you can be as thin as you want traditionally or stereotypically feminine and be powerful, and you don't have to choose a side. you have to sacrifice in parts of yourself once you are an adult. i guess the idea is to make children have that message, to. >> exactly. someone asked really an interesting question. i want to know what your answers to this. alex asked how can kamala harris of what she represents move the new on the conversation about overage injuring of childhood?

what his is your response to t, lisa? >> i said this yesterday. two days ago my stepfather wrote to me and said how many of these vp picks were tomboys? that something you could write. i looked and come to lots and lots of news articles and i could only find that reference for susan rice who was super, super sporty site didn't find any references to, harris as a tomboy -- kamala harris. but but i just saw this clip gog around of her at the kavanaugh confirmation hearing for the supreme court saying can you think of any laws that restrict male bodies the way we have all these laws that restrict the freedoms of female bodies? and he is just -- he can't say a word.

he has no answer. she is completely stumped him. it's 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. >> yeah. >> of all genders. >> yeah, she is. is anything that you want to sort of leave us with this evening about maybe something that surprised you during your research and/or maybe what you hope to see come since were talking about politics, the politics of all of this? i know you mention marketing and consumerism, which are really important, but is anything you want to leave us with in terms of what you would like to see more of, or even for us to incorporate in our lives like action items we could do or

positions maybe you encourage us to take to further your message? >> i think mine hopes and dreams -- my hopes and dreams problem before a nation sound kind of silly but what i would like is for all children to study philosophy and to study how knowledge is acquired, and to understand that people have different and competing belief systems and that there's a way to acknowledge that without it being threatening, if we can stop being so focused on proving people wrong that we can't listen to and learn from them. and i don't know, you know, i'm terrified of cancel culture. it has affected me and my writing, but i've also been thinking that sometimes having

to not talk, i mean, there are many people in my life to our site when i talk less. has forced me to listen to these other perspectives. partly because i'm afraid of them, and that part is good and yet it really is important for me to try to understand the world from these different perspectives. but it's really hard to do that when you're being attacked. who can take and complex information when they feel threatened? it's not a thing. so that's why i wish the focus was on not on who is right, but who benefits and it gets a limited and who gets liberated from this competing belief systems, and how we make room for these different ways of being in the world. and my goal is really to remind people that there are kids like

this. they may come up to be -- lets that they may grow up to be transcomm then made throughout the eighth weird super conforming demonstrate women. for many of them they are still exploring and figure it out. the more space we can give them to do that, the more chance they have a figuring out the authentic identity. so it's really hard to create space when we're screaming at and threatening each other. >> my message is make sure you get your copy of "tomboy" ." it is brilliant and i promise you is a very engaging page turning read as we've seen from our reviews and from other great authors blurbs we have here. but i really enjoyed working with you on this, lisa, and your

continued to inspire me to think differently and also to try to get more comfortable in speaking out on this topic in a way without being afraid i'm going to get it wrong. i've learned a lot from the book, and i do feel that in helping my son in terms of the conversation we have about gender as a boy. i just wanted to thank you so much for all the work you've done, all the kercher took for you to write this book. it's been a very exciting launch and i'm so happy the way we have really come we're seeing the word spread and all the ways we are seeing everyone fully embraced this message. it's very exciting. >> thank you so much. i really appreciate it. >> thank you, both of you. this has been fascinating and wonderful, and i could stay all night but i guess i can't stay

here all my. i know we all have places to get to. there was question in the chat asking if you're interested in giving talks to universities about your book and i said that person should send me an email and i will forget it on to you. email me and i will pass it on to lisa. lisa, thank you so much. it's fascinating. we had a wonderful time. thank you everyone for being here in the audience this evening. we will be back here tomorrow night for a book -- by wharton professor, so please come back and we'll see you then, and thank everyone for being here. ♪ >> tv on c-span2 this labor day weekend watch top nonfiction books and authors.

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