 So, you can see over there, there's a National Geographic gender revolution, I totally agree, we are in the midst of a gender revolution, and the children are leading it. And it's a wonderful thing to see, and it's also humbling to know they know more than we do about this topic of being gender expansive. But I just want to say something. This is not the original gender revolution in the last century. So I am a child of the 60s, and we were the flower children, and we were accused of smoking dope and not taking baths. We did smoke dope, but we did take baths. But one of the things we also did was challenge gender stereotypes. So we had men with long hair, men who wore jewelry, women who stopped shaving their legs, and an insistence that William could have a doll. So there is a history, I think it goes back to the civil rights movement, then into the feminist movement, then into the gay and lesbian movement, and now to the issue of transgender rights and the transgender and gender expansive movement, and definitely beyond the binary. And what we have, therefore, as we sit here today, is we've got the earth moving under our feet. So we used to think, a lot of people still do, the gender is bedrock. That's why you say, when somebody's going to have a baby, boy or girl. And we situate a child before they're even born in their gender, which we need to be humble enough to say we don't know yet, but we still do it. Now we've got gender is moving boulders, and it makes a lot of people nervous. And that's why you were seeing a lot of pushback, like no transgender people in the military for no good reason, because these moving boulders create a lot of anxiety. But they're here, and we should celebrate them. But we've always had gender as fluid. I wanted to show you this picture. That is a 17th century Flemish painting, little boy with goat, okay? So this is a little boy in the 17th century. But fast forward, go to the earliest 20th century, find a picture of Franklin Delano Roosevelt in a white dress. Because in European culture, which traveled over to the United States, all children dressed the same till age seven, and they dressed like this. And then there was a sudden differentiation between male and female. So the girls kept dressing like that, no more for the boys. But we still have gender fluidity in terms of expression, different than we have now in the 17th century. Now let's fast forward. Okay, this is my local pharmacy in Rockridge, Oakland, Pharmaca. And I was walking in, and I saw this child, who was referred to as a boy by his mother, wearing by the candy, this is a candy counter, wearing work boots, little painter pants, an REI ski jacket, and a pink tutu. The amazing thing is nobody looked twice, because it was Oakland, California. What they also didn't notice, which I did, is he was also stealing candy. This is the child of a colleague of mine, in his full gender expansive self, with his wings, his wand, and at Toys R Us, which, you know, gluttony for punishment going to Toys R Us, but asking for his toy Tonka truck. Now we remember 1972, William's doll, that was a big deal. We feminists in that era, were going around to schools talking about boys can play with dolls. The book comes out, William can have a doll. And that was wonderful. And it was really a sea change in children's books. And now, let's come to 2018. You see all of these books here, and I want to alert you to another one that I don't think I see here, by Colt Keohmeier, called Stacey's Not a Girl. And I would definitely recommend that you all have this in your libraries, because it really deals with a child who doesn't know yet, and is exploring. And it's just a wonderful book in that regard. Now I want to go back to the 1940s, because we went back to 1940s, to the turn of the 20th century. I'm coming back to the 40s. You're wondering why I have Stuart Little up here. E.B. White, without knowing it, wrote really the parable of the parents with a gender expansive child. Okay. Review. I'm sure you all know this story, but I'm still... Mr. and Mrs. White. I'm sorry. Mr. and Mrs. Little have a baby, out comes a mouse. They're shocked. The pediatrician says, this is wonderful. You have a little mouse. They're not so sure. But they rise to the occasion, and they learn how to raise their mouse so that their mouse can be safe and filled with pride. But they also protect their mouse. So when there's a nursery rhyme about the three blind mice, Mr. Little says, we tear that page out. We do not want our child to be worried that they're going to be going around the house with a farmer's wife trying to cut off their tail. So out goes that one. I reread the story, and I thought, this is what it's like for a family with a gender expansive child. They often have a child they did not expect. They don't know what to do for their child, which direction to go in to make sure their child is safe and happy. And they also know they need to protect their child. The only difference between Mr. and Mrs. Little is they're not going to know the day their child was born. They may know by the end of the first year if they pay attention. They may not know till their child is 10, 20, 40, 50, but somewhere along the line, they're going to have the child they didn't expect. And that's changing now as people are doing gender neutral names saying let's be open to expecting anything, but in general, for most parents, in this moment of history, it's a surprise. So now the kids I want us to think about today are the ones that often get forgotten, and these are the gender expansive children. And these are what I call the small T in LGBT. So we know about LGBT, but little T's are very different than big T's. And we really need to bring it down to childhood. So what do we have here? We have a child who's expansive either in gender identity or gender expressions. We have a child who does not accept the gender that matches the sex designated to them at birth or the social expectations for the roles and behaviors for that gender or both. Now, Eric already ran through these. I'm just going to repeat. I hope you don't mind. Basic concepts. Gender identity, who I know myself to be at my core, male, female, or other. And that's the being of gender. Then we have gender expressions, how I put my gender presentation together. Things I like to do, clothes I like to wear, where I move, and so forth. That's the doing of gender. Underline the next one. Neither A or B equals sexual identity. They are separate. They can cross lines with it. But often when you may have this at your library, a parent will come in with a three-year-old little boy and say, I think my child is gay. Do you have any books about boys and dresses? They couldn't know yet if their child is gay. What they can know is their child-like stresses or wants to learn about kids with dresses. So we just always have to make sure we don't collapse them all into the same category. Now, here's a cheat sheet for gender expressions. How to tell if a toy is for boys or girls. Do you operate the toy with your genitalia? Yes, it is not for children. No, it's for either boys or girls or children of any gender. I didn't do the slide, so I have to just add that. Now, let's just do, I want to just a photo album of some small t's just so we can get a visual. These are all children here who are transgender. These are children who change from one gender to another at different ages. The child in the tutu is from the Netherlands. I think you might recognize jazz in the corner. And the child in the top is a local child from the Bay Area. Here's some more children. All of these are either gender-expansive or transgender kids. And the one, I think, that is most compelling are the two in the corner, because those are identical twins. One of them has had treatment, puberty blockers, and hormones. And you can now guess which one is the one who is transgender and which one is the one who is cisgender. That is stayed with the gender that matched the designated sex of birth. So one of them is transgender, the other is not. Now, we're going to talk about making sure that children's reading is gender-inclusive. First thing is we've got to toss out everything we learned in school about gender to do that. Just to review, I don't know about you, but what I learned in school or just at home was gender comes in two boxes. One for boys, one for girls, one for men, one for women. Figure out which one you belong to based on what's on your birth certificate and act accordingly. That's the gender binary right there. Then about the turn into the 21st century, people came up with the notion of a gender spectrum. I'm on the board of an organization called Gender Spectrum. And it was a great new concept that instead of having one box here, one box there, how about an infinite variety of colors and hues that gender goes along? I think that's a great idea. One problem with that. It still has two poles. Feminine over here, masculine over there, or you can switch them either way. But it still runs along the spectrum of the binary. So that troubled me. So I made up something else. And I came up with a new picture called the Gender Web. And I thought, huh, this could work. So imagine a spider web in a tree, three-dimensional, pulling in three directions, and some spider spun it. And it's going to be different than the next one. So I made this up that we have a gender web. Imagine that web. And we have every person has their own gender web. And they weave together or spin together nature, nurture, and culture to make the gender that is them that will be unique. So let's go break it down. Threads in the gender web. We've got nature, nurture, and culture as the umbrella. Now let's break it down. We have your chromosomes, XX, XY, or something else. We have the hormones. What kind of hormones do you have flowing through your body? It starts in utero. We have your hormone receptors. How are they taken in in your body? We have your gonads, your primary sex characteristics. What's between your legs? We have secondary sex characteristics, such as beards, breasts. We have your brain. We have your mind. We have your socialization, your family, your school, your community, and community in the largest arch, including spiritual organizations, educational organizations, et cetera. We have the culture. The culture you live in, which may not be singular, the values, the ethics, the laws, the theories, and the practices. All of that goes into one child's gender web, and one adult's gender web. But now we're going into the Twilight Zone. Fourth dimension. It's not just three dimension. I went, oh, there's a fourth dimension. That's time. And time is critical here, because every child alters their gender web. As they weave together nature, nurture, and culture over time, it's not necessarily static. It may be stable for many people, but for other people, it may ebb and flow, either their identity or their expressions or both. So for example, we just heard at our clinic about a 92-year-old person who just announced that they're transgender and is transitioning after 92 years. So that doesn't mean they just discovered it. But in terms of the flow of gender throughout a lifetime, things go a long way up. Now, gender web is kind of like fingerprints in the following way. No two children's gender webs are going to be exactly the same. We could say snowflakes, too. But let's use fingerprints. That's how they're the same. But here's how they're different. You're going to die with the same fingerprints you were born with. They're immutable. That's how we identify people is by their fingerprints. Any of you who has to do that for the state of California, like I do as a psychologist, they want your fingerprints. They will be stable. But your gender web isn't. It's not fixed at birth. And it can change over the course of your life and certainly over the course of a child's childhood. Now, I want to just quickly run through a laundry list. Because this is the, and a lot of these terms are made by the kids themselves. And this is not to put kids in boxes. But as you know, kids love categories. They love categories. I like to put things in categories. So these are the categories that actually, mostly, I got from the kids, of the different ways the gender web can show up. So we've got living outside boxes, 21st century gender creative children. We have transgender children. We have gender expansive children. Now, as you said, gender expansive can cover everybody. But I'm just using them differently so you'll know the different terms here. Gender fluid children, that could be one of two things. I flow over time, or I flow within myself right now. So it covers both. We have gender non-binary children. You've also heard gender diverse, gender non-conforming, and gender variant, which was the original term. And as you know, language is political. So what's good today will be politically incorrect tomorrow. So we'll just keep changing as we go. This is a whole group of kids you all should know about. And these are the gender hybrids. And this was taught to me by a seven-year-old who parents ask, could I meet this child? Because they couldn't figure out what this child's gender was. So I went to the waiting room in my office, my private office. And there was a child sitting there wearing essentially basketball uniform head to toe. Not a warrior's, but a basketball uniform. Came into my office, migrated them. Then they twirled around and had a long blonde braid with a pink bow at the bottom. And then twirled around again and said to me, you see, I'm a Prius. I said, uh-huh. And they said, yes, yes. I'm a boy in the front, and I'm a girl in the back. So I'm a hybrid. So I went, OK, we got gender hybrids. Then I started meeting a whole bunch of other gender hybrids. And so we have the gender Prius. We have the gender minotaur. Now, I use that term. Nobody came into me and said, I'm a gender minotaur. But what they did come into me and say is I'm one thing on the top and another thing on the bottom. And often that was to explain away their genitalia. And most of the kids who are gender minotaurs love mermaid. So make sure you have a lot of mermaid books. Because I really, you think about it, it works. Then there's gender by season. I can wear my whatever I want at home, but at school I can't. Or my parents won't let me. So you have summer girl, school boy, school year boy, or just summer non-binary school binary to conform to what's expected at school. That would be an example of by season. You have gender by location. It's cool at home, but not at Grammys in central Utah. Then we have, this was a new one, a gender Tesla. So this is one of the kids I've been seeing for a long time who also comes to our clinic. And at our clinic, we had had a rating scale that our medical director had made up about, so where are you today if one is boy and 10 is girl, where would you put yourself so that you can, like a slide where you can see where it was going from one visit to another. And we said, we got to scrap that. It's binary. We can't use it. So we had just grabbed it. However, this kid had been giving their measure for a long time and they liked that. So when I came in, they said to me at the clinic, they said to me, Dr. Rosenthal forgot to give me the scale today, you know. And I said, oh, well, what did you want to tell me about the scale? Well, I've moved from a four to a six, meaning from girl to boy, four to six. And I said, okay. And then I said, well, maybe we could think about, and I told this person about the gender Prius. I said, maybe you're trying to tell me your gender Prius. And they found that really intriguing. And then they thought for a little bit and said, I don't think so. I think I'm moving towards Tesla. And they did. And they are now a very happy transgender boy. So we have gender Teslas. We have gender ambidextrous children. Now this came to me where two moms asked me to seed their child because they could not figure their child out. Their child refused to declare a gender. And both the moms are scientists. And they said, we just want facts. We want answers. So I met with the child, I didn't know either. So I met with the child, got to know the child. And this child clearly did not want to just, didn't want to talk about gender, just wanted to play Legos, just didn't want to declare a gender. And was gender fluid by location chosen by themselves. They were a girl across the street with the neighbor's friends, but a boy with their brother. So I was meeting with the parents for the feedback session. And I thought, I got two scientists here. I don't know what to do. I don't have facts for them. So I made it up right then. I said, you know what I discovered? I discovered you have a gender ambidextrous child. Your child is equally adept at their female hand and their male hand. And they can go back and forth between the two or merge in the middle, at the midline. And they said, that's great. We love it. It's scientific. We can tell our friends. It can have to do with the brain. And all of a sudden they're caught on like wildfire. And all these kids love being gender ambidextrous. And then we have gender smoothies. Now this one came to me from a teenager I worked with who was as gender expansive and exciting as you could imagine. Very colorful in my waiting room. And so this person came in and said to me, so you see, I am a gender smoothie. You take everything about gender. You put it in the blender. You press the button. You got me a gender smoothie. So we have that gender smoothie. We have gender queer youth. And this is a term that really started about 15 years ago. There's not only a term for a person but a social movement and continues to be. And we also simply have a queer movement that just includes anybody who doesn't go by the norms for either gender or sexuality. Then we have a gender youth. That can be one of two things. I'm no gender or I'm a gender. So we have a lot of kids who identify as a gender. And we have two groups here. We have the proto gay children and the proto transgender youth. The proto gay children are often the kids who early in life show up as very expansive in their gender expressions. And as they get older, they discover that at their core is their sexual identity is not straight. And so gender does weave together. And there's a lot of explanations for this. But we'll just say for now that gender is a forerunner. And often many people remain gender expansive. But at the core is they arrive at their sexual identities. Then we have the opposite. We have a group of youth. And often these are youth who are designated female at birth have always been quote unquote masculine in their presentation, sometimes known as butch dykes. And they go to high school. And they discover a community that they never had before. And they love it. And they become part of that community. And through their romantic relationships, what they discover is when they're with another girl, they are actually not feeling like a girl. They experience themselves as boring. So they transition from first an identification as gay and then later as transgender. And that is why you saw all of those front page articles in New York Times magazine cover stories about the Boyzitz-Smith College. Because these are many youth who enter college as lesbians and exit as transgender men. So those are our proto-transgender youth. And the last one is our most concerning group that all of us and the books we read need to always be thinking about. And these are our gender tootsie roll pops. And these are the kids who are one thing on the outside and the other on the inside. And usually, if you think about a tootsie roll pop, it's brittle on the outside and the soft, gooey stuff. You want to get to on the inside. So who they really are, they're hiding. And they have to put up a false front, which they try to make palatable to everybody else, but they're suffering. And these are the kids we hear as the gender dysphoric kids who need some help and support so they can be who they are. And so there's another way to understand that when we're thinking about the gender tootsie roll pops or any of the other kids, that every person has a true gender self. And that's their internal sense of both their identity and expressions. And it's theirs, nobody else's. And then all of us have a false gender self. We have some way sometimes where we hide our gender. I used to be a girl who was a wizard math. And my mother told me no boy would date me. So I never told anybody. I was good at math. And of course, these many years later, that pains me that I had because I was trying to conform to a certain gender trope, I couldn't just be who I was and incorporate being, identifying as female, who is good at math. And I even tried to, I went to a big public high school. And I was the only girl in my AP calculus class. And I thought, I'll never get a date this way. So what I did was I backed into the class, thinking because of a crowded hallways, people would think I was coming out of the algebra class. And so they thought, what's with her going backwards? So it never worked, but I tried. And then we have the most important thing. And this is where our books really help with gender creativity. And that's the weaving together of a unique authentic gender self based on our core feelings and chosen gender expressions. We don't choose our core sense of self. We can choose our expressions. But we can choose to make them go underground. We can discover them, but it's not a choice. It's just who we are. So let's just review then gender creativity, if we put it together, is each child's personal artistry and composing a unique authentic gender web based on core feelings of gender identity and chosen gender expressions. So how are we supposed to know a child's gender? Rule of thumb, not for us to say, but for the children to tell. Is it a boy or a girl? I don't know. It can't talk yet. Good rule of thumb. Adult, where do we come in? All children come to us with gender creativity. What we owe them in exchange is to give them exposure to the whitest variety of gender expressions and identities and open the pathway for them to explore their own. Simple as that. So you can take a moment. Think about all the books in your library. Do they include all the flower children of the 21st century and all the ways they do their gender? And it's important not just for the gender-expansive readers but for all readers, that all children in every classroom and in every library have an exposure to gender in all its infinite variations. So how do you become a gender-creative librarian? First, you call on your gender angels, right? So what? What are gender angels? These are the feelings, attitudes inside you, lessons you've learned, efforts you've made to recognize gender in all its variations as a healthy part of humanity. Gender angels allow you to promote gender creativity in the children. Gender angels facilitate gender acceptance within the entire world you and the children live in. We also have gender ghosts. And anybody here who says they don't have one is lying. We all have them because we were socialized in a culture that hasn't been always so friendly to gender infinity. So what are they? So here you've got the things you were taught that come together in beliefs, attitudes, feelings, reactions to tell you things like transgender children need therapy. They're ill. We have to teach children appropriate gender. You can't just use any bathroom you want. Actually, you can, by the way, legally in the state of California in a public school. We are the only state that has that statute that gives children in public schools the right to the bathroom that matches their gender. So yay, California. Transgender boys are not real boys. Transgender girls are not real girls. You can't just live in the middle or say you're neither boy nor girl. It doesn't work that way. And you can fill in the blank. We all have them. So we've got a war of the worlds. We have a gender ghost going against our gender angels. So we all have them. And typically, we will discover them. And typically, they're not going to get along well. They don't. So our task is to let the gender angels drown out the voices of the gender ghost. So it's like Jacob wrestling with the angel. Jacob needs to win over the angel. So how do you do that? Self-examination, self-reflection, and working in groups, getting feedback, friendly feedback, not accusations, friendly feedback with your colleagues, your friends, your family. Just check each other. Just check each other all the time and listen to the kids. They'll tell you when you messed up. They will tell you. And why should we do this? Because anything else is going to do harm to our gender-expansive children, to all children, and not to mention to the world around them. Now, in doing that, beware your subtle gender microaggressions. So first definition, what are they? Brief, commonplace, daily, verbal, behavioral, environmental, and dignities, whether intentional or unintentional, that communicate hostile, derogatory, or negative slides and insults towards a marginalized group. Gender-expansive trends gender children count as such a group. And when it intersects, that they have other areas of diversity that come together. It's double, triple whammy. We always have to think about that together, because children aren't just their gender. They're their race, they're their ethnicity, they're their class, and so forth. So you got an accumulation of microaggressions. If they keep happening, you can create a trauma in a child. And more so if someone is from more than one marginalized group at the same time. So when I explain it to parents, I say it's like this. If you go like this on your skin, it's a ping. But if you keep doing the same ping, you get a welt. And after that, it gets infected, and it can be really serious. So we don't want pings. We just want to stop pings. And what are some pings? If you do not use a child's pronouns that they're asking you to use, that can be a microaggression, particularly when the child's being very clear what they would like. If you slip, if you forget, oh, you know, I've just known you so long as one thing, it's just so hard. That's understandable, but work on it. If you refuse to use a child's preferred name, if you ever say, oh, this is a book for girls. Or if you have different sections, one for boys, one for girls in your library. If you ever have children line up by gender, boys over here, girls over here, that can be a microaggression for the child who goes, I don't know which one I belong in, like the gender fluid child. Where do I go? If you have no books in your library that reflect a child's gender, if you have any books that lay out rules for boys and girls, rules for boys, rules for girls, and if you have books in the library that have gender stereotyping. Now I want to press pause there, because you can either throw them all out or use them educationally to critique and critique them with the children. So I'm gonna give you an example of how I tried to do that with my daughter. We only allowed our daughter to see, she was the older one to watch public TV. We thought we could shield it from commercialism. It didn't work, because she got old enough to go to other kids' houses. She came back, she said, hey, you know there's more than one channel. So we didn't lie, we said, yeah. So we decided we had to give in and let her watch the channel that all her friends were watching. But we did it, we would sit with her and critique it. And one of them at the time were battery operated dolls that did all kinds of things. And it was all kinds of toys for kids that they were, so we would do the, this was the 70s, we would do, it's commercialism, it's capitalism, and look what they're trying to trick little kids into. So one day she's walked through a commercial and she goes, mommy, look at that doll. They're telling me that it can crawl, it can eat food, it can even poop, and I bet you the batteries aren't even included. Pause, I want one. So you can try. So the thing that we're working on is for all of us to be able to say we are gender allies to all the children. So we're gonna work to eliminate ghosts, but also we have them. So sometimes what you need to do is build a firewall around them so they don't escape and hurt our gender creative children or any child. So think of yourself, and your library is a full length mirror. No child wants to look in a mirror and either see a distorted sense of themselves or be invisible, not even be able to find themselves. You are that mirror, the books are that mirror. So the best thing you can give a gender expansive child, reflect actively reflect back to them an authentic and positive image of who they are through your words, your actions, your feelings, and your books. Thank you.