 Thank you, thank you. OK, we are going to start off with the first question. Why did you write these books? And who did you write them for? Write or illustrate? And did you write them for gender expansive children, their peers, siblings, grownups, children who have experienced bullying, who have perpetrated bullying? And I imagine, of course, it's always a combination of these things. But I wonder, when you wrote them, did you have an ideal reader in mind? And also, if you have experienced challenges in trying to write a book that will address that reader, while also address other people that might be in conflict with each other, so how to speak to multiple audiences without alienating any of those audiences. That's a lot. Who would like to begin? You can just, Sarah? Sure. Maybe because of the cat. Ian leaned over and said, we forgot to mention that we're the parents of a gender nonconforming kid. We leave anything out, just ask. So our son, Sam, is almost 16. And when he was two, he liked everything that traditionally girls liked. He wanted pink sneakers and a pink t-shirt, and he wanted to wear the flowery, floppy hat in the dress up corner. And as he got older that only intensified, he would go to preschool and wear the princess dress up costume all day and have to fight the girls for it because they wanted it. And then one day he said, I want to wear a dress to school for real. And as progressive San Francisco parents, we thought whatever his gender expression was was fine. No big deal. But the dress thing kind of threw us because it crossed an imaginary line, an invisible line that we didn't even realize was there until those words came out of his mouth. And our fear was that he would be harassed for being different. And we were right, but it turned out that that didn't matter to him because it was more important to him to be himself than to worry about not being harassed like for an end, like a lot of characters we've already heard about today, except he's a real person. So and actually the day he went to wear a dress for that first time, we did some coaching because we recognized his parents. It was important for us to protect him and teach him how to be in the world and as well as let him be himself. And we taught him some things he could say when he was harassed, like just saying no and going to get a teacher, he was only three. And so instead, he did wear this dress and at the end of the day we said, how did it go? Did you get teased? And he said, yeah. And we said, what did you say? And he said, I said I can be a boy and wear a dress because it is my choice. So we realized we weren't the teachers, he was the teacher. So we wrote the book for boys like Sam because there were very few books out there that reflected who he was. And we also wrote it for any other kids who are different because I think you brought up fatness and there's so many ways of being different that the underlying issue is the same. You are who you are and someone is giving you shit about it, right? That's, and I think that when we see any books about difference, we can find ourselves in them. So we just wanted to add our book to that little lexicon. Did you have anything to add, Ian? You talked about how not to alienate people. Well, life is really hard for gender non-conforming kids. Maybe it's easier now, but 13 years ago, it was really, really hard. And we knew if we were gonna write a book for them, we had to be true to their experience so that they would see themselves really reflected in it. And that made for really tough read. Our son's experiences were actually too intense to put into a book for younger kids. And so we had to move away from our own story that we knew and we know dozens, hundreds of families of gender non-conforming kids. And so we started to work into a bigger, broader fictional character who ended up being Jacob, whose story is true and that it's things that we've seen happen or happened to friends of ours but aren't necessarily our story and it made it more appropriate for younger readers because we're trying to reach, you know, second grader, two-year-olds, three-year-olds, four-year-olds, just as they're learning these gender concepts. Oh, and we have alienated many people. Excluding the state of North Carolina, unfortunately. Yeah. No. Right, it's not, it's a low bar. Leslie, did you? Sure, so, you know, basically I started with Heather. This is the new Heather. New and improved Heather has two mommies and I told you that somebody asked me, stopped me on the street and asked me to write the book. But the reason it resonated, her request really resonated with me was because when I was growing up, there were no books about Jewish kids. So you saw the book, you know, I read Nurse Nancy and Dick and Jane, you know, where were the books about a little girl with frizzy hair eating chicken soup with her bubby on Friday night? They just weren't there. And I remember when I was 27, I was in a bookstore, an alternative bookstore, and happened upon the carp in the bathtub, which is a book about a kid whose grandmother has a carp in the bathtub and they're gonna make a filter fish out of the carp, which is kind of, you know, horrifying. Became a vegetarian because of that book. No, I was a vegetarian before that book. But anyway, I cried in this bookstore when I was 27 because I saw a family like mine. And that's when I realized, even though I couldn't articulate this need when I was a kid, how important it is to see yourself. Because even though I grew up in Brooklyn in a Jewish neighborhood surrounded by Jewish families just like mine, I asked my parents, why can't we have a Christmas tree? When do I get to look for Easter eggs? So, because that's what I saw on TV and in movies and in books. So that experience of the media message was stronger than my direct experience of seeing families just like mine all around me. So that's the story of Heather. And then basically, I wrote Sparkle Boy after I spent a week in Provincetown for Family Week. And there were all these little boys running around two twos and a gay dad turned to me and said, I wish my son could dress like this all year instead of just for one week. So I thought about that. And then I was actually here in San Francisco and I was sleeping at a friend's apartment and I came out in the morning kind of bleary eyed. And he's a big guy. And he was in a yellow nightgown with a matching pinoir and mules with fur on the toe and he had dangling earrings on and he took one earring off. It was a clip on to talk on the phone and he was so fabulous. And I had known him for probably 20 years and I had never seen him dressed like that. And I felt so honored that he felt safe with me to express his authentic self in that way that I said to myself, I need to write a book so that gender creative boys of all ages can dress however they want. So that is how I came to write Sparkle Boy. Either of you have something Dine to say about this question. Yes, I do. Because yes, I totally wrote this book for trans kids and gender non-conforming kids and also for trans adults to see the story that we didn't have growing up. But in writing to a largely cisgender audience which given that most readers are cisgender that's going to happen. I am writing for trans community. Because these kids turn into adults and trans people and gender non-conforming people face frightening numbers of violence, particularly trans women of color. And so if I can put into some cisgender jock boys head the idea that a trans person is a real person and I can bring them close enough so that the story is not about accepting the trans person but about respect or not about like how hard it is to accept that person but simply the onus to respect that person. Not about understanding them but saying they are real whether or not I understand it could keep some trans person alive some day. That's why I write. Can I have something? I don't, did I say I would answer this? You don't have to. Let's move on. Yes, please. Any of you heard of the Family Acceptance Project? Right, so it's a project out of San Francisco State by a woman named Caitlin Ryan which looked at outcomes for LGBT kids who had differing levels of support in their families and their communities. And what the project was able to show is that LGBT kids who had a lot of support had the same kind of health and mental health outcomes as non-LGBT kids. They came out okay because people loved them. And the kids who had no support, the kids who got kicked out, who were made homeless by their families, not supporting them, had obviously very poor health and mental health outcomes but they were also able to show that a little bit of support made a difference. So if, you know, by reading a book about someone who's different than you, helping you to understand that person and just giving a little bit of love as a teacher, a librarian, someone, a person in a kid's life even if it's not their parents that that little bit of support actually improves health and mental health outcomes. And that is profoundly powerful and it's why I think it's why all of us write. And in our own experience, we saw with our son in kindergarten, his teacher did a little bit of gender education. She taught the kids, are there colors that are for boys and for girls? You know, it's pink, you know, some of the basic stuff that Les Leo is teaching us earlier. She did it in a kindergarten appropriate level and she showed a picture of herself in second grade and said, with short hair, and said, is this a boy or a girl? And they said, oh, that's a boy. And she said, that's me. And so these kinds of simple bits of education helped the kids in Sam's class to accept him but the other kindergarten class didn't have this kind of education. And so they harassed our kid at every turn. And this was our little Petrie dish, our little scientific study of the power of education and what it can do. It doesn't take that much, right? But we just have to be talking about these issues. So that's why we wrote this book. Thanks for adding that. Okay, next question. So we've talked a bit about the power of children's literature. I think actually that's the perfect segue. It doesn't take a lot to do a lot. And everybody here, I believe, agrees that with that or you would not be librarians making sure that children have access to these books. And with that power as authors who are creating that, there comes a lot of responsibility to do it right in pressure. And as we all know, what right is changes over time, culturally as we understand more and more and also individually as we mature in our writing and in our own understandings of gender and of everything. So this question, I'm curious about for you how your understanding of gender has changed over the years and how if there's things that you wish that you had known before you started writing your books and also if there's ways that you've seen the impact of your books change over time. And I have some examples, but I'll save those because I'm curious what you have to say. Would you like to start, Maya? Great. Blab, once you get me blabbering though, I won't shut up. Well, it's interesting because I really write from within the community to the community. It's the same that I do with race and ethnic work. When I'm writing, I'm writing to Latinx kids that are just like me to other kids who are having experience of racism that I experienced as a child. And so there's this piece of really kind of honing that intimacy between the two of us that's important to me. And so when I first started doing my own press, I immediately got out my claiming phase curriculum. The next one immediately was gender now. And it's a different way of looking at gender. It's a way of looking at gender where we peel back the patriarchy. We peel back the source of the binary and we see the kind of damage that that's done and you sort of like take a view of all the lies that exist in our world is my fantasy of course is that we start teaching the truth to our children, which is that queer, intersex and trans animals, plants, everything exists all the time. And that it was suppressed for a very distinct reason and that that's a way to stop internalizing that bullying. And in my imagination, it's a way of kind of taking away some of the power that we would even have bullying as an option so that kids can all kind of get on the same side. And be like, oh, this is throughout history. This is throughout the entire world. This is throughout nature. This is a lie that's been going on. So let's start telling the truth to each other, to ourselves and promoting that. So I always come from that kind of place. I'm really outside of Western culture. I really want to have a critical view on what we're doing, why we're doing it and the source of it. So I don't just come up with books. I actually source from them from very deep places within myself having been involved with trans people for the last 30 years. And really like what we learned and what we had to tell our kids so that they could understand us or our community. Because the barrage is so constant, so full force that there's a belief system that it's true that we are somehow aberrant, that we're either need to be pathologized or there's something that we need to be focused on that we're other in some way. So I'm basically trying to dismantle that whole concept of other and root it within a brown black liberation as well so that we don't separate those two things out because they're intimately connected. So that's some of the stuff that I'll be talking to and it ties back into that first voice and what it's like to be queer, trans, intersex in the world and the kind of experiences that you have from the moment you're born, right? And how we start addressing something that is really huge in ways that kids can understand which is why we landed on the pronouns. We're like, here's a way that we can start negotiating how kids are policing each other to perform in these very specific ways that aren't real. So my thing in all of my activism is to always create that circle, invite people in and be like, hey, what are the commonalities? What are the connections? What's oppressing all of us and how can we join together to kind of deal with that? Children's books are the most radical thing you can do. One, because we've all been damaged by the children's books that we've grown up with, right? Period. And then from there, coming into that own voice, first voice so that we can start creating a different world through our own experience and peeling back some of that binary lie. See, I will not shut up. I could go on forever. So that's what my books are sourced in. It's a much deeper. It's never mental. Alex? So, I started writing this book in 2005 and I thought I was gonna have to make Xerox copies and send it out to PFLAGs and we would get it out to the kids who really needed it. And I've actually, I've talked with Scholastic who published it and they said, yeah, in 2005, it would not have gotten published by a major press when it happened. And then we started to have a shift where by about 2013, I looked around and no offense to anyone at this table, but I said, if I don't get this book out, it's gonna be a bunch of cis white ladies who have stories out there. Because that's what's out there. By and large, most of the stories that are written about trans people are written by white people and they're written by cisgender people. And now I am not a trans girl. I am non-binary and I did not grow up with an understanding of transness. So I could talk about near voices. But the story was something that I thought I was only going to share to trans kids as if it was a thing that trans kids were the only ones who needed it. And so what shifted for me is like, books only been out a couple of years, but what shifted for me is as I was writing it, who I was writing it to and who was gonna read it. And in fact, the first copies of first drafts of the book didn't have the word transgender in it. Because in 2005, what fourth grader was gonna get access to that language? And now of course, what fourth grader who had access to the internet wouldn't go and find that word and take it and consume it. Like the way that I consumed gender queer when I found it at 19, like we need language, we need tools, we deserve tools. And so people are like worried about like, oh, well I don't want someone to, I wanna protect my child, right? I wanna protect whoever this person is. But hiding hurts a lot. And so that's like in protecting someone physically, if you are hurting who they are, that protection is about you feeling good and feeling like you don't have to worry because the person's safe. But if they don't get to be themselves, how safe are they? Just sort of a windy answer to the question, but that's what I'm thinking about right now. Not offended at all. And in fact, I've done a lot of work to cultivate the cis white lady persona. And these are our pen names, right, Sara and Ian Hoffman. We don't actually share last name. But when we took pen names, I wanted to take one that made it seem like I was more normal and intelligible and safe because our message I think is a challenging one and we wanted to be acceptable to the largest possible audience. And so we take ourselves and get a little more vanilla because it seems more safe. We couldn't get away from seeming Jewish, so we went with Hoffman because really you can't not be. But aside from that, if you're scared off by that, there's nothing we can do about that. But in every other way, we wanted to be those accessible people because when I started writing for adults, I got so much criticism for making my son gay or trans or whatever, making him do. There's this whole notion out there that you can, the parents like us are forcing our children to put on a dress, be sparkly, et cetera. So there was so much hostility out there that we wanted to be as vanilla and bland and easygoing and rational seeming as possible. Yes, and to be clear, that is for the adults, right? The kids do not need the accessibility. The kids are used to learning things. The kids are used to being exposed to stuff they don't know. It's the adults who freak out because they're all going gay. I have to chime in, I have to say, I think this is really important for us to touch. And it's really uncomfortable in a lot of ways. But by cis white parents coming in, they're actually taking up space within the children's book industry for voices like mine or Alex's to come through. Like we need queer, trans, intersex voices in the industry talking to kids now. We don't need more parents and I appreciate your work. Hands down, I am grateful. And yet we have to have those hard conversations. These are the same hard conversations I had to have around race and ethnicity, right? So we need to start having those in this arena as well because the truth of the matter is, is that the children's book industry does have little doors that it opens and closes and the more you look like they can sell that voice, then that's what they're gonna go with, right? And we need to call that out. And when we have privilege to use it and say, okay, that's what I do. I'm like, oh, I pass for this, I pass for that. Well, within the community, then this is the voice I'm gonna bring out, right? We need to be able to stay within a parent position so that we're not voicing those children inappropriately at times. If we're not having any experiences that connect to gender outside of what our community, our society approves of, then we have absolutely no idea, even as a parent, even with huge, huge well-intentioned hearts doing tons of good, no idea. And we have to touch that. I have no idea what the original question was. I'm just, you know, feel like I'm learning a lot and thinking a lot. And Heather has two mommies came out in 1989. So I wrote it in 1988, so it's 30 years old. So I hope that I have learned a few things since then. But one thing was, you know, at the time, a friend and I put it out ourselves because nobody would touch this book. We went to mainstream houses, alternative houses, children's book houses, lesbian presses. The lesbian press movement was big at that time and nobody would publish it. So a friend and I decided we would do it together. And we had the original Kickstarter campaign, which was we wrote letters and we put stamps on envelopes and sent them to people. So then six months later, the book was taken up by Allison Books and then at the 10-year anniversary, we reprinted it and then the 20th anniversary. And each time there was a note to parents and teachers and there was an explanation and there was all this stuff around the book. And then when it came out in 2015 by Candlewick, newly illustrated, I said to my editor, I said, you know what? I just wanted to be a book for kids. I don't want a note to parents and teachers. I don't want any explanation. I just wanted to be on the bookshelf. As a book about a family. And I really question when people say it's a different kind of family. I'm like, different than who? It's not different than my friends' families, right? So just trying to get away from any concept of quote unquote normal because that just doesn't fly. Because variety and diversity and all those buzzwords are really where it's at. And one question that I pose to audiences that I speak to is if you had nothing to rebel against and nothing to conform to, who would you be? You know, so that's something to really think about. There are no standards at all. And you could just come into this world with no expectations thrown on you and just be yourself, who would you be? So that's what I've been thinking about for myself and also in terms of the books that I write. So my last question, you've already answered and I like your answer. And it is, what do we need? What books do we need now? And you can talk about what you're currently working on or just what you want to have happen. And then we're gonna do a Q and A. So this is another quick answer and who would like to start? We need more, more, more, more, more because books are consumable. So to say that there's a book about a trans kid in the library works for about two weeks, right? And then we need another one. So we need lots of them. We need them to not just be about white kids. We need them to not just be about being trans. We need to have like Spanish speaking at home, kids who want to solve mysteries and love jelly beans. Oh, and their genderqueer, right? And in fact, those are the stories that cis people should be writing. Because yes, I do want more stories by everyone, but the stories of transness are stories for trans people to tell. What I'm doing is actually my next story isn't trans. I have a new book coming out in September. It's called You Don't Know Everything, Jilly P. It is about a hearing white girl in Piedmont, California whose baby sister is born deaf. She has a deaf black friend online and she makes mistakes. She commits microaggressions. She thinks she knows more than she does. And so this is a book about being who you are. The next book is about figuring out how to support people and who they are without centering yourself in the conversation. As I center myself in that. So I just gave the talk I gave earlier at the Eric Carr Museum of Picture Book Art and a, I don't know, a woman, I don't know if she was a teacher or librarian or a parent, whoever she was, she raised her hand and she said, do you know about any books that just show men being gentle and kind? And I thought, well, that is a needed category. So I just wrote a book called What Daddies Do and it's about all kinds of dads doing all kind of kind things with their son, like encouraging their sons to cry when they get hurt or hugging their son when they have a bad dream instead of saying, you know, don't be silly, there are no monsters under your bed. So that's one thing that I think we need. And I also really, really support the In Our Own Voices movement and I think we need many, many, many, many more books by people of color, trans people, people who really haven't had the opportunity to tell their own stories. So we wrote Jacob because we didn't see any other books out there about a little boy who liked to wear a dress. And there's something we don't love about it, which is that there's a big challenge in it over the fact that he wants to wear a dress. And like Alex, I just wanna see a book about a kid who likes jelly beans and does whatever and happens to be wearing a dress and nobody comments on it, right? And so that was the book we were hoping to write. The publishing world didn't seem quite ready for it so this is what we were able to get published. We actually wrote this with the idea that someday it would be quaint and I was at the ALA a couple of years ago and I was telling this lovely English woman that that was our goal. And she looked at me and she said, oh, sweetie. She said, you're going to sell a lot of books before that happens. Yeah. So we had, we were talking with our publisher about the next book that would come after Jacob and actually they suggested a book about siblings and Leslie took care of that. So the book that we wrote instead was a book about bathrooms because really for kids who don't conform to gender norms, the hardest part of their day at school is going to the bathroom. And it happened for our kid. Even when he was less looking feminine he would wear, you know, boy clothes so a T-shirt and khaki pants and pink crocs and his hair was long. And he'd get beaten up in the bathroom at school at his little progressive private San Francisco school, right? So you can imagine what it was like in airport bathrooms or the zoo bathroom in Syracuse, New York or, you know, a train station bathroom. And so we had to physically protect him because we were emotionally protecting him and letting him be himself. We had to physically protect him in all these unsafe spaces. And this is the number one issue that parents of kids like this tell us about is the bathroom. And so we've written that book. It's being shopped by our agent, Deborah Warren. And we'll see if the world is ready to talk about the bathroom. We have actually, it's not, it's written but it's not illustrated and it took us a while so it's gonna take us a bit longer where their superheroes in the bathroom is their secret lair. Yeah. Maya, is there anything else you wanna add to what needs to be written? Well, I am gonna mention the statistics in my presentation about just literally how many numbers we need to write that we need over like, I don't have it in front of me but it's something like over 370 more books per year by and about LGBTQI, two-spirit people. So that's gonna change the world dramatically if we can start getting enough presses to start, you know, personally that's why I started to press. I also teach how to start to make your own press because I found that's the place where I can get my books out because it was in 2010 that I published Gender Now and I wasn't gonna get that published anywhere and I knew people needed it immediately. So start your own press. Yes. And with that, Q&A begins. Tell us about your presses that you're starting. And you can raise your hand and Eric will come along with the mic. Hi, my name is Rami. I am a children's librarian at Oakland Public Library and I have a question for Leslia and then for anyone else to whom it applies. I was curious about the changes in Heather when it came out in the 30th anniversary edition. You said there was no parent note. What else changed about the book and the illustrations or in the story? So first of all, my business partner, I didn't have the money for color illustrations so they went from black and white to color. That's an obvious difference. One thing is that in the book when there's story time and all the kids start talking about, there's a story about a kid whose father's a veterinarian and all the kids say, my daddy is this, my daddy is that and then a kid asks Heather, what does your daddy do? And she says, I don't have a daddy, Heather says. She looks around the circle and wonders, am I the only one here who doesn't have a daddy? Now in the original, the text was something like, Heather's forehead crinkles up and she begins to cry. And I thought, now, I'm so lucky that you get a chance to rewrite a book 25 years later that there's nothing to cry about. She's just kind of wondering, is she the only one here without a dad? So that was one change. And then when all of Heather's classmates draw pictures of their family, I have one child being raised by her grandmother, which I didn't have before, but I know a lot of kids are being raised by grandparents now. And the other main thing is that the text is shorter because I realized that it was very wordy. So those are some of the things that I did. Thank you. Is there anything that you would change about yours if it were to be printed for the other authors and illustrators? Yes. I would change the title. I dead named my main character in the title. Dead naming is using a name that author no longer wishes. Oh, sorry, an author. A person no longer wishes to be associated with or used about them. At the time when I was writing it, it was called Girl George, which was very clever 30 years ago. Scholastic, when they got it, they were like, well, we're gonna take off the word girl and I'm like, my feminist ankles went, no, no, no, no. Because they thought there would be some people who didn't read it because it didn't have the word girl on it and they didn't want them to have that excuse. I was like, oh, that makes sense. And I didn't think any more about it until now I'm like, oh, yeah. Luckily she's not real. And that discomfort that comes up about trying to talk about a book but you can't even really talk about the character because you're not quite sure what name to use and whether someone knows which name them by and whether you don't wanna like out them but you also don't wanna be rude but yeah, that's all very trans. It's actually better, I think, and that was gonna be my question for you because now you get to talk about it, right? Every time you speak, you get to bring up this issue. It's the silver lining up, but it's still a mistake. Anybody else? Changes, they won't. Next question. I like that you identified yourself. So please, please do that as well. Go there. Yeah, in the back corner. I'm Matthew and I'm actually the co-author of the pronoun book with Maya. And I actually just wanted to bring up, it's more of a comment than a question. There actually is a book. What's about a boy wearing a dress that's actually bilingual Spanish that's actually sitting right up there with no conflict in it called one of a kind like me so I just wanna put that in there. I actually wanna riff on that. Thanks for bringing that up because you're like reading my mind. I actually also teach because I step outside of a Western model and because I have my own press and I don't have to abide by what larger presses want is I don't recommend using the conflict model and I especially don't think it's a good idea for LGBTQIA to spirit folks because so much of the life is around conflict for us. And so I feel like it's a way of perpetuating not only that we experience conflict and I understand truth telling, right? But what it does to kids who aren't having those experiences is it also identifies who to bully, right? So it's playing this multiple layers and we have to be having those more holistic thoughts about how these books are functioning. This is something I'm gonna talk a lot about too in my session. And there's another book. Thank you for mentioning that. There's a book called I'm Jay Let's Play that I believe is also up here. And there's no conflict. I'm gonna touch on this one too, yeah. Next question. Larry, I just wanted to know how recent. One of a kind like me, Unico Comuyo. 16, 17. Recent. And local author also. And a local press. And a local press. Yes. I actually wanted to ask, I'll get to you, Anna. I'm sorry. Go ahead. Because I'm putting this day together and I'm glad that Leslie have brought this up in her presentation that so many of the books out there are, with gender expansive kids are boys dressing sparkly. And where are the books about females who are gender non-conforming? And I mean, you brought that up like it just is more accepted and there's a whole masculinity thing, but. Well, you know, it just feels that it's more okay for a girl to act like a tomboy than it is for a boy to act like a, for lack of a better word, sissy. So, you know, I think the probably the books aren't seen as needed as much, though I disagree, I think they definitely are needed. But you're right, they're definitely books about boys acting in more feminine ways are outnumber books about girls acting more in masculine ways. Yes, and that the whole what is socially acceptable. And I think of a lot of it comes down to the larger culture understands or makes sense of someone wanting to go up the ladder of privilege. Right, exactly. So a girl who wants to be a boy, that's because you wanna play with the cool toys. But a boy who wants to go down the ladder of privilege, what the heck is going on over there? That's weird. And that's why having a structural sense when we start looking at voice and we start understanding the impact is so important and why I've taken my race ethnic thing and brought it over here. Because without that larger perspective and understanding the source of the binary thinking, we actually can't make sense out of this time completely. And that's actually the point, right? It's about erasure. It's about confusion and fog. It's about lies, right? If the entire world, every single thing that we can even look at ever is queer, trans, and intersex all the time. We start understanding the impact, the huge lie that's been going on with the patriarchy and start dismantling that and making books for kids and telling them the truth. They'll pick up on that. They're totally smart. Hi, everybody. I'm Anna Spickovich. I'm a librarian here at the MIX, our teen center at SFPL. And this is just more of a comment and a story I wanted to share. I just wanted to say thank you for everybody who's participating in this, panelists, organizers, and participants. And my story is just that this was sparked just today. A memory of being in my elementary school library and being read a story by my librarian, Mrs. Christ, which was ex a fabulous child. Is everyone familiar with that? Yes. It's a story that was, I just looked it up, written by a woman named Lois back in the 70s about two parents who scientists decide that they're gonna raise their baby genderless as an experiment, baby X. And so baby X goes to school and pushes doll carriages and plays football and wears overalls every day. And by the time they grow up, everyone's saying, what's gonna happen, what's gonna happen? And the moral of the story is when they're old enough that it's going to become apparent that they are one or another gender, it won't matter anymore. And I don't know if that's true or not, but it just occurred to me today that that's why I'm a librarian is stories like that that my librarian read to me as this white child. So I just wanna share that with a room full of librarians, how this impacts us in so many different ways and over so many different years. So thank you everybody for providing this. Librarians rock by the way. Hi, my name is Megan and I work at Burlingham Public Library. And I just, you all touched on this a little bit, but I was just curious, how have you managed to kind of have to find a balance between the very real realities of like having to sell and market a book to, and get a publisher behind it and audience without compromising like who you are and what you wanted to get across? Did I mention I have my own press? I still traditionally publish. In fact, I had a book come out last year with Leon Lowe, but I do find that having complete freedom to do whatever I need to do for my community led me to publish when a bully is president, Truth and Creativity for Oppressive Times. I wrote it the day after 45 was elected and I had it in the hands of teachers and kids within four months. And it's about suppressed history. It includes LGBTQ, I mean, those are the kind of books we need to get out. And I could really give a rat's ass. I find my way to make my living however I can because my work is activist driven. And so we need to have people saying, hey, let's do it. People who are in the industry saying, yeah, the industry cannot hold me. It cannot hold me. I'm gonna go way over there. Let's go party. A lot of black folk tell their kids that you have to work twice as hard to get half as far. And I sort of took some hint from that in that I worked on my book for 10 years and I polished it till there was not a word that I couldn't stand behind. Which is great to do, but also lots of other people get to publish mediocre books. I mean, you guys are librarians. You see mediocre books all the time. So my answer was just like to make the books so good that you couldn't not like it. Which is not the most efficient way, but you know, that's what I do. It's an interesting question. I mean, I had complete freedom when I published Heather Has to Mom is because a friend and I published it on our own. But now, like 65 books later, I have some kind of clout in the industry. So I feel like I've been given a voice. So I have an opportunity and an obligation and a responsibility to use that voice for the greater good. So if an editor wants me to change something, and I think it's really going to impact the book in a way I don't want it to, I will fight for that change. If an editor wants me to change recently, I had to change a goat from being a little brown goat to a little white goat, which I never thought of that in terms of race. But it was because the illustrator thought that the goat would stand out more against the dark background. And so that was fine with me. So, you know, you really, you pick your battles, your relationship with your editor and your presses like any other relationship, there are compromises. But hopefully the compromises that I'm asked to make are not something that I feel, you know, I can't live with at the end of the day because my name is on the book. So I have to feel okay about it. So we went the mainstream publishing route with Jacob. We are agent shopped at first to the larger presses. All of whom turned it down. And Albert Whitman. There's something I want to say about our agent first because I agree with Alex here. It's a lot about revising and revising and revising until you've got the story that they can't say no to. So our agent was really liked the story as we'd written it. And she's like, but I don't think I can sell it to a mainstream press. I don't think anybody's going to buy it. We're like, there are parents out there waiting to buy this book. There are children waiting for this book. We promise you it'll sell. And she's like, I can't walk into a mainstream press with this book and tell them that they need to buy it unless you can convince me that they're going to sell it. And so we did a lot of work, a lot of research, convincing our agent, just gathering all these news sources, all these articles, getting in contact with Lyft Serves, writing the concise statement and then the paragraph and then the supporting documents. And once we gave that to her and she glanced through it, she called us back the next day and she said, okay, I get it now. I don't have kids myself, but I get it. And I know who to take it to because, yeah. And our goal was to get it to a mainstream press. We wanted that broad reach. We don't have Maya's energy to start our own press. I wish she did. But what we got with this publisher is a small publisher who really, really stood by it. So it was illustrated by a guy named Chris Case up in Portland. And he was not the first illustrator they went to. The first illustrator they went to accepted the job, signed the contract and then then looked at the manuscript and said, I can't do this. I can't, I can't draw pictures of a boy in a dress. And they said, that's right, you can't next. And we love them for that because they, you know, they're a bit of an issue publisher. They're most famous for publishing the boxcar children. But then a lot of issue books, you know, kids who live in wheelchairs. There's one, my son likes to characterize them as the people who published Abby has asthma. They, you know, they write books about adoption and race and all kinds of diversity issues, but they had never taken this on before. And I think it was a little scary and they were really brave. And they have really stood by it. I believe we're past our time. Oh. Thank you all so much. This is.