Why Representation in Kids’ Books Matters for LGBTQ Teens and Families

Welcome to Just Breathe.

I am so very happy that you are here today. Today we have just a really, really extraordinary guest. He is the co-author of the brand new book that is called Girls of the World Doing More Than Ever Before. His name is Michael Tyler. He wrote this book with Lindsay Davis. And oh my goodness, are you in for a treat with this interview, with this discussion that we get to have. Michael is a writer, a speaker, and the author of The Skin You Live In and Mirror Face as well. And he is also the co-author of another book with Lindsay. And he talks, as you will see, but his whole purpose in life and what he talks about is Acceptance and Self-Love. He advises educators on DEI and SEL curriculum and has addressed forums for the King Center, the Clinton Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and Beyond Differences. So without further ado, I am so delighted to bring you this discussion with Michael Tyler.

Welcome to Just Breathe: Parenting Your LGBTQ Teen, the podcast transforming the conversation around loving and raising an LGBTQ child. My name is Heather Hester, and I am so grateful you are here. I want you to take a deep breath and know that for the time we are together, you are in the safety of the Just Breathe Nest. Whether today's show is an amazing guest, or me sharing stories, resources, strategies, or lessons I've learned along our journey, I want you to feel like we're just hanging out at a coffee shop having a cozy chat. Most of all, I want you to remember that wherever you are on this journey right now, In this moment in time, you are not alone.

Michael, welcome, welcome to the show. I'm so delighted that you are here to talk to my really beautiful audience today and to share about your new book, which I just heard just hit the New York Times bestseller list. Congratulations, that is huge.

Big thanks on that. It is huge for any writer of any genre, of any age group, to be able to reach that kind of an accolade, that acknowledgement. Uh, it validates all of the lonely hours you spend, but for me, it's also an affirmation of what my intent is for writing. Because I'm one of those writers who— I'm less about writing stories and more about writing messages. Uh, I— because I'm interested in whatever it is that I put out into the world, particularly as it pertains to children. It's going to have some effect on what character they develop. I grew up coming into the civil rights era where content of character was always foremost focus in my development. And that's what my approach has always been to writing for children is, how am I contributing to the content of the character? So when something like the New York Times Bestsellers List says you did a good job at contributing to the content of the character, I feel good about that.

Yes, I would say so. I would say so. So just so everyone knows, the full title of this beautiful book, which, oh my goodness, is— just gorgeous as well as the content is beautiful. It is called Girls of the World Doing More Than Ever Before. So this is the second book that you and Lindsay Davies have written together. Can you talk a little bit about— I'd love to hear more about this book and then, you know, bigger picture about the two of you writing together, why you've chosen to do this, and kind of what you're trying to— what message you're really wanting to put out into the world.

Well, I think Lindsay is in accord with me in terms of actually doing message content material. Lindsay approached me to do this book, Girls of the World, after we had done the book we did last year, The Smallest Spot of the Dot. And so I went back up to that book because, um, we had known each other for 2 or 3 years before we decided to actually get involved in a writing project. Uh, Lindsay had a couple of books remaining on a book contract deal that she had done already, but she wanted to do something that was different than what she had previously written. She had 4 books that had done very well, and she had the experience where she was talking to some, uh, individuals and some students in a classroom, and part of the discussion turned to divisions in society and race, and she was introducing to them the concept of the Human Genome Project, uh, in which a truth that came from the Human Genome Project is that 99.9% of all human beings are genetically identical, which is a fascinating thing. So what if we had a world based upon understanding that, right? Right. One-tenth of 1% makes a difference. And so Lindsay contacted me after she had that, uh, outing with the, with the school and said that she was so excited by how excited they were to learn that, that she just knew that this had to be some kind of book. Uh, and that's how A Small Spot of Dot came to be. And it was after that one was done that the, the simplicity of how we worked together was such that she said, well, you know, I've got one more book I'm gonna I want to consider you to join me on doing— which was an immediate yes. And of course, why not for me? And she said that she really wanted to do a book that spoke to girls, a book that spoke to the development of their own identity and their own sense of self. And that's something that I had always wanted to do. I was always reluctant to write that book on my own because I never wanted to be accused of mansplaining that issue. And so I always felt that if I ever did that project, it would require me to have a co-author who was female. And Lindsay and I had already proved that we knew how to run a fast dunk. So that's what it was. It was a sit pass and there it was. And it was a joy to write. It was fun. We were on the same page right off the bat as we were the first time around. And it was just easy putting everything together, putting the concept together. The one thing that I give Lindsay credit for is that she has a very pure sense of what it is that she wants to convey. And she— definitely has trust that I can find the concepts and the words to work with her to get that, uh, to, to become verbalized. And it's, it's not an— it's not a difficult thing for us to, to do, to come together. Working with her is the easiest thing that I've had in terms of collaboration with anybody. It's piece of cake.

That's so nice. You're very lucky.

Yeah, very lucky.

I mean, really, really lucky. So are you the one who has the, the talent with being able to rhyme and to really bring things together in such a poetic— just the way it's written is so beautiful and so pleasant to read.

Thank you for saying that. Yeah, that is something that I do have a knack for. Lindsay and I happen to like the same child poets. We're both big Shel Silverstein fans. We're both big Dr. Seuss fans. So we both have that kind of lyrical DNA in our minds. And so when we sit down to write, I think we both bring that. It informs how we write. But I am very adept at doing things quickly. I have a huge amount of words swimming around in my head, and I can just reach out and grab them. But that lyricism the poetic lyricism, that's always in my mind. No matter what it is I'm thinking about, I tend to phrase things, even if I'm writing prose. People have often said that when I'm writing prose, it's very lyrical. I just had that sort of rhythm in my head. And, uh, the subject matter that Lindsay and I were tackling was, was so dear to us. We were so impassioned about that, it just became easy to bring it out.

That is a gift. I mean, really, really a gift. Oh my goodness. I hope you both realize that. I mean, just individually, but then as a team, that is really, really extraordinary. You're very lucky that you found each other.

We were lucky. We're lucky. We realize that. Yes.

Oh my goodness. So, you know, my audience is, is pretty niched as well. A lot of people who listen to my show are parents and allies of LGBTQ kids, youth, adolescents, young adults. So this is definitely, you know, when I— this came into my inbox and I was like, oh, you know, not a direct translation, but definitely a parallel, right? Like, there's a lot of— yeah, here that I love and it's so beautiful. And, um, so I'm wondering if you, you know, just some words of wisdom that can translate from what you wrote in this book, from what you shared in this book to a parent who might be just beginning this journey with their child?

Mm-hmm. I think that there are a lot of overlays because whenever you're looking at any individual who's part of a group that is marginalized or disparaged on a broad scale,, uh, in society, many of the issues that they confront are the same issues that others in other demographics confront as well, because the overall issue is the dehumanization of that person. So you can be African American in a racial caste system in America and you're dehumanized. You can be poor in a society that favors wealth and you can be dehumanized. You look at the caste system in India, for example, one of the most dehumanizing systems of apartheid anywhere. And so when you look at children who grow up LGBTQIA+, uh, they are constantly dealing with not only the peril of their own psychology, of constantly questioning themselves, correct, undermining their own value because they're not finding value anywhere, even oftentimes not in their own home.

That's right.

But the greater pressure comes from the peers that they're with because they can't find community, which is essential if you're going to have any sense of belonging. You need to find that community with your peers. And so their sense of dehumanization can be far more, uh, have a far more gravity to it because as young people, they are yet not equipped to handle that, to emotionally deflect that or psychologically deflect that. And for parents who really are allies, I always say that they need to become more than allies because you can be an ally and be passive. To me, they need to be active engineers in the identity construction of their own children. I have a son who's gay, and I knew that he was when he was— before he was 2 years old. I knew that he was. And at the time that I realized that, I actually took some delight in knowing it. I did, because I didn't grow up with homosexual anxieties. I didn't grow up— it's strange to say that because I'm a kid of the '60s, but my mother was very open to lots of people, and she worked with a lot of individuals in fashion design. And so I got to meet a lot of people who were in the LGBTQ community and had a comfort level with it right off the bat. Also, by the time I was 15 years old, I developed a fascination for life sciences, part of which was genetics and evolutionary biology. And I started doing a lot of reading of research that was coming out of the Salk Institute. Out in California. And much of what they were concentrating on was trying to understand if there was a biological genetic substrate for homosexuality, uh, same-sex attraction, and, and finding out that there actually was. It legitimized the biology of it all. And one of the things that I came to understand— and what I'm saying, I'm saying because I hope parents who are listening are picking up on the point I'm making with all this information is that this is what you need to know if you want to help your child, okay? Because if you, if you don't take it from the approach that I'm suggesting that you might take it from, what ends up happening is you become susceptible to the social pressures out there because you're trying to fit in where everybody else is trying to tell you you should be. And that's the last thing you can do when it comes to your own child. So when I was 15, I was learning, for example, that about 8% of all animals will exhibit some sort of same-sex attraction, and then even a similar amount will exhibit hermaphroditic presentation. And, and in humans, we consider that— or turn that to be intersex, because hermaphrodites actually have functioning, uh, organs, whereas intersex don't. They may dual presentation, but not functioning, right. And so what that told me at that young age was that there was no set determination, a binary determination of what sexual presentation was, or what sexuality was, that it existed on a gradation. And that I saw it at that young age, frontier of understanding what the human animal was about because we didn't understand this at all because we already had a fixed notion on what it was and we were just going to run with that and make everybody fall into that category. So from early on, teenage years on, I never fell into that. I never felt that I had to subsidize an understanding of that. I was always fighting people. With that, I ended up having a very lonely teenage life. But what it made me, when I realized that my son at a very early age was gay, is it made me immediately— and this was not something I had to make a conscious decision to do— it made me immediately embrace him as I would any other child. It made me immediately embrace all of his humanity. Because I didn't see it as being an aberration. I didn't see it as being a perversion. I didn't see it as being a choice. I saw it as being an element of who he is. When I look at people and listen to people describe their sexuality, I don't hear it any differently than if you were to describe yourself as a person who wore glasses, or if you were a person who had blonde hair, or if you were a person who was 5'8". To me, it's a very benign adjective that describes who you are. And I think if parents out there were to start off with that as a foundational and a fundamental understanding of how to think about the relationship with their child, they wouldn't find it to be complex at all.

Right. Right.

So that's what I would recommend they start off with, doing that. It's not that hard.

Well, it's not that hard. It's like saying you love your child unconditionally.

Yeah, you just have to— part of what your love unconditionally is, is that you have to love— and the way I term it is you have to love with power. And what I mean by that is, is that you have to love knowing that you have to give them the strength to prevail and exist in a society that more likely is going to aggress against them. Is more likely going to antagonize against them. Now, my mother had to do that raising African-American children. So what I say is there's an overlay between the dehumanization of people, regardless of what demographic they happen to fall into, then it's the same. So my mother had to love us with power. She had to give us that internal strength, that internal power. And that truly, fully embracing and accepting who your child is Because if you don't, they're always going to think that there's something wrong with them coming from their own parents, right? And, and you're the, you're the people— mom and dad are the people— have to give them their greatest sense of self, their greatest sense of certainty. And so if you're operating with the thought, any thought at all, any doubt, any hesitancy, that some element of your child is something is abnormal or something that delegitimizes their humanity, then you're crippling them. You're going to harm them in some kind of way. And so I look at it again. I look at sexuality as a benign characteristic. I wear a size 13 shoe. That person over there happens to like men and he's a man. I don't see it any differently. I never have seen it. This is the problem when you take the religious intent, give it a political cause, and then you use it to persecute people. And so I don't have that problem, that complication.

No, you do not. That was so beautifully said. I feel like we should— like, that was kind of a drop the mic moment. Cut it there. We're done.

All right.

You really don't know how to improve or add to that. Bestselling author who is just extraordinary. Oh my gosh. You just made my, really made my entire day. Thank you so much.

I appreciate you saying that. But, but, but, but as I caution everybody, I can't talk the ears off an elephant so we can go on and on. I, I, for example, I remember growing up and my mother having worked with individuals who put on fashion shows. And did garments and so forth. And, and having met a few men who were in that business, and at the time, I was one of the sectors that they could go into where they actually earned income, was, was fashion, and it was beauty, and it was cosmetics, and it was hairstyling and so forth. So they were the ones who really were the experts at putting together fashion shows, which oftentimes were fundraisers for organizations in my neighborhood, in my community. And so I got to meet a lot of these men. And I got to befriend a lot of them and always found them to be fascinating because there was a vitality to them that I just didn't see in other people. But I came to understand them also to be individuals who found their own community. And I got to be invited into that community to really understand who they were as people. And so growing up, I was around them a lot and I saw the person. I didn't see the thing, because that's what society wants to do with people it doesn't like. It wants to call them a thing instead of realizing that they are a person.

Right.

And so that's where the name-calling comes in. Name-calling is that thing. And I never saw them as things. I never saw them as alien people. I always saw them as people who had hopes and fears, people who had heartache and laughter. People who had deeper understandings about elements of life that many of us who aren't challenged as they are. When every single day of your life is an issue of survival, you come to live life with a greater understanding of how to survive.

Right.

And you come to live life with a greater value of what living day to day actually is. And so many people that I found who've been most disparaged in life are the people that I've gotten my greatest lessons about what it means to be human. And I think that that is the question that we should all be asking. Any parent out there who is raising a child in what my sister— my sister's lesbian, my sister likes to call the alphabet community— any parent who's out there raising a child in the alphabet community should not be trying to understand their child in terms of their sexuality. This is what I would recommend. I'm not saying this is an orthodoxy. This is what I recommend. They should be simply trying to understand a child as being fully human because that's what they are.

Yes.

They're fully human. And if you help them understand that, then they can exist and be fully human anywhere they are in the world, anywhere they are in society, anywhere they are in any city that they're in. And I also advocate that by doing that, because there's nothing bigger than being human, there really isn't. You can be a woman, but that's not fully human. You can be a man, but that's not fully human. I can be 6'3", but that's not fully human. You can be 5'3", but that's not fully human. To be fully human is this composite is so big that it casts a shadow over everything else. So if you're developing that, there's no power anybody can have over you. And oftentimes it shuts down what might be adversarial because people cower in power. Mm-hmm. So give them that power. So good.

It's beautiful. I mean, really beautiful. So there's so much wisdom in that because I think as, you know, what I hear from people so often is, I'm so scared for my child. I don't know what to do. I, and you, it's so easy to kind of get wrapped up in that space, right? Where you're, then you can't see. So You offering this wisdom is so empowering and it's so freeing and just incredibly good advice for everyone listening. So I hope y'all are taking notes.

I hope you regard it that way. I really do. And you said, for example, parents who fear for their child's existence. There's not a parent anywhere in the world, anywhere in America, who has a daughter who doesn't fear for her existence. Yep. There's not a single one. So how, how are you processing that? How are you sending your daughter in the world when you know the hazards that face young girls and face grown women in this world? The hazards are far greater for girls and women than there are for boys and men. And so are you handicapping your daughter in some kind of way because she's a girl entering a world where she might find aggression, where she might find abrasions, where she might find misogyny and sexism? Uh, because if you're not considering her full humanity to deflect that, she will always be vulnerable to that. So I don't see that any differently than having a child who's a race minority who has to face that. Or having a child who has a disability, uh, and has to face that. Why is that any different? If we think it's different, then we will make it different for our children. And so we as parents can make that a problem. We don't need to make that a problem for them. They should fully embrace who they are as being natural. You should fully embrace who they are as being natural. Yep. There's There's oftentimes something wrong with how society sees them, but there's nothing wrong with how they see themselves.

Correct.

Okay. I go out in the world every day and there's something wrong with how society sees me. When I see people grabbing their purses and clutching and following me around in stores and so forth, there's something wrong with how society sees me, but there's nothing wrong with how I see myself. So I have a Teflon garment on my mind whenever I walk out of society. That stuff just bounces off of me because I don't enter the world as a Black man or as an African American man or as an African American. Those are elements of who I am. I enter the world as a human, as being fully human. There's nothing bigger than that. Nothing bigger than that. So I would ask those parents out there to, with care and love, and with the intent to power, give power to their children because they love with power, love strongly, love fiercely, that they will be able to give them that same Teflon shield.

I love that. Thank you. That is just perfect. Just like that. I would love to talk to you all day long, but I am watching our time very closely. So I just want to give you one more. I know we talked about the book just a little bit at the beginning, but I'd love to kind of circle back and end with that as well. So I will let you end with whatever you would like to say about the book, where people can find it, and all of those good things.

Uh, first of all, they can find it anywhere, anywhere you can get a book, you can find it. Whether it's your local store, whether it's a big chain, whether it's online. In your library. The book is available, it's keenly available, and I really hope people seek it out. The one thing I most, most want to say about the book is it's easy to say that it's about girl empowerment, but to me it's more than that, because I believe that no society will ever reach its maximum while denying half of its citizens. And America is yet to reach its maximum. There's no society on the planet that's done so, because patriarchy runs most societies. And so most societies are denying half their citizens. I want to live in a world where humanity is maximized. And so to me, as a matter of logic, then in order to have that more perfect union or that ultimate civilization, you have to bring women and girls full on board. You have to get the most out of them that you can and give them the belief that they can get the most out of themselves so they can make the most contribution to any society that they're in. And then we will have the most of whatever humanity can be. So to me, it's It's more than just an identity empowerment. It's how do we put a message inside of a child that's going to enable them to create the maximum society that any of us can live in? Because that's the society I want to live in. So that's the last thing I would say about it.

Love it. Thank you. Thank you so much for taking time out of your schedule to be with me and to be with all of my people. So, so appreciate it.

Thank you. I appreciate you giving me the time because you gave me a chance to talk. I love to talk.

Absolutely. Well, you know, that's what I do.

Right.

Oh my goodness.

Thanks so much for joining me today. If you enjoyed today's episode, I would be I am so grateful for a rating or review. Click on the link in the show notes or go to my website, chrysalismama.com, to stay up to date on my latest resources as well as to learn how you can work with me. Please share this podcast with anyone who needs to know that they are not alone and remember to just breathe. Until next time!