Three questions to Chrissy

Before we dive in Chrissy, tell us a little bit about yourself!

I’m a 53 year old Gen X cisgender woman, wife, mom, writer, yoga teacher, reader, and thinker. Sometimes I think books and ideas are my best friends, despite happily designed a life around my family (my husband of 28 years our three young adult kids), my yoga community, my friends, etc. I’m neither a night owl nor early bird…sweet spot is closer to10:00am-2:00pm! I love teaching yoga because there is always something new to learn and because it forces me to move my body to balance out the number of hours I sit either reading or writing. I am particularly drawn to abstract concepts and how they interrelate, like physics, complex systems, contemplative sciences, evolutionary or cultural biology, nature, etc. but also love reading literary fiction. But for good measure, I also love dad jokes, puns, and legitimately formulaic, low brow television series. I’ve got range! The connective tissue is curiosity…podcasts, books, email newsletters, YouTube videos, you name it. :)

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What is something you’ve changed your mind about recently? 

Ha - it’s probably more accurate to say that I’m trying to change my mind than that I have changed my mind  successfully but...I’m trying to be less ANTI-pedantic about language. And yes, I didn’t technically need a double-negative but used it deliberately to highlight what first felt counterintuitive, at least to me — i.e., pedantic isn’t usually a quality most people aspire to, and I still fundamentally believe that i.) language is meant to evolve and that ii.) we should expect and rely on shared definitions that are descriptive (i.e., based in widespread cultural use), more than prescriptive (i.e., decided by any one authority). 

But (!), I also think that too much disinformation and misinformation is allowed to thrive in today’s digital world, and that the resulting increased pace of language change is too easily conflated with the equally increased pace of language subversion, by authoritarians, lazy content creators and commentators, hapless or willfully ignorant social media users, etc. 

So maybe more of us do need to question, challenge, or resist the ways that certain definitions and meanings are allowed to shift without enough push back. I don’t mean words like ‘literal,’ which is too far gone to save anyway, but words like ‘liberal,’ ‘capitalism,’ etc. What nuances and gradations of meaning are being added or lost before there is time for a fair fight? Maybe this does actually jive with my philosophy — because though I had implicitly meant dictionaries, “authority” could also refer to any one person or group with arbitrary influence and power over the rest of us.

Who is someone you admire and why? 

Amy Poehler! I can’t get enough of her podcast, “Good Hang,” which I consider the Ted Lasso of podcasts. I have always liked her, especially on both SNL and Parks and Rec, but have realized how much I admire her. The way she runs the show and interacts with guests is so warm, intuitive, and positive — like the fact that she starts each episode by first talking to a friend of the guest so they can ’talk well’ about that person behind their backs. Now that’s a type of language subversion I can get behind. She’s funny, always in a kind way, and has consistently been a great advocate for women, especially those that have helped her raise her children. 

If you had to give a TED Talk, what topic would you choose and why?    

Oh my gosh, I’m obsessed with the degree to which culture defines what we used to consider either a function of biology or psychology. My TED talk would attempt to synthesize and connect the dots between everything I have gleaned across books like The WEIRDest People in the World, Sapiens, The Dawn of Everything, 7 Lessons About the Brain, Why Fish Don’t Exist, Notes on Complexity, and more! That said, if I had to give the talk tomorrow, I’d be screwed so may have to resort to something I know a little better, such as the reality that Yoga, mindfulness, and the like are as much a community practice than a self practice, that self-care and pampering are two different things, and that more focus and societal resources are needed to support the lost art of social connection, not as a nice-to-have but as a must-have for us to survive. 

What's something exciting you're working on?

I’m preparing to release the 2nd edition of an anthology that I co-created and wrote a few years ago called Trans Anthology Project: Real Stories & Reflections from Gender-Diverse Youth and Parents. It’s a project very near and dear to my heart, having grown from a single essay I wrote in 2019 about my experience parenting my trans son. To grow it into an anthology, me and my writing partner (a therapist who has worked with hundreds of gender-diverse teens and their families) leveraged social media to solicit full-length stories and poems from gender-diverse teens/young adults and parents across the US AND/OR to engage with anonymous online questionnaires. The resulting collection represents over 200 distinct voices and is interspersed with foundational educational material on gender and various aspects of gender diversity to allow all readers, regardless of knowledge or experience, to gain a deeper and more nuanced understanding as they read the personal stories in the collection, and with which to further inform their overall understanding of gender in the real world. 

We self-published the first edition of the book in 2024, before the 2024 US election, using small donations from family and friends. We were immediately blown away by the positive feedback, including a starred review by Kirkus Reviews, who also later included it in a list of top indie books. At the same time, we wrote it before the severe anti-trans backlash that Trump's re-election unleashed. Quicker than we expected, the tone felt insufficient and the educational material out of date. In addition, because we had been in a rush to get the book out before the election, we knew all along that we would eventually need to balance the voices (e.g., we had too many trans masc/male voices at the expense of others). So, my writing partner and I are using funds from a generous donor to publish a second edition. For this second edition, we re-wrote the educational material to reflect objective changes and as importantly to integrate feedback from a panel of trans young adults about its subjective accuracy. We also collected additional stories and poems to increase representation of trans femme/female voices and others. The 2nd edition is currently in layout and will hopefully be available sometime this summer!!!