Hi and welcome back to The Gender Reveal Party, I'm Jay Pryor your host. This week we are talking to April Patillo. April is another friend of mine. Once again, I want to thank April for her generosity and all of my friends for their generosity coming on the show and sharing with you the real reveal; revealing gender in ways that are powerful and amazing. And, you know, I was thinking about this today, gender is like poetry or art. I had a woman approach me who's been listening to the podcast and said, “could you give a definition for femme?”, and my immediate response was no I cannot, nor would I ever try. The thing about gender is that you can't just stamp one label on it and say that's what it is, there's not some stamp definition. Those of you who are cisgender heterosexual people who have lived nothing but the binary may have trouble getting your head around that and I get that. Sometimes I look at a piece of art and I think what in the actual heck did anybody think painting that. Now somebody could come up right behind me and say wow what a beautiful rose garden. They see a rose garden, I see... I don't know what that is, but it's art. Gender is like that. You cannot tell another person what their gender is, you can't tell another person what their gender expression is. Everybody's is different and that's the beauty of it. So you know, one of my big hopes in doing this work is to help you realize that gender is fluid and it runs the gamut and that means that you have the freedom to express yourself and your gender any way you want. So today we're meeting with my friend April Patillo who is also a sociologist and April's one of my smart friends. I have lots of friends and I have lots of smart friends and April's one of my smartest. I really love to surround myself with really smart people and April is somebody that, I think I say this in the interview, I can't remember it's been a minute, but any time that we're talking or having a conversation April can always bring in the theory, “let me tell you about the queer theory”. So I love that about her and I love - that's one of the reasons I wanted to bring her to you, is that I feel like you're going to learn a lot today. This is a little bit of a long interview, so if you want to, you know, do it in parts I understand that. But I really am delighted to introduce you to my friend April Patillo. Thanks for joining us.
