Jodie Patterson is an author, activist, beauty explorer and mother of 5. She holds the position of Chair of the Human Rights Campaign Foundation Board, our nation’s largest LGBT organization. As a globally recognized activist, she speaks on topics of radical parenting, identity, and gender.
When her son announced at the age of 3 “Mama I’m not a girl. I’m a boy”, she set out to inform herself, shift her own bias and change the way her community understood gender.
Patterson chronicled that journey in her memoir, The Bold World: A Memoir of Family and Transformation – hailed by Alice Walker as “Marvelous”.
Cosmopolitan Magazine filmed a mini documentary on jodie’s family in 2016 – reaching over 11 million views.
Her second book, Born Ready: The True Story Of A Boy Named Penelope allows her 5 children’s voices to be heard, showing us how an entire community can be flexible and change for those they love.
Patterson is also a long-standing entrepreneur, co-founding two beauty companies and receiving Beauty Skin Expert of the Year award by Cosmopolitan Magazine. She co-owns the live performance venue Joe’s Pub at the Public Theater.
Along with the work Patterson does with the Human Rights Campaign, she sits on Mount Sinai’s Institute for Health Equity Research Task Force, the Advisory Board of the Ackerman Institute’s Gender & Family Project, and Mount Sinai’s Center for Transgender Medicine and Surgery Advisory Board. The United Nations recognized Patterson as a Champion of Change.
Jodie Patterson live in Brooklyn where she co-raises her children with love, education and family solidarity.
In this episode we talk about:
- growing up being in many different worlds living in NYC
- the message of “walking in like you own the place” she got from her father and what that really looked like and meant
- as individuals we get to determine who we are
- attending an all Black female college and what that experience was like
- following what was interesting to her and how that shaped her professional life and several careers
- having ideas and then thinking how can I gather the people to make this happen with me instead of taking it all on it’s own
- her family life with 5 kids, one adopted, and mixed family
- her then three year old identifying their own gender and her families journey in raising a transgender boy named Penelope
- how much as a society we don’t know, see, or think about being transgender because of how media displays it
- what inspired her to write her memoir The Bold World and how her life journey supports how she has been able to support Penelope and her families journey
- navigating being a voice for transgender while being the mother of 5 one of whom doesn’t believe that transgender exists, and one of whom is transgender
- the muscle of detaching
- how she “labs it out” with her kids to give them all a space to talk it out and not necessarily be right but be heard
- Which keychain she chose from my line and why!
Make sure to get her memoir The Bold World and Born Ready, The True Story of a Boy Named Penelope
You can find more about Jodie on her site and follow Jodie @jodiepatterson
LINKS to other things/people/music we mentioned!
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