Hi SweetSmarties, I'm so excited to share my interview with Dr. Judy Y. Chu! Her work is really important to me, and her book, When Boys Become Boys: Development, Relationships, & Masculinity is my favorite of all the literary sources I've read in my Progressive Parenting Project research. She was also in one of my favorite documentaries, The Mask You Live in, by the Representation Project. I rewatched it recently, 10 years after I first saw it, and I still found it very impactful, so I recommend you read Judy's book and watch that documentary, if you're interested in Gender Socialization, particularly how it begins in children and how certain aspects of it can be restrictive.

Our interview lasted over 2 hours, so I divided it into 2 parts, and recorded a little epilogue for you explaining that at the end of this episode. You'll probably notice Judy's and my audio sound really different, and that's because not only did we conduct our conversation remotely, but unfortunately her microphone on her wired ear phones rubbed against her hair and clothes the whole time, so I did my best to remove those rustling sounds. As a result, her voice sounds kind of far away, or like I recorded a phone call on speaker or something. I tried my best to normalize the volume, and align our voices, after editing our audio tracks separately, so I'm sorry if it doesn't sound ideal, but trust me, this is a lot better than it sounded originally. lol

Anyway, in this first part I speak about how significantly her work impacted me, she speaks about her background and path to this field, we talk about our interpretations of Progressive Parenting, her 2 year study from her book, specifically the changes she noticed in the young boys she interviewed in terms of their masculinity development between the ages of 4 and 5 (as well as briefly at 6 and 8), and how we believe many aspects of our humanity should not be gendered, like personality traits, behaviors, emotions, interests, activities, etc.

In the next part, we discuss how to navigate the world as it is, while still striving for improvement, my conference work from my Sociology of Education class, touching on the ideas of Pluralistic Ignorance and the Dyadic Power Thesis, and we end by expressing our appreciation for each other, and how much we enjoyed our interaction. :)

Lastly, my epilogue sounds the way it does, because I'm a little sick right now (8/20/25 when I recorded it and when I'm publishing this episode), so that explains the contrast between the way I am in the interview on 8/11/25. I hope you enjoy listening to this part of our discussion, and the next part I'll release on 8/28! Thank you! Talk to you then! :D

P.S. I remembered during the interview that the linguistic dichotomy I was referring to is Prescriptivism vs Descriptivism, and thought about mentioning it, but didn’t want to interrupt our flow, so I decided to just include it here. 😄