Velshi Banned Book Club: ‘Cleavage: Men, Women, and the Space Between Us’ by Jennifer Finney Boylan

What this episode is about

In "Cleavage: Men, Women, and the Space Between Us," Jennifer Finney Boylan explores the complexities of gender identity and societal perceptions of the transgender community, reflecting on her own journey through change and division. Using the multifaceted definition of "cleavage," she illustrates how personal and societal narratives intertwine, showcasing both progress and challenges faced over the last two decades since her first memoir.

Key takeaways

• Finney Boylan's 'Cleavage' reveals how a single word can embody both division and connection—it's a paradox of identity.
• Trans visibility has surged, yet so has hostility—proof that progress isn't always linear but riddled with complexities.
• In 2003, trans lives needed justification; today, they demand celebration—a shift from apology to unapologetic authenticity.
• Once, misunderstanding was met with decency; now, social media amplifies stereotypes—did we exchange wisdom for virality?
• 'Cleavage' isn't just a memoir; it's a mirror reflecting our collective struggle for empathy in a cleaved nation.

Who speaks in this episode?

• Ali Velshi (Host) · 7 min speaking
• Jennifer Finney Boylan (Guest) · 4 min speaking

What is discussed, and when

1. 0:00 – 3:00: Cleavage: Men, Women, and the Space Between Us, Jennifer Finney Boylan, She's Not There
2. 3:00 – 6:00: Jennifer Finney Boylan, Cleavage: Men, Women, and the Space Between Us, Penn America
3. 9:00 – 10:53: Cleavage: Men, Women, and the Space Between Us, Penn America

Notable quotes from "Velshi Banned Book Club: ‘Cleavage: Men, Women, and the Space Between Us’ by Jennifer Finney Boylan"

• This is the fifth memoir written by my friend, the award winning author and longtime member of the Velshi Band Book Club, Jennifer Finney Boylan.

  about Cleavage: Men, Women, and the Space Between Us · at 1:11

• Tool to build empathy then, today they're critical so right after commercial break i'm joined by jennifer finney boylan to discuss her latest memoir cleavage men women and the…

  about Jennifer Finney Boylan · at 3:11

Who and what is mentioned in this episode?

People

• Jennifer Finney Boylan — Person · Main guest · 4 mentions · first at 0:01
  Central interview subject and author being featured; discusses her memoir "Cleavage" and broader themes of change, trans visibility, and empathy through storytelling.

Books & papers

• Cleavage: Men, Women, and the Space Between Us — Book · Primary recommendation · 5 mentions · first at 0:02
  Main focus of the episode, discussed in depth regarding its themes of gender, change, and human connection.
• She's Not There — Book · Referenced work · 1 mention · first at 1:39
  Compared to 'Cleavage' to highlight changes in the perception of the transgender community over two decades.
  Published well over two decades AGO, BACK IN 2003, QUOTE, AS I LOOK BACK ON SHE'S NOT THERE NOW, IT'S IMPOSSIBLE FOR ME NOT TO NOTICE WHAT FEELS LIKE AN AIR OF APOLOGY TO THE WHOLE THING.

Companies & orgs

• Penn America — Company · Business focus · 2 mentions · first at 3:39
  Mentioned in relation to its research on book banning and its support for the book club.
  BY THE WAY, YOU ARE HERE TO TALK ABOUT YOUR BOOK BUT WE'RE POWERED by PEN America and the research that you all do about book banning.

Full transcript with timestamps

0:01 Jennifer Finney Boylan's latest memoi Cleavage Men Women and the Space Between Us was named with careful intention. Finney Boylan explains the title at the very end in the epilogue. Quote, one of the stranger aspects of the word cleavage is that it contains, its definition contains its own opposite, which is to say that to cleave means to divide, to split something in half, like the way gender divides humans or the way politics divides a country. But to cleave also means to stick to or to adhere close to someone emotionally, like the way the book of Mark suggests, a man shall leave his father and mother, and cleave to his wife.

0:39 And yet cleavage also means the space that exists between two separated things. I love that a single word can have all these meanings because at various moments, the journey I've been on has meant many different things to me, too. Indeed, Finney Boylan's point isn't just that only she has lived a life through many definitions and iterations. Her point is that we all do. What is life, but constant reliable change? And that question is at the center of today's Velshi Van Book Club feature, Cleavage. Men, women and the space between us.

1:11 This is the fifth memoir written by my friend, the award winning author and longtime member of the Velshi Band Book Club, Jennifer Finney Boylan. Of the many changes Finney Boylan explores in the book Cleavage, perhaps the most thought-provoking and necessary is how the perception, reality, and reception of the transgender community has changed in the past several years, for better and for worse. Like a Wheel of Fortune tarot card, Finney Boylan comes full circle and compares Cleavage with her first memoir called She's Not There, published well over two decades DECADES AGO, BACK IN 2003, QUOTE, AS I LOOK BACK ON SHE'S NOT THERE NOW, IT'S IMPOSSIBLE FOR ME NOT TO NOTICE WHAT FEELS LIKE AN AIR OF APOLOGY TO THE WHOLE THING.

1:52 IN SO MANY WAYS, THE AUTHOR OF THAT BOOK IS BEGGING THE READER, PLEASE DON'T hate me. I'm so sorry." The book sets out to justify what I then presumed was a situation the average reader would struggle to comprehend, and this is perhaps the biggest change from 1998, when I first began to come out to the present. People coming out as trans now aren't apologizing for who they are. Our lives are not a thing to be ashamed of or apologized for or explained. Our lives are a thing of wildness and tenderness and joy, end quote.

2:24 By the way, the book is full of joy. As for reception, since Phinney Boylan's own experience coming out, she says that, quote, people have received formal instructions on how to hate transgender people, end quote, hatred toward the transgender community has become a rallying cry for an increasingly visible and powerful faction of the American public. When Vinnie Boylan joined us on the Velshi Band Book Club to talk about her memoir Good Boy last year, I remarked on how her memoirs, through humor, well-placed anecdotes, pitch-perfect details and skillful writing, remind readers that we are all much more similar than we are different.

3:01 Connection and in understanding. Since last year, the hate, the division, the cleave, if you will, between Americans has only grown. If Phinney Boylan's words and her story were an important tool to build empathy then, today they're critical so right after commercial break i'm joined by jennifer finney boylan to discuss her latest memoir cleavage men women and the space between us you Today's meeting of the Valshie Band Book Club is officially underway. I'm joined for the second time by Jennifer Finney Boylan, a member of the Penn America Board of

3:49 THANK YOU FOR BEING BACK WITH US. BY THE WAY, YOU ARE HERE TO TALK ABOUT YOUR BOOK BUT WE'RE POWERED by PEN America and the research that you all do about book banning. So I thank you for that relationship as well. This book is fantastic, but one of the things that hit me was very, very early on in the book when you talk about when you first came out. I DON'T KNOW HOW, IT WAS LONG AGO ENOUGH THAT PEOPLE DIDN'T HAVE A SORT OF A SCAFFOLDING OF THINGS TO THINK ABOUT A TRANSGENDER PERSON. RIGHT, NO ONE HAD BEEN TAUGHT TO HATE ME YET.

4:18 THEY MIGHT HAVE BEEN PUZZLED, WHAT WAS THAT What was that like? What were people's reactions? In some ways, it may have been easier then. I mean, it's funny because now there are a lot of transgender people. We're in the public eye. But with all this increased INCREASED VISIBILITY, I THINK HAS COME ALSO INCREASED BLOWBACK, OBVIOUSLY. YEAH. BACK THEN, I MEAN, I CAME OUT TO MY CHRISTIAN EVANGELICAL REPUBLICAN MOTHER AFTER, went on a late on a Sunday night after giving her a very large gin and tonic. And I told her, no, I spilled the beans and I told her the truth.

4:52 And I started to cry because I said, I'm sorry in fact, she said these three remain faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love. So in some ways it was easier then because it seemed like such an unusual and obscure thing. People, all you can do, all people could do then was fall back on their own sense of common decency. Right. And they might have had prejudices but it still wasn't as built up as we've now made it. Now there's an instant response you can get off of social media about what you're supposed to think about trans people and the threat that they pose to your family.

5:42 Yeah, my mother didn't give me a lecture about social contagions. She didn't give me a lecture about trans women in sports. She didn't give me a lecture about trans women You know, all she said was that she loved me and that we'd work it out. But when you came out, you weren't a child. You weren't young. You weren't a teenager. You were married. Yeah, it used to be. And had a child. Yeah, I'm still and still married now. To the same person. 37 years, 12 as husband and wife, 25 now as wife and wife. I just need to pause for a second there.

6:09 That is a remarkable story. You've had you've had two married lives with the same person for all intents and purposes. Well, in a way, it's one married life to my wife who is named Deirdre. And if she's watching, I love you, sweetie. Thanks for watching. And thanks for the last 37 years. That's an amazing story. Talk about people being able to manage things that they were not expecting. Well, I hate to be an English professor, but Ovid tells us in the Metamorphosis, what do we know? We know none of us is only one thing.

6:40 And that life is about change. If you get married when you're 30, as I did, by the time you're nearly 70, as I am now, if your marriage is still the same marriage as it was 40 years earlier, your marriage is in trouble. Because the idea is not that we are with each other and that we never change. The idea is that we are all together, embracing change together. But you write in the book, in the introduction, you say perhaps the THE CENTRAL QUESTION OF THIS BOOK IS NOT SPECIFIC TO GENDER AT ALL. INSTEAD IT'S THE UNIVERSAL DILEMMA AT THE HEART OF SO MUCH HUMAN TROUBLE.

7:15 WHY IS CHANGE THE THING WE ALL LONG FOR AS WELL AS THE THING we most fear. We are afraid of change, even though we long for it. It's fundamentally weird. And I think particularly changes that you don't understand, things that you don't know about. And I think the current political movement or the moment that we're in, it's not so much about hatred of trans people. It's just hatred of people who are different. It's isolating the small, vulnerable minority. And making them kind of the punching bag, the whipping girls of, of, of difference.

7:54 You write, you write books that have similar things that could be memoirs. They're all, they're told in different ways and it's remarkable that you're able to tell similar stories in so many different ways. But what's the goal? Because you put your information out there. Is the idea that you YOU HAVE GOT AN OFFERING FOR EVERYBODY TO TRY AND UNDERSTAND YOUR STORY IN YOUR LIFE. WHY HAVE YOU PUT YOURSELF OUT THERE? THE IDEA IS TO OPEN HEARTS THAT WE, THAT'S WHAT STORIES DO. STORIES HAD THIS, THIS, magical ability to change hearts, to change minds, even when you're not expecting it.

8:30 Because you enter someone else's life through the mystery of storytelling. And I think that's why books are being banned. Because there are people out there who do not want anyone to see the world other than they do, in a way other than they do. The opening of the hearts in your books, whether it's this one or your books about your life through the eyes of the dogs that you've had, is that it's weirdly normal. There's nothing that one could describe about you as normal in the way we think our lives are going to unfold.

9:03 And yet I listen to your stories and they're kind of funny. They're about what you like, what you bake, what you eat, how you cook. Somebody said to me, I think it was after I was on the Oprah show, someone wrote me and said the weird thing about you is you seem almost like a person someone could

9:29 know. They're all people who have families, who have histories and who have stories. My mother said to me once, it's impossible to hate anyone whose story you know. And so that's the business that we should all be in, uh, that we should all be hearing stories, learning stories, telling stories. And that's, that's why they're trying to shut down these books. Well, again, thanks to the team at Penn America for giving us the raw material and the information and fighting back against book banning. That's how we knew this was a big issue, and we rely so heavily upon you.

10:03 So thank you. Thank you for the book again. I am coming to know you. The only thing we don't have in common is, boy, you are a great baker. You're a great YOU ARE A GREAT BAKER. I AM A GREAT BAKER. I MAKE GREAT PIZZA. BUT I CAN TEACH YOU HOW TO MAKE GREAT PIZZA. WELL, THAT WOULD BE AN ACCOMMISHMENT. I APPRECIATE ONE OF MY CHILDREN ONCE SAID OUR FAMILY IS HELD TOGETHER WITH CHEESE. I LOVE IT. JENNIFFER FINNEY-BOYLAND IS IS A LONG-TIME MEMBER OF THE BELSHIBAND BOOK CLUB AND A TRUSTEE AT PAN AMERICA AND THE AUTHOR OF MANY IMPORTANT WORKS OF LITERATURE INCLUDING CLEAVAGE, MEN, WOMEN, AND THE SPACE BETWEEN US WHICH IS OUT RIGHT NOW in paperback.

Questions about this episode

Who speaks in "Velshi Banned Book Club: ‘Cleavage: Men, Women, and the Space Between Us’ by Jennifer Finney Boylan"?

Ali Velshi (Host), Jennifer Finney Boylan (Guest).

What is "Velshi Banned Book Club: ‘Cleavage: Men, Women, and the Space Between Us’ by Jennifer Finney Boylan" about?

In "Cleavage: Men, Women, and the Space Between Us," Jennifer Finney Boylan explores the complexities of gender identity and societal perceptions of the transgender community, reflecting on her own journey through change and division. Using the multifaceted definition of "cleavage," she illustrates how personal and societal narratives intertwine, showcasing both progress and challenges faced…

What is mentioned in this MS NOW episode?

4 people, works and ideas are mentioned, including Cleavage: Men, Women, and the Space Between Us, Jennifer Finney Boylan, She's Not There, Penn America. Each one on this page links to its own page with every episode that mentions it.

How long is "Velshi Banned Book Club: ‘Cleavage: Men, Women, and the Space Between Us’ by Jennifer Finney Boylan"?

The episode runs 11 min; the transcript is about 1,865 words in 18 timestamped sections.

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