I've also been working with the Challengers Club in the inner city of Los Angeles for 15 years now, I guess, and it's essentially an inner-city recreation club for boys and girls.
I always try to act as though there is a little boy or a little girl around, and I try never to do anything that would give them a bad example.
You put three girls in a house, and all of a sudden before you know it, you're talking about boys and drinking whiskey, and things go down and you get deep real quick.
I'm from the generation that had the boys' door and the girls' door when you went to school, and you got in big trouble if you went in the wrong one.
When we run, hide and try to deny our trauma the little boy or girl within comes back to seek validation, healing and peace.
A boy or girl who has gone through the eight grades should possess a complete, practical education and should have received special training in some specific line of work, fitting him or her to earn a livelihood.
Learning, while at school, that the charge for the education of girls was the same as that for boys, and that, when they became teachers, women received only half as much as men for their services, the injustice of this distinction was so apparent.
Providing better computer science education in public schools to kids, and encouraging girls to participate, is the only way to rewrite stereotypes about tech and really break open the old-boys' club.
I think it's great for my boys to have a girl in the house, just to understand at least a little bit about what makes a woman tick - not that I can certainly figure that out, because I can't.
The truth is, I think country music... there's a lot of great people, and just being raised the way a lot of country boys and girls are, hopefully there's just a lot of respect.
When you start one of these programs, school lunch programs, in a country that heretofore had nothing of that kind, immediately school enrollment jumps dramatically. Girls and boys get to the classroom with the promise of a good meal once a day.
But whatever the Lord throws at me right now, I think I've been given more blessings than I ever deserved. If he wants to top it off with anything - boy, girl - I would love either of them.
I went to an all-girls' Christian convent school run by nuns. It was fun, but when I was 15, I said, 'Mum, that's it - I need to go where there are some boys.'
It's well known by now that I had a special need to get Maureen's goat when ever the opportunity presented itself. I was a boy and she was the enemy... a girl.
I just write characters, and somehow they happen to be a boy and a girl. When the story is put together, and their characters interwoven, they do end up together somehow.
I could do whatever I wanted as a girl, whatever my brother did. I could play against the boys and achieve whatever they did.
My first conscious thought of 'I should be like that and not like this' was probably at about six, and I was playing with... I have a twin brother, and we were playing with our twin cousins, who are a boy and a girl.
When Bound was released, Boys don't Cry wasn't out yet. Therefore it was very taboo to play a lesbian. I loved the part, because girls never get to play the typical guy parts.
I grew up like a lot of country boys and girls do - amongst the pine trees, dirt roads, farms, mules and people who were real.
It's fun being one of the boys. It's fun to have a character that's rough and gets down and dirty and not to be this precious girl who just sits in the corner and just sort of stands by the action.
I've nothing against kids reading anything they please, but I do have a problem with pink books for girls and black books for boys.
