Love How You Look, No Matter Who You Are: A Beauty Entrepreneur and LGBTQIA Activist on Identity

goop beauty editors Jean Godfrey-June and Megan O’Neill love to ask—and answer—questions. In their podcast, The Beauty Closet, they’re doing both. To familiarize you with each week’s guest, we came up with a goop beauty (and life) questionnaire.

THIS WEEK WE’RE TALKING TO:

Jodie Patterson, LGBTQIA and human rights activist, author, cochair of the Human Rights Campaign Foundation board, and beauty entrepreneur

Life is always changing, points out activist, author, founder, and mom Jodie Patterson—so you have to adapt. After multiple careers (in fashion, beauty, retail, and…the circus), five children (one of them transgender), a TED Talk, and two books (The Bold World and Born Ready: A Boy Named Penelope), the incredibly stylish cochair of the Human Rights Campaign Foundation board is happy to share how she does it on the newest episode of the Beauty Closet podcast. How to make yourself and your kids feel beautiful is one of her amazing, totally doable tips; how to see hair as love is another. And of course, we had to know how she gets her glowy skin (believe it or not, she’s fifty).

In wide-leg cropped jeans, a furry anorak with a crossing-the-tundra air, and pristine white high-tops with the laces elegantly looped around her ankles, she is also one of the chicest women we know, not to mention the most chiseled. “Yoga!” says Patterson, who believes that actual physical flexibility helps with mental flexibility.

We talked about how flexibility eases difficult conversations, where beauty (physical appearance) comes in when you’re growing up transgender, why terms like “ethnic aisle” are misleading and useless, and how to own your identity even when you feel marginalized. “There are moments when you feel worn down by identity,” says Patterson. “I have that feeling when we walk into a room as a queer black family. I used to think, Oh, gosh, this is a hard life to live. But now, I think, This is so great—nobody knows what we know as a queer black family. Find the upside.” We could’ve talked to her all night, but she had to rush home to prepare for a speaking engagement. We did manage to squeeze a bit more brilliance out of her when we sent her the goop beauty questionnaire.