Family Proclamations: Rethinking Relationships, Gender, and Sexuality

Mainstream feminism today was created mostly by white women, for white women. It has soaked into American pop culture, social media, the economy, politics, and more. Rafia Zakaria wants that to change. In this episode, we discuss her book Against White Feminism: Notes on Disruption.

Rafia Zakaria is a Pakistani-American attorney, feminist, journalist, and author. Her books include he authored the books The Upstairs Wife: An Intimate History of Pakistan and Against White Feminism: Notes on Disruption. 

Laurie Lee Hall was a promising college student studying architecture, and she was known to the world as a man. When she encountered The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints she saw a well-defined path that fit the gender she was assigned at birth. So she buried her past to become the perfect Mormon man. 

Wearing her male disguise, she married, had children, and rose to the position of chief architect for the LDS Church, overseeing its most sacred building projects. But her past refused to stay buried. Could she become who she really was without risking her family, her career, and her church membership? Her whole world?

Laurie Lee Hall is author of Dictates of Conscience: From Mormon High Priest to My New Life as a Woman. She was raised in New England and trained in architecture at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Her career included managing design and construction programs for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints as its chief architect. She simultaneously served in several ecclesiastical leadership positions until her church excommunicated her following her gender transition. Since then she has served on the executive committee of Affirmation: LGBTQ Mormons, Families & Friends. In 2023, she became the first transgender recipient of Affirmation’s Paul Mortensen Award, for leadership within the LGBTQ/Mormon-­adjacent community. She and her partner, Nancy Beaman, live in Kentucky and have nine children and twenty-­four grandchildren.

Trump's 2018 zero tolerance policy which separated immigrant children from their parents at the border with no plan for reuniting them shocked the conscience of many Americans. And even though Trump claimed to cease the practice within weeks, zero tolerance is rooted in American law that dates back 100 years and remains on the books today. It can easily happen again. 

Efrén Olivares was on the front lines defending immigrant families, and the work was personal. Efrén himself is an immigrant, and he joins us to talk about his incredible book, My Boy Will Die of Sorrow: A Memoir of Immigration From the Front Lines.  

Efrén Olivares is the deputy legal Director of the Immigrant Justice Project at the Southern Poverty Law Center. He was the lead lawyer in a successful landmark petition to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights on behalf of families separated under the zero-tolerance policy. He previously directed the racial and economic justice program at the Texas Civil Rights Project. His writings on immigration policy have been published by the New York Times, USA Today, and Newsweek. He has testified before Congress and at briefings on Capitol Hill about immigration and border policies. He was the first member of his family to attend college. He is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania and Yale Law School. He is author of My Boy Will Die of Sorrow: A Memoir of Immigration From the Front Lines.

"We are effectively run in this country via the Democrats, by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they've made and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too. And it's just a basic fact, if you look at Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, AOC, the entire future of the Democrats is controlled by people without children. And how does it make any sense that we've turned our country over to people who don't really have a direct stake in it."

—J.D. Vance, Republican Senator and Vice Presidential candidate 

In this mini episode, historian Peggy O'Donnell Heffington returns to talk about how women without children became a focal point of the 2024 presidential election. Check out her full interview here. 

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As a Black woman growing up in England, Catherine Joy White sometimes felt out of place at home, but also disconnected from the heritage of her Jamaican ancestors. Until she began connecting with the stories of remarkable but often forgotten Black woman from history. Their stories helped her re-envision what beauty means, how silence can also be strength, what "self care" really means, and what courage looks like.

She found fortitude which, like a thread of gold, can connect all of us to the past, keep us grounded in the present, and point us toward a better future. 

Catherine Joy White is author of This Thread of Gold: A Celebration of Black Womanhood. She earned a Master’s Degree in Women’s Studies from Oxford. She is an actor, writer, filmmaker, and founder and CEO of the award-winning Kusini Productions, a company established to champion the voices of Black women. White is also a gender advisor to the United Nations, and was honored as a member of the Forbes 30 Under 30 Class of 2022. 

Abi Maxwell's daughter wanted the pink shoes. She wanted to dress as a witch on Halloween in kindergarten. She wore her hair long and envied the dance costumes other girls got to wear for the recital. The problem was that Abi's daughter was "known" to her, and to their conservative New Hampshire town, as a boy.

Suddenly, Abi's beloved hometown became engulfed in a hurricane of controversy with her daughter right in the eye of the storm. In this episode, Abi tells the story of how her own ignorance about trans people turned into understanding about her own daughter, and then fear for her family's safety. 

Abi Maxwell is author of the novels Lake People and The Den. After graduating from the writing program at the University of Montana, she spent many years working in public libraries. She is a dedicated advocate for the rights of transgender youth. Her latest book is called One Day I'll Grow Up and Be a Beautiful Woman: A Mother's Story.

Full transcript available at familyproclamations.org. 

History is full of women who never gave birth to children, whether because they couldn't or even didn't want to. Historian Peggy O'Donnell Heffington says her research about women without children made her feel more settled about her own choice not to have kids, but it also surprisingly made her feel greater solidarity with women who make the opposite choice. She joins us to talk about her book Without Children: The Long History of Not Being a Mother.

Peggy O'Donnell Heffington is Assistant Senior Instructional Professor and Associate Director of Undergraduate Studies at the University of Chicago. She teaches and writes on feminism, women's movements, and motherhood in American and European history. Her first book is called Without Children: The Long History of Not Being a Mother (Seal Press, 2023). Her writing has also appeared in Jezebel, the Boston Globe, Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere. She received her PhD in History from the University of California, Berkeley.

Full transcript available at familyproclamations.org. 

Up to 90% of women and trans men experience menstrual abnormalities or pelvic issues at some point in their lives. Dr. Karen Tang says too many people are suffering in silence, and that's why she wrote a comprehensive guide called It's Not Hysteria: Everything You Need to Know About Your Reproductive Health (but Were Never Told). We're talking all about reproductive health, so if you've ever met with a gynecologist, this one's for you. And if you haven't, this one is also very much for you! 

Dr. Karen Tang is author of It's Not Hysteria: Everything You Need to Know About Your Reproductive Health (but Were Never Told). She's a board-certified gynecologist, a minimally invasive gynecologic surgeon, and an internationally recognized leader in reproductive health, and social media. She received her MD and Masters in Public Health at Columbia University, her residency training in OB/Gyn at Beth Israel Deaconess/Harvard Medical School, and her fellowship in advanced gynecologic endoscopic surgery at Legacy Health in Portland. Her areas of medical expertise include endometriosis, fibroids, chronic pelvic pain, and gender affirming gynecologic care for transgender and non-binary individuals. Follow her on social media (@karentangmd) or learn more at karentangmd.com.

Full transcript available here at familyproclamations.org. 

Bella DePaulo has been single her entire life, but she doesn't want anyone's pity about that. This social psychologist loves being single, and she always has. In her latest book Single At Heart she highlights the lives of people who are thriving not in spite of being uncoupled, but because of it. She joins us to talk about what her research uncovers about the "Power, Freedom, and Heart-Filling Joy of Single Life."

Bella DePaulo has been described by The Atlantic as “America’s foremost thinker and writer on the single experience.” She is a social psychologist who earned her PhD at Harvard University and works as an academic affiliate in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her latest book is Single At Heart: The Power, Freedom, and Heart-Filling Joy of Single Life. She also blogs at Psychology Today.

A full transcript of this episode is available here.

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Lauren Sandler is an "only child" expert. She is one. She has one. And as an award-winning journalist, Lauren dug deep to answer some of the most pressing questions about singletons. Are they more lonely? Are they more selfish? Would they be better off with siblings? She answers these questions and more in her book, One and Only: The Freedom of Having an Only Child and the Joy of Being One. 

Lauren Sandler is an award-winning journalist and author based in Brooklyn. She is author of multiple best-selling books including This Is All I Got: A New Mother’s Search for Home, Righteous: Dispatches from the Evangelical Youth Movement, and One and Only: The Freedom of Having an Only Child, and the Joy of Being One. Her essays and features have appeared in dozens of publications including Time, The New York Times, Slate, The Atlantic, The Nation, The New Republic, The Guardian, New York Magazine, and Elle. She has been on staff at Salon and at NPR, where she worked on All Things Considered, Morning Edition, Weekend Edition, and the Cultural Desk. And there’s even more! Visit laurenosandler.com/about to see what she's up to now.

Complete transcript available at familyproclamations.org.