Firing The Voice Police (Part 1) With The Vocal Fries

We usually ask folks to support our show on Patreon. Today, we wanted to suggest places to support crucial abortion services. Planned Parenthood Shout Your Abortion National Abortion Federation **NOTE: During this episode, we refer to Rachel Jeantel by her last name only. We wanted to clarify and use her full name here. Rachel Jeantel was a primary prosecution witness at Trayvon Martin's murder trial. Court officials claimed she was "hard to understand" and ultimately her testimony was dismissed as not credible.** A couple months ago, Jeannie asked the BTSW Facebook group whether anyone had ever gotten criticized for how they speak or sound while at work. The response was overwhelming. So many listeners had stories about getting their voice or speech policed on the job. Megan Figueroa and Carrie Gillon know about voice policing better than most - and the many ways it causes more harm than good. They're the cohosts of the excellent podcast The Vocal Fries, the podcast about linguistic discrimination. Plus, Carrie is a former professor of linguistics and the Language Planner and Researcher for the Squamish Nation, and Megan recently finished her PhD at the University of Arizona, where she's a Project Manager at a language development lab. Carrie and Megan go deep on the ways linguistic discrimination can harm women on the job and elsewhere, and why all of us who have taken joy in correcting someone for using the wrong "your" or "their" on Twitter maybe need to check ourselves.