Inflection Point with Lauren Schiller

Today, we hear from Emily Ladau, a disability rights activist, about how to break down barriers. Emily Ladau has Larsen syndrome, a rare genetic joint and muscle disorder. She is on a mission to make progress for disability rights by sharing her own story and helping others do the same on their own terms. She's won a number of awards for her activism, and her first book is Demystifying Disability:What to Know, What to Say, and How to Be an Ally.

This is episode 5 from a special segment for Women’s History Month about how we can build a more feminist future....and take care of ourselves and each other when the work is daunting. Find more trailblazers in our new book, It’s a Good Day to Change the World.

This episode we hear from Senator Sarah McBride about how to advance equality.

Senator McBride became the highest-ranking openly trans official in the country in 2020 when she was elected to the Delaware state senate. But this wasn’t the first time she made history.

In 2009, McBride was a junior at American University when she used her social media platform to come out as a trans woman. She says coming out was the most difficult thing she'd ever done and realized she wanted to play a larger role in creating an accepting world for more trans people. So, while still in college, she led the way in advocating for the adoption of Delaware’s first gender identity non-discrimination bill.

This is episode 4 from a special segment for Women’s History Month about how we can build a more feminist future....and take care of ourselves and each other when the work is daunting. Find more trailblazers in our new book, It’s a Good Day to Change the World.

Today, we hear from Gloria Steinem about how to start a revolution. Through her speeches, books, documentary films, and the feminist organizations she’s founded, Gloria advocates for reproductive choice and ending violence against women and children. She cofounded the Ms. Foundation for Women, and the Women’s Media Center,among others. She was one of the founders of New York magazine and in 1972 she launched Ms., the first feminist magazine with national distribution.

This is episode 3 from a special segment for Women’s History Month about how we can build a more feminist future....and take care of ourselves and each other when the work is daunting. Find more trailblazers in our new book, It’s a Good Day to Change the World.

Today, we hear from Caroline Paul about the importance of being brave. Caroline should know…She's climbed the Golden Gate Bridge, gotten into Guinness World Records for crawling and trained for the Olympic luge team. In 1989, Caroline was one of the first female firefighters in San Francisco—1 of 15 women out of a crew of 1,500. For thirteen years, every day on the job was an adventure. She published a memoir about her experience, and later wrote The Gutsy Girl and You Are Mighty, a practical guide for young activists.

This is episode 2 from a special segment for Women’s History Month about how we can build a more feminist future....and take care of ourselves and each other when the work is daunting. Find more trailblazers in our new book, It’s a Good Day to Change the World.

Isha Clarke is a founding member of Youth vs. Apocalypse, an activist organization that organized the first-ever youth climate strike in San Francisco. Isha has been fighting for climate justice since junior high school. That's when they spoke out against a coal terminal slated to be built in their hometown of Oakland, CA. A few years later they confronted senator Dianne Feinstein about the Green New Deal in a video that went viral.

Isha believes we all have the power to reverse the climate crisis.

This is episode 1 from a special segment for Women’s History Month about how we can build a more feminist future....and take care of ourselves and each other when the work is daunting. Find more trailblazers in our new book, It’s a Good Day to Change the World.

Great news! We have a new book coming out based on Inflection Point interviews, called It’s a Good Day to Change the World! To give you a peek inside every Tuesday, throughout Women’s History Month, we’re bringing you a special short segment we produced with KALW San Francisco about how we can build a more feminist future–and take care of ourselves and each other along the way. You’ll hear inspiring firsthand stories and get practical tools from trailblazers for how to create an equal, just and joyful world. First episode airs on February 28th.

Lauren Schiller and co-author Hadley Dynak will be at bookstores around the Bay Area and in Park City, NYC and Milwaukee throughout March. Learn more, find an event near you, and get the book at itsagooddaybook.com.

Thank you to our Bay Area launch sponsors:

Donkey & Goat Winery - A woman made winery and Berkeley, CA’s first natural winery

Hello!Lucky

Almanac Beer

Slanted Door

On Inflection Point, we’ve documented the changes for women between two major milestones here in the US: From right before we thought we’d see our first woman President with Hillary Clinton, to today, when we might see our first VP woman of color, with Kamala Harris.

Inflection Point is one of the only nationally syndicated radio shows and one of the first podcasts ever dedicated exclusively to featuring conversations with women about how we build power, what we do with it when we have it, and what still stands in our way. This August, we’re making a change too. Listen to find out more or go to our website for the transcript.

Watch the video with photos!

In Love and Action,

Lauren

What makes a boy a “boy” and a girl a “girl”? And why from the womb are we so obsessed with gender and why just by virtue of being male or female society expects us to behave or dress certain ways, or use certain bathrooms? Or fit into other so-called norms. That’s a lot of pressure on a kid, especially if your biological identity--the sex you were assigned at birth--differs from your gender identity or gender expression.

Today, as part of the Inflection Point summer swap series you’ll hear from Donna Cleveland, the host of a new podcast called Thread the Needle that explores the meeting place between feminist ideals and the realities of women’s lives.

In this episode, Donna looks into the suicide of a 14-year-old trans boy from her own small hometown and asks the question—What does our society need to understand about gender and how it influences our sense of self in order to better support our trans community, friends and family?

Before you listen, Donna wants to make sure you know that this story includes discussion of suicide and other self-harming behavior.

An awkward conversation with her white mother about “good white people” inspired Ijeoma Oluo to take on the unenviable task of writing one of the most user-friendly books on race of our time: “So You Want To Talk About Race.” In plain language, Ijeoma has confronted deeply uncomfortable questions surrounding racial injustice from the school-to-prison pipeline to the Black Lives Matter movement to white feminism and intersectionality.

In our conversation recorded in 2018, Ijeoma wakes me up to the fact that solidarity between all women cannot happen until white cis women hold themselves accountable to the ways they have benefitted from systems of oppression. Most importantly, Ijeoma offers practical, everyday actions that you can do today to help dismantle the system of racism.

Is the body positivity movement a good thing or a bad thing in the quest for equality? Ruth Whippman joins Lauren to uncover the debate.

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And when you’re done, come on over to The Inflection Point Society, our Facebook group of everyday activists who seek to make extraordinary change through small, daily actions.