Liberating Motherhood

Family court can be a brutal experience for women, especially those who have experienced abuse, neglect, and violence. While the standards in family courts seem neutral, gender bias has infiltrated every corner of our world, especially our highly conservative court system. Women face an uphill battle, a bias in favor of believing men, and a culture that prioritizes men’s access to their children over children’s safety and well-being.

The way you express yourself in family court is critical. You’ll need to be succinct, to present as the sort of “good mother” courts respect, and depict the violence and abuse in a way judges understand. Your lawyer may not know how to help you do this—and even if they do, they may charge you tens of thousands of dollars to help you craft your image.

That’s where Kaitlyn comes in. She’s not a substitute for legal advice. She’s a supportive advocate who can help you understand family court norms and better meet judge’s expectations. Her message is a hopeful one: strategy matters, and may radically change the outcome.
In this podcast, we talk about tipping the odds more in your favor, effective family court strategies, how trauma can negatively impact advocacy, and how to anticipate and manage bias.
You can visit Kaitlyn on Instagram here. Kaitlyn offers one-on-one family court strategy sessions, and you can book a session with her here. Some other resources from Kaitlyn include:

In the next few weeks, I’ll be talking quite a bit about how courts fail to protect women, including to the point of allowing their partners to murder them. So if you’re not a subscriber, sign up now to get it all in your inbox.

Content warning: This podcast extensively discusses all forms of intimate partner violence, some child abuse, and briefly discusses the death of a child, but not in graphic detail. 

Intimate partner violence is much more than physical violence. Every physically violent perpetrator was, for a time, not physically violent. The emotionally abusive, degrading, and controlling environment these perpetrators create is ultimately what enables the physical violence. 

Our society recognizes only a very limited number of behaviors as abusive, which is why so many women feel shocked and stunned when their partners finally become violent. When you understand coercive control, though, it becomes clear that the violence is part of a controlling strategy. 

Coercive control is the environment abusers create, and it’s much more—and much worse—than just violence. While it is deeply isolating, it follows very predictable patterns. In this podcast, we talk about topics such as: 

Why abusers cannot be good fathers.

Emma Katz, a world-renowned expert on coercive control, focuses her research and writing on the effects of coercive control on children. She dispels the notion that a man can abuse the mother but still be a “good dad,” and talks extensively about how courts often replicate abusive norms. 

These coercively controlling men might seem cunning, but they’re largely following the same playbook. Understanding that playbook empowers women to recognize abuse earlier, to identify when it is happening, and potentially, to leave. 

I highly recommend Dr. Katz’s Substack. Find that here. Read more about her on her website, or buy her incredible book here. 

Zawn and Jeff discuss why being a “nice guy” is a red flag, not a green one, why men who abuse women commonly claim to have been victims of abuse, and whether men ever deserve the benefit of the doubt.

See some of my previous work on nice guys here: 

Desiree Stephens is an incredible racial justice and decolonization activist. I originally wanted to discuss with her the role of rest and pleasure in activism, but as is so often the case in conversations with Desiree, we ended up covering so much more ground. 

Desiree frames so many things in ways I’ve never heard them framed before. She can be quite confronting—leaving you with the choice of wallowing in defensiveness or rising to her challenge and thinking more deeply. I encourage readers to do the latter, and to follow Desiree to learn more. 

You can follow Desiree on Substack here, or on Facebook here. 

Sexual coercion in marriage is widespread and normalized. In roughly half of marriages, this coercion escalates to abuse. 

Men dismiss women as less sexual, and insist that women should therefore cater to men’s needs. The data suggest otherwise. Women avoid sex with men because men do not offer them sex that is worth having—and because they create abusive environments that destroy sexual desire. 

Men who actually want to have sex should listen to women’s concerns. Instead, they become sexually coercive—apparently more interested in complaining about sex than actually having it. 

In this podcast, Jeff and I talk about the normalization of violence and abuse in marriage, and why a more feminist approach could help everyone enjoy a healthier sex life. 

You can read the data from my sex survey here. I’ll also be doing an update survey in about a month!

We'll be covering other forms of sexual abuse and dysfunction in subsequent episodes, and welcome your feedback on what you'd like to hear us discuss next.

All of our main feed podcast episodes are free, but we’ll be releasing a monthly bonus episode to paid Substack and Patreon subscribers. This month’s bonus comes out tomorrow. Subscribing also helps support the podcast so we can do more episodes, gives you access to the Liberating Motherhood support group, includes at least eight extra pieces of content per month, and funds scholarships for those who cannot afford paid subscriptions.

Subscribe on Substack or Patreon. 

Bringing life into the world should be a source of immense power--and often, it is. But in a patriarchy, we endeavor to destroy women's power. This is why patriarchy has turned childbirth into a dangerous, traumatic nightmare. Learn about the state of childbirth, and what you can do to push back--and why it's a partner's obligation to protect and support the person giving birth.

Zawn and Jeff have extensive professional and personal experience with this issue. With their first baby, they had to navigate a sudden change in hospital policy designed to prevent them from having the natural birth Zawn wanted. Their second baby died at birth, and a postpartum hemorrhage nearly claimed Zawn’s life, too. And with their third, the intersection of trauma and a complicated birth required lots of advocacy in a system that often punishes such behavior. 

Zawn runs a small nonprofit devoted to defending the rights of all people who give birth. And as a civil rights attorney specializing in police and prison abuses, Jeff has seen the worst of how our criminal justice system abuses pregnant people.

In this episode, we give a broad overview of the issue, and will discuss other angles in more detail in subsequent episodes. We also give some general tips for advocacy in a broken system. 

Readers may find the following links helpful for framing and understanding the discussion: 

Men, not hormones, are the leading cause of postpartum depression

You’re Wrong About Postpartum Depression 

8 Shocking Statistics About Abuse and Mistreatment of People in Labor

Doctors are examining the vaginas of unconscious women without their consent

10 things you need to know about Georgia’s maternal mortality crisis

Why is it that we respond to proposals and weddings with joy rather than terror? We know that men are the biggest public health threat to women, and that most marriages are inequitable and unhappy. Yet patriarchy promotes this disconnect. Learn why in this episode. 

View some of Zawn's surveys on household labor inequity here: https://zawn.substack.com/t/surveys

Men are angry at their partners. But why, in a world where women are already doing a disproportionate share of relational, household, and parenting labor, do men feel so disenfranchised? 

Follow Zawn at zawn.substack.com or https://www.facebook.com/zawnv/