Family Proclamations

Have you ever felt resentment about how responsibilities are divided in your relationship? Kate Mangino joins us to break down why this dynamic exists—and more important, what you can do about it. Outdated gender norms are causing a lot of problems for people whether they're married, dating, or in a queer or straight partnership. Luckily, some small, everyday changes can lead to a more balanced home life where everyone has time for work, family, and themselves. We're talking about the book, Equal Partners: Improving Gender Equality at Home. SHOW NOTES —State of the World's Fathers Report —"In a Growing Share of U.S. Marriages, Husbands and Wives Earn About the Same," Pew Research Center —"What to Do if You're Doing Too Much," Kate Mangino, Psychology Today ABOUT THE GUEST Kate Mangino is author of Equal Partners: Improving Gender Equality at Home. She has written and delivered curricula in over 20 countries about issues such as women's empowerment, healthy masculinity, HIV prevention, and early and forced childhood marriage. Kate's work can be found in Time, Slate, and the Harvard Business Review. Subscribe to her newsletter at katemangino.com. Full transcript available here at relationscapes.org.   

One January day in 1975, seven-year-old Guinevere Turner put on her best dress, hugged her favorite toy tightly, and waited for the spaceship to arrive. The world was ending and she would be saved, spirited away to Venus with the rest of her enormous and enlightened family. The prophecy failed. Instead of collapsing, the cult she was being raised in carried on. But Guinevere would soon find herself thrown out into the world beyond, where things somehow became more nightmarish than before. In this episode, Guinevere Turner joins us to talk about her remarkable memoir, When the World Didn't End. Buy the Book. Read Guinevere's piece in The New Yorker that led to her memoir.  About the Guest Guinevere Turner is an acclaimed screenwriter and director. She co-wrote the screenplays for American Psycho and The Notorious Bettie Page and, most recently, wrote the screenplay for Charlie Says. She also wrote and starred in the film Go Fish and was a writer and actor on Showtime's The L Word. An essay she wrote for The New Yorker is the inspiration for this memoir. She lives in New York and Los Angeles. A full transcript is available here at relationscapes.org. 

In this episode: Family Proclamations is getting a new name! A few listeners sound off on their divorce experiences, and attorney Heather Quick stops by to talk about what to look for in a divorce lawyer.  Check out Heather's resources: Florida Women's Law Group resources Women Winning Divorce podcast   The full transcript of this episode is available here. 

Paul Scheer is an award-winning actor, screenwriter, comedian and podcast host of How Did This Get Made? So you'd think his most interesting life stories would be about his audition for Saturday Night Live or how he came up through improv comedy to star in shows like The League and Black Monday. Those are interesting stories, but in his new memoir, Paul gives center stage to family stories. Growing up with a loving mom and dad who divorced, the tyranny of an abusive stepfather, and what it's like to become a marriage partner and a parent in the shadow of traumatic experiences.  About the Guest Paul Scheer is author of the New York Times best-selling memoir, Joyful Recollections of Trauma. He's a comedian and a Screen Actors Guild Award-winning actor from shows like The League, Veep, Fresh Off the Boat, and Black Monday. He's a podcaster of the smash-hit How Did This Get Made and also Unspooled with his co-host Amy Nicholson. He lives in LA with his partner June Diane Raphael and their two kids.  Full transcript available at familyproclamations.org. 

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. About the Guest 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? About the Guest 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 American conscience. And even though he 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.   About the Guest 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.  Plus: Listener Voicemail Bonus preview of the terrific podcast, "Refamulating." 

As a Black woman growing up in England, Catherine Joy White sometimes felt out of place at home and also disconnected from the place 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, and what courage looks like. Such fortitude, like a thread of gold, can connect all of us to the past, and point us toward a better future.  About the Guest 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.  About the Guest 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.

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. About the Guest 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!  About the Guest 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." About the Guest 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. Recommend the show to a friend! Rate and review in Apple Podcasts and Spotify!

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.  About the Guest 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.

As an ultra-Orthodox Jew, Sara Glass was raised to believe her purpose in life was to marry a righteous man and bear children, all to the glory of God. On the outside, she was following that plan to perfection. But on the inside, something was pulling her in a very different direction. It was traumatic, and she would have to risk everything to find healing. Sara joins us to discuss her new memoir, Kissing Girls on Shabbat. Note: This episode includes discussion of miscarriage and also sexual violence. Listener discretion is advised. If you or someone you know is experiencing intimate partner abuse, help is available. Contact the National Domestic Violence Hotline at 800-799-7233, text the word "START" to 88788, or visit thehotline.org.  About the Guest Sara Glass is a psychotherapist and writer in New York City. She earned her a Master's in Social Work from Rutgers University and a PhD in Psychology from Capella University. She is the clinical director of Soul Wellness NYC, a private psychotherapy practice in Midtown Manhattan, and serves as a Clinical Supervisor for Jewish Queer Youth, a non-profit organization that supports and empowers LGBTQ youth. Learn more at drsaraglass.com or follow her on social media: @drsaraglass.   Complete transcript available here: familyproclamations.org.

What does it mean to be a man? It depends on who you ask. And it depends on *when* you ask, because masculinity has always been a moving target. In this episode we travel back to ancient Rome, where manly men loved war, violence, and sexual conquest. Mike Pope says this history has powerful relevance for us today. We're talking about his book, Lucretius and the End of Masculinity.  About the Guest Mike Pope is Associate Professor of Classical Studies at Brigham Young University. He is author of the book, Lucretius and the End of Masculinity.    Complete transcript available here (familyproclamations.org).

Eris Young is author of the go-to book on everything non-binary. They break down the basics of the gender binary, painting a more expansive, inclusive, and accurate picture of human identity. What is it like to be nonbinary? What challenges do people face? What about healthcare for nonbinary folks? All this and more, as we talk to Eris Young about their book, They/Them/Their: A Guide to Nonbinary and Genderqueer Identities. About the Guest Eris Young is a queer, transgender writer of fiction and nonfiction. Their books They/Them/Their: A guide to nonbinary and genderqueer identities (2019) and Ace Voices: What it means to be asexual, aromantic, demi or gray-ace (2022), are published by Jessica Kingsley. They were the writer-in-residence at Lighthouse, Edinburgh's radical bookshop, from 2019 to 2022, in 2020 received a Scottish Book Trust New Writer Award for fiction, and are a 2023 IPSE Freelancer Award finalist, in the Equality, Diversity and Inclusion category. Transcript ERIS YOUNG: When you step away from the norm in any way, it's going to influence the way people interface with you, the way people treat you, the assumptions they make about you when they see you. I think it just made my childhood that much more complicated. BLAIR HODGES: That's Eris Young, and the norm they stepped away from in middle school that caused some difficulty was the gender binary—the idea that there are two discrete genders, boy and girl, man and woman, end of story. Today there's a growing chorus of scientists, biologists, psychologists, and other specialists who are making it clearer than ever that the gender binary doesn't capture the diversity of human experiences. This includes trans people and all who don't fall so neatly into one category or another. In this episode, Eris Young joins us to talk about their book, They/Them/Their: A Guide to Nonbinary and Genderqueer Identities. There's no one right way to be a guy or a girl, or someone else entirely. I'm Blair Hodges, and this is Family Proclamations. REACHING THE AUDIENCE (01:31) BLAIR HODGES: Eris Young, welcome to Family Proclamations. It's great to have you on the show. ERIS YOUNG: Thanks for having me, Blair. I'm really happy to be here. BLAIR HODGES: We're talking about your book, They/Them/Their. These are pronouns obviously, and they are pronouns you use. Your introduction to this book starts off with a glossary of sixteen terms. But you manage to actually keep it interesting! We'll talk about those terms, but I think it says a lot that you had to spend time right off the bat with direct definitions. Talk a little bit about that decision for the book. ERIS YOUNG: It is a bit odd. You don't often start off with a dictionary or a glossary. Because of the nature of the project and when it came out—this book came out in 2019 and I started writing it around 2017—and at that time we were at the very beginning of our understanding, at least in the Anglophone West, of nonbinary and genderqueer identities and trans identity in the mainstream. For the book I wanted to get into the nitty gritty. I wanted to go deep as quickly as possible, but it meant there was a lot of explaining I had to do in a short space of time in order to be able to get past that basic stuff. I'll talk a little bit later how I feel about glossaries and dictionaries and how that's changed over time. It's very much a product of where I was at and where we as a society were at when the book was written. BLAIR HODGES: You say your target audience is people who want to understand but might not have the means yet. This isn't necessarily for people that have already been in all the online discussions about nonbinary and different gender identities, but for people trying to wrap their minds around it. It can be a little intimidating for people that aren't used to those discussions in those spaces, and you identify some of reasons. It might feel like people are afraid of making a mistake so they're afraid to ask questions, or they might feel like they're virtue signaling if they're going overboard and trying to show how knowledgeable they are. Tell me a little bit more about those dynamics because your target audience was for interested and well-meaning people that just want to learn more. ERIS YOUNG: It is funny how much has changed in the time since I wrote the book. It's only been a couple of years, so when I first wrote it I was very much—and I think that's the strength of the book—I was really doing what I could to reach as many people as possible. That meant I had to do a little bit of explaining and a little bit of making sure my readers were on the same page as me from the very beginning. I've seen the book described as “accessible.” I've had a lot of cis people come up to me and enthuse about the way they were able to use the book to get to know the nonbinary people in their life, or to make their workplace more inclusive. I really value having been able to do that for people. BLAIR HODGES: You mentioned cisgender folks. I'm cisgender. For people who aren't familiar with the terminology, that means my gender identity aligns with the sex I was assigned at birth, the assumptions people made based on what my body looked like back then. I fit into a typical male identity and my body aligns with that. The term “cis” is basically trying to get people to think about how cisgender itself is also an identity. To be nonbinary is an identity in the same way being cisgender is an identity, and it's trying to avoid hierarchies of comparison of better than or less than. It seems to serve an equalizing purpose. ERIS YOUNG: It's absolutely an equalizer, and it's absolutely a way of challenging this otherness. Trans and gender non-conforming people, we tend to get placed into this "other" category, but really it's about repositioning cis and trans as categories of being on an equal footing with each other. ERIS GETS PERSONAL (05:54) BLAIR HODGES: We'll expand on definitions as we go, but let's start here with more about your own personal biography. This book explores your own experiences. You're very personal here. You talk about what it was like growing up. You say you realized as a young child there was something different, or something uncomfortable maybe about how you were encouraged to act and dress and speak and play as a child. Tell people a little bit about how that felt, about how you were. ERIS YOUNG: This is something I've thought about a lot over the years. I think in comparison to a lot of genderqueer and nonbinary people I was fairly lucky. My parents are very liberal in the sense of being quite flexible. They weren't very prescriptive. I did karate. I did art lessons. I managed to avoid a lot of the gendered activities—not to say I was very good at karate or art! I dodged a bullet a lot of people in my position don't always manage to avoid, so I'm very grateful to my parents for that. When I was a little kid, especially an adolescent and in high school, I did feel different. This has to do with my sexuality, my gender, my neurodivergent stuff going on. There were a lot of times when if the adults in my life had had the opportunity to read a book or watch a TV program about transgender or about nonbinary identity, that would have helped me a lot. This is what I'm trying to give to the nonbinary children, the trans children of the people reading my book. I don't think it's going to make a huge difference, but I have had quite a few parents reach out to me, and I've had some intense emotional conversations with parents who, as you say, they're really well-meaning and they're trying to understand, but they've been taught their whole lives gender and sex work a certain way. They're finding it difficult to try and engage while trying not to hurt the nonbinary or trans person in their life. PARENTAL APPROACHES (08:20) BLAIR HODGES: That's right. There are a lot of different reactions parents can have, coming from a lot of different places. Some people might have very rigid ideas about sex and gender being inflexible, and gender assigned at birth is paramount, and so any kind of deviation from that is uncomfortable, or even evil or whatever to them. Then you have people who are more open to it but might see social discrimination and might worry for their kids if they're nonbinary or trans, and they worry about discrimination kids would face. Or maybe even the dreams a parent has for their kids, where in theory they're alright with trans identities or nonbinary identities, but they also have built this story of who their kid was going to be and then they have to let go of that story. I think parental anxiety can come from a lot of different directions and it's not limited to "conservative" or traditionalist, anti-trans feelings, but can also come from people who are open and believe and accept trans identities as well. ERIS YOUNG: I think so much of parenthood and family is—you know, we're so close to it. For some people family and parenthood is the most fundamental and personal thing in their life. That means ego plays into it a lot, whether we want it to or not. I see this talking to a lot of asexual and aromantic people as well. We'll have parents who are good, supportive, loving parents, but when they encounter something that disrupts their own ideas of what their family should look like, it can cause a lot of conflict. Something I'm really hoping for, an idea that makes me quite emotional that I'm hoping for the future, is I'd like to see more parents approach their child's gender journey as not a challenge to them as a parent or as not an obstacle to their idea of their child's happy and stable future. Instead, I'd like to see parents approaching their child's gender exploration and potential transition as an adventure you're going on together as a family. I think for a lot of people this practically isn't possible because society right now makes it hard to be trans or nonbinary or genderqueer. I'm hoping we can have incremental social change, such that in ten or twenty or fifty years we can celebrate it when our children decide they're something other than they were assigned at birth. I think that's a beautiful potential future. I'd like to work towards that. SOCIAL PRESSURES (11:23) BLAIRHODGES: In the book you also talk about some of the ways you felt anxiety, even though your parents were generally supportive and, it seems, flexible and open to different things. You also felt anxiety around public restrooms or different social situations. What were the pressures? Did you feel pressure to conform to the gender binary that you had to resist? What did that pressure look like? ERIS YOUNG: No matter who you are, there's a lot of pressure on you to conform to the sex assignment you were given at birth. Restrooms is a thing. We talk about it a lot. I still have to navigate that, although nowadays when you're an adult you can get away with pretty much anything by walking in and looking like you know what you're doing. But as a kid I was—I don't want to say a little weirdo, but I was quite a shy child. [laughter] I was a nervous little kid. Not really knowing anything about the community that I would later enter, it added this extra layer of complication. I had a good childhood, but I was a funny little guy. I've definitely had some anxiety throughout my life, a lot to do with being neurodivergent. What did it really look like? It kind of really started to come to the fore when I was in middle and high school, so in my early to mid-teens in California, in Orange County. We didn't have strict dress codes or anything. I was dressing in boy's clothes from high school. I think it more influenced the way people treated me and looked at me. When you step away from the norm in any way, it's going to influence the way people interface with you, the way people treat you, the assumptions they make about you when they see you. I think it just made my childhood that much more complicated. BLAIR HODGES: This speaks to the idea of nonbinary people being thought of as egocentric or self-obsessed in presentation and stuff, and what interests me about you is you were not like that. It seems like you didn't want attention. And you also needed to express your gender identity in a way that made you feel comfortable in your body and in yourself. But you weren't going for attention. It seems like if anything, you wanted to not get extra attention. ERIS YOUNG: It's funny because that is the stereotype, isn't it? Pretty much all of the trans and gender non-conforming people I know, myself included, we're just trying to live our lives and because we're now able to be visible and open in a way we never were before, going from invisible to visible is now being transformed into this perception of us being attention-seeking. When you look at the ways some cis people act out and perform their gender, like don't even get me started! It's very funny we do get painted with this paintbrush and it all has to do with visibility and change. It's not that we're visible or trying to be obnoxious about it, it's that we exist and our existence challenges the status quo and makes people think about things they haven't had to think about before. BIOLOGICAL SEX AND GENDER (15:12) BLAIR HODGES: Your book also drills down on gender, sex, and the binary. For people who aren't familiar with this way of thinking about sex and gender your explanation is really helpful. The most common understanding of sex and gender is a binary understanding. The idea is gender is determined by a person's physical body parts, their body morphology, maybe chromosomes, or whatever. That's also supposed to determine sexual orientation as well. Gender identity, sexual orientation, and sex are all thought to be one singular thing. In your book you talk about how humans are loosely a “sexually dimorphic” species. There is a general view of a sex male, a sex female, and so it's easy to understand how we've arrived at these assumptions about sex and gender. But you complicate that for us. Talk about why that binary understanding is problematic. ERIS YOUNG: This is a fun question with a lot of deep potential. One of the things that happened for me, while I was writing They/Them/Their the more research I did, the more it complicated that understanding. I was a twenty-year-old starting to write this book and I approached it with an understanding of: There is biological sex and some people feel they are not whatever they were assigned at birth. In reality, the more you look at it and the more research you do, and the more you look at history and actually biology, that rigid, contiguous binary we've constructed and we've put on this pedestal in our society, it starts to crumble really quickly. It kind of broke my brain and put it back together, and that's part of why I'm so pleased I was able to write this book when I did because it made a lot of things make much more sense to me very quickly. For example, I'm picturing three boxes with arrows between them, and you've got biological sex equals gender equals sexuality. Well, a good hundred years ago we started to disrupt this idea of gender equals sexuality. There are all sorts of different kinds of historical categorizations of homosexual people—as inverts, hermaphrodites. These are the quite pathological words placed onto us or claimed by us at different times. We've pretty much disrupted that connection. We've also managed to start—with some setbacks, there's still backlash against homosexuality, but we're starting to be able to decouple this idea of biological sex equals gender. We've got trans people, we've got nonbinary people, all sorts of people who aren't cis. We're also starting to come to understand biological sex is not as much a scientific reality as we're taught to believe, or as some people would want us to believe. This was something revelatory for me as I was writing the book, is it turns out that intersex conditions—so people who are born with what we might call ambiguous genitalia, or secondary sex characteristics that develop differently from how we would expect them to based on that person's assigned sex, those ways of being, and there's actually dozens of different ways a person can be intersex—they're way, way, way more common than we're led to believe. I didn't know a person could be intersex. I didn't know that was a thing until my late teens. Mid to late teens. BLAIR HODGES: Me too. It may have even been my twenties. ERIS YOUNG: No one talks about it. The only way I was able to learn about it is through the trans community because historically trans and intersex communities have been allied and we share a lot of lived experiences, though we're not always overlapping Venn diagram circles. Intersex people exist and are around and we know them. It's not a marginal experience by any means. BLAIR HODGES: That's even on a chromosomal level, right? It's not the case that it's a simple XX, XY. There are different combinations. ERIS YOUNG: There are women who would present as cis women and who would never be seen as anything other than a cis woman who have a Y chromosome. THE BINARY IMPULSE TO CLOCK (20:30) BLAIR HODGES: Alright, so I think one of the reasons this can be hard for people to grasp is, I think humans in general need these shortcut ways to sum each other up. We want to be able to look at each other, we want visual cues, and just to be able to get a picture of who a person is. Perhaps even a lot of transgender folks, I think, want to present on one end of the binary or another. There's still a lot of social pressure or social expectations or social conditioning. To transition kind of happens on a scale, some people really want to transition in a way that helps them present as female, very female, feminine, femme. Other people want to present as masc, masculine, more male. But nonbinary folks don't always really feel comfortable at either end of that pole. Here's a quote from you: "A genderqueer person will most likely have been raised as either male or female, and most likely will have either a penis or vagina and attendant chromosomes and hormones, but will not feel that either of these labels suits them wholly. They might feel that both or neither of those labels applies." So even with many trans folks the binary is strong, and we have genderqueer or nonbinary folks that challenged that polarity. ERIS YOUNG: That's why we're here, isn't it? We do like categories. We like binaries. As people, we like to be able to make quick assumptions. I don't know if that's an inherent thing for human brains, or if it's something we're taught, but it does take a lot of work to get beyond. For me, I had to do a lot of thinking, a lot of research, a lot of writing and talking to people. I had to be on Tumblr for quite a long time before I could get my brain out of these rigid categories I had been thinking in. In a way that's a privilege, but the more you do it, it's a skill. It's critical thinking. This way of being able to question the categories you're given. As a nonbinary person, I'm quite grateful I'm able to exist in between. I feel like it gives me a lot of freedom to play, to question, to challenge. BLAIR HODGES: I think the more nonbinary and genderqueer folks we get to know, the more automatic it can become. I think even with pronouns. I have a coworker, they/them pronouns, and they're the second person I've spent a lot of time with. It took a little while to be able to automatically think—instead of “translating” it, instead of looking at them and having to decide to use their preferred pronoun—to it becoming automatic. I also found that using they/them more generally helped do that as well. Referring to people as they/them more broadly. Familiarity helps a lot, but also it can be challenging because we don't necessarily know we're running into people who might be nonbinary all the time. As you say in the book, it's hard to even get estimates of how many people identify as nonbinary. That's part of the challenge. ERIS YOUNG: I agree. That's one of the problems. That's why it's so hard to be genderqueer or nonbinary, or one of the reasons is a lot of our social systems are built around these very rigid categories. When you break them, you stop being intelligible to the system you exist in. If I am nonbinary, but I have to choose M or F on a form, I get erased as a person. BLAIR HODGES: That's right. You're facing this on forms, you're facing this as people are interacting with you, and from my perspective as a cisgendered person encountering a nonbinary person, my impulse has been to think, “What are they really?” Basically still thinking in terms of what gender they were assigned at birth and then triangulating from that. So I think people are tempted to ask invasive questions about that. It's not my business what gender you or anyone else was assigned at birth, and the more I've been familiar with actual nonbinary folks and hanging out with them, the less that impulse exists to try to see them initially as "What are they really?" Or where's their transness? Where are they transitioning away from, instead of just seeing them as they are. ERIS YOUNG: When you were taught that binary gender is the only thing, your brain is naturally going to go and try and fit the person you're talking to into one or the other category. The only way to do it, the easiest way, is to get to know people and talk to people, as you say. BLAIR HODGES: Do you have to resist that, too? Does the impulse I'm talking about sound familiar to you? When you see someone and as they present your brain starts to automatically do this processing of what their gender identity is. Because we're in such a cisgender-heavy society, it seems that would be a default. I'm just guessing. I'm interested in your thoughts, maybe even for genderqueer folks, that they might have that same kind of impulse. What do you think? ERIS YOUNG: We're subject to the same social conditioning everyone else is. It's different from individual to individual, but I had to do a lot of, I guess you would call it unlearning, as I was writing the book and as I was getting to know myself. I had to let go of all those impulses. I can't even say I did let go of them because it's an ongoing process. I had to do a lot of unlearning and I have a lot of these harmful or unproductive instincts of trying to once I've clocked someone, my brain automatically wants me to try and wonder their sex assignment at birth. It's quite a harmful instinct and a hard one to get rid of. I have managed to get rid of that instinct by being myself and being with other people in my community. I also wanted to loop back to the instinct of thinking what is the person's sex assignment at birth. That instinct to try and wonder about a person's sex assignment at birth, a lot of that comes from, or at least I think it comes from the way our society as a whole is really obsessed with bodies and specifically with categorizing bodies and medicalizing bodies and pathologizing difference. This is an instinct that exists on a lot of different levels, most often in the medical system, but it permeates throughout society. It feels like a very Western, very Anglophone instinct to seek some kind of essential truth about a person. I use that phrase “essential truth” not on its face value, but what we're seeking is what we're taught to think as the truth of a person, when in reality the truth of a person doesn't have to have anything to do with what's in their pants. I think there's this deep historical process that's kind of still ongoing, that contributes to this instinct we have to clock people. IGNORING VERSUS EMBRACING (28:24) BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, I find myself in such a strange position about it, because there's this weird tension of, it shouldn't matter all that much, but it also should matter because I also want to support folks, especially marginalized folks. I want to understand their experiences. There are legal issues, social pressures. I would shy away from a “gender blindness,” I guess. Or a way of erasing gender identity. ERIS YOUNG: Right. I was at university for undergrad in mid-2010s, I guess, I don't know. There was a lot of discourse around, can you be race blind? Can you be post-racial? I mean, no, because you're a person who exists now. Regardless of whether biological sex or gender or even race, regardless of whether those things are actual "scientific realities," they affect the lived experience of real life people today. It's not possible to be gender blind. I think you're right to shy away from that impulse because I don't think it's necessarily a productive one. That's kind of like saying, "Oh, can't we all just get along?" when you're talking about social inequality. At the same time, I don't want to be gender blind. I want to celebrate people's genders. I want to celebrate a trans woman's ability to joyfully embrace femininity and womanhood. I want to celebrate my own in-betweenness and my own playful way I live my gender. I think there is a well-meaning impulse to "not see gender." I don't think that's necessarily the most productive thing to do, because rather I think we should be trying to celebrate difference. BLAIR HODGES: I think the idea of ignoring it is probably coming from a place of privilege. What it really means is I'm not comfortable with it and so let's just not talk about it-- ERIS YOUNG: I think you've hit the nail on the head. LANGUAGE NERD (30:49) BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, when other people don't have that luxury of ignoring it. Okay, so Eris you're also kind of a language nerd. You have a chapter in here about your linguistics I wanted to talk about, because this is a huge consideration. Language itself can be one of the biggest obstacles to social and legal acceptance of nonbinary and genderqueer identities. Let's talk a little bit about that, including the ways different languages are structured. Sometimes gender is literally baked into language. ERIS YOUNG: When I wrote the book, my publisher sent me a list of topics they wanted to cover and I think pronouns were on the list. But then I rubbed my hands together like, "Something about language, you say?" [laughter] I am a big language nerd. Any chance I get to talk about it I will take. We've had the pronouns debate. I think we're coming to the end of that debate, maybe? I guess my political instinct would be, can we stop talking about pronouns and start talking about suicide statistics? Obviously we can talk about both. But I think this "debate" around, "Oh, is it okay to use they/them pronouns?" Like, whatever. But language does have a huge effect on our lived realities. Anyone who's studied any other languages knows this can be totally different depending on what language you're speaking. Your ability to maintain your own autonomy when it comes to gender presentation—what does it mean for someone to be genderqueer or nonbinary in a language like Spanish, where if you speak about someone else you basically have to assign them a binary gender? That was the kind of question I had been trying to get at. There's other languages like Japanese, for example, and obviously there are caveats here because Japanese society—I'm not an expert—but it's not a wonderful place to be trans or nonbinary or queer, but the language itself just taken in a vacuum, you are allowed to basically claim gender for yourself based on the personal pronouns you use because you refer to yourself with a gender. You can use different forms of the word "I" based on how you see your own gender. I haven't studied it in a while, but it's broadly gendered. That's something you can exercise autonomy in. I could use boku if I wanted to be slightly more masculine, but not as masculine as saying ore, for example. BLAIR HODGES: That's interesting because these Japanese words could be seen as over-gendering things, but it also gives people the opportunity to play with language or to identify themselves in their gender identity more on the fly and more subtly than having to say, "My gender pronouns are this." You can just refer to yourself. ERIS YOUNG: You can signal to people on the fly. BLAIR HODGES: If I was saying “I'm glad to meet you,” I could say that in a way that says “I being a cis person…” They would look at me and what I look like and I can give them gender clues just by saying, "I'm glad to meet you”? ERIS YOUNG: It comes down to a part of gender presentation. One of the people I spoke to in writing They/Them/Their is Japanese and I asked them what their pronouns were, and they use they/them in English and boku in Japanese. Depending on the language you're speaking, the way language shapes gender experience is different. I think a lot of the ways we ourselves use language is so gendered. There's a lot of ways, at least in English, a person is able to signal their own gender in the language they use. BLAIR HODGES: You talk about “natural gender” in language, which is the basic meaning of a word, like "woman," "man," and different languages have these natural gender words. And then there's “grammatical gender—all the ways gender is embedded in language arbitrarily. Like in Spanish, there's your ways of signaling male and femaleness and there's also, as you said, in Japanese this way of signaling gender associated to other words, and even in phrases you might use. And you say there are some “social convention” phrases that are more coded as masculine or feminine. I can't think of any examples, but I guess it might be like, let's say in English saying "holy cow" would be like, "Oh, that's kind of like a boy thing to say. Girls don't really say that." There's coded ways of even sending signals about your gender identity and phrases you use. ERIS YOUNG: You're absolutely right. When I'm saying I don't think we need to have the pronouns debate anymore, I mean I don't think we need to debate about whether it's grammatical anymore. PRONOUN GO ROUND (35:36) BLAIR HODGES: I guess even swearing in English. It used to be more so in the past, but it was not "ladylike" to use certain words. In English too. You mentioned the pronoun debate, I do think it's important to talk about why that is important. Why that does matter to people. There's a quote here I highlighted from the book: "The question at the heart of the pronoun debate is really fundamentally one about autonomy, the ability of a demographic, especially a marginalized one, to name itself and to claim agency or control over how it's referred to, and by extension treated." I think this is what makes some opponents and critics so uncomfortable with the pronoun debate. They don't want to give up control over defining other people. They perhaps feel it's some sort of indictment even of themselves. It's really a control issue and a dignity issue. You talk a little bit about that history too, because they/them/their for a singular, people say, "Oh, ‘they,' that's plural. It's not right to use that singularly." Your book is like, "Well, actually." [laughs] ERIS YOUNG: I do a bit of "well, actually." English has actually had neutral pronouns in it. Old English had them and various times throughout history. People may not know this, but language changes a lot over time. English has had neutral pronouns at various times. I think Shakespeare used them. Jane Austen used them. So to say it's ungrammatical and it's a newfangled thing is pretty disingenuous. BLAIR HODGES: People should note "they" as a singular pronoun actually is older than "you" as a singular pronoun. It was being used earlier than "you." Let's talk about neopronouns too. This is where I feel I have to resist being the old man on the porch shaking my fist at the youths, because when I start seeing all the differences, people might see pronouns like ze and xe and ve, I'm not even a hundred percent sure how to pronounce a lot of these, but so it's easy for me to be the old man on the porch. Give us some info about these newer pronouns. ERIS YOUNG: At the time I wrote the book, there were and still are people who use pronouns like ze/zir, ze/hir, which is a combination of him and her. They get conjugated, or they declined any other set of pronouns. But truth be told, I don't personally know many people that use neopronouns, and I wonder if that is because it's quite difficult to assert that. We're barely able to get people to not mis-gender us and to use they/them. BLAIR HODGES: Like you said, there was a learning curve in being able to learn how to use they/them/their in the way I can now. It's a bigger lift when we're completely unfamiliar with new pronouns. I see the utility of them. I think it's cool. I like how language changes to adapt to new realities. Maybe a hundred years from now someone will be like, "You didn't know? These pronouns have now carried the day." That'd be cool. But I feel that future would be a long way off. ERIS YOUNG: It does feel a long way off. I'll probably talk a little bit later about backlash we're experiencing, especially here in the UK, and I wonder if a lot of people who would otherwise be using neopronouns because they feel that most accurately reflects who they are, are just sort of like, "I can't fight with people anymore. I'll just use they/them." MISGENDERING MISTAKES (40:01) BLAIR HODGES: This speaks to a broader issue of the kind of fights people are willing to have, and the rights that are at the forefront at the moment. That's a political calculation, which also means some people get hurt in the meantime, and pain exists in the meantime. But there are priorities that are set and there are imbalances of power. People get to kind of decide, "Let's rally together. What are we going for right now?" Choices have to be made. I think that can be tricky, but it speaks to the fact that language is a power game. All of this is wrapped up in power. Not that everybody is even necessarily trying to exercise mean power over others, but sometimes we make mistakes. Now I'm looking for tips from you about how people can handle accidentally misgendering somebody, for example, what's a good approach when that happens? ERIS YOUNG: Going back to this idea of we're not really trying to be the center of attention, even just because being the center of attention is quite dangerous, the best advice is to approach the interaction with good faith, understand you may be hurting someone more than you personally can empathize with, and there are certain situations where it's no one's fault. I guess my advice would be if you accidentally misgender someone or deadname someone, you don't need to make a big deal out of it. Make sure the person knows you're sorry and you're trying, but you don't need to necessarily go, "Oh, God, I'm the worst! Oh no, I f*cked up so bad!" Don't make it about you, but also don't put them in the spotlight. You can correct yourself, say sorry, and then move on with the conversation. Maybe you can check in with that person later and say, "Are you okay?" We're all adults here and there are ways of doing it sensitively just as long as you're being as respectful as you can be. BLAIR HODGES: One thing I've been encouraged to resist is to say something like, "I hope you can be patient with me as I learn." Because again, that's making it about me and putting an obligation on that person to police their own feelings or to maybe even feel shame if they feel angry or upset about it. ERIS YOUNG: Because sometimes I can't be patient with someone. I just need to step away. That's a good point. BLAIR HODGES: I love this in your book where you talk about that, how does it feel to get misgendered? And you're like, "Well, it depends on the day. There are some days when I'm feeling fine and I see that as an annoyance and it's like, okay that's not really cool but I can move on." Then you can be in a different space at a different time when it hurts more. And it depends on your relationship to the person who's doing it, or the situation. There's no one way it's received when someone gets misgendered. It really depends. I liked what you said of just being subtle about it, of being straightforward, apologizing, and not making too big of a deal out of it either. That otherwise puts more labor on a nonbinary or nongender conforming person. ERIS YOUNG: I guess understand also you can apologize, and you should apologize, but the other person doesn't owe you forgiveness. BLAIR HODGES: And don't feel resentful if they don't. They have a whole backlog of experiences that your one comment one day can be added to. I think that's all about not making it about me again. I would be making it about me if I was like, "Well, they should forgive me and if they don't then that's a problem," or “they're a bad person,” or whatever. That would be centering myself. I've been working at not centering myself as much, especially coming from a more privileged position, being cis-het, being a white male. I'm perceived as the default or with all the privilege that brings. It's helpful to keep in mind that misgendering can be really hurtful, and other times it can just be annoying. I think being attuned to that is helpful. I want to remind people Eris Young is our guest and we're talking about the book They/Them/Their: A Guide to Nonbinary and Queer Identities. This is a great book. Eris, I'm so glad we're able to sit down and talk with you about it today. And we've got more stuff to cover.  NEGOTIATING UNITY IN THE COMMUNITY (44:28) BLAIR HODGES: I want to talk about the community aspect. It's Pride Month, by the way. Happy Pride, Eris! ERIS YOUNG: Happy Pride! BLAIR HODGES: Let's look at this acronym: LGBTQ. I've also seen it expanded to LGBTQIA+. There are different iterations of it. It didn't occur to me until pretty recently the way the acronym breaks down, the first few letters pertain more to sexual orientation, lesbian, gay, bi, and then we start to get to gender identity. Trans, queer, the T and Q, and I is intersex, A, asexuality, the plus means it can extend to pansexual and aromantic. There's all sorts of things. But it's interesting to me that it's not fully distinguishing between sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, and so on. It's all kind of lumped together as these marginalized identities. What that means is the LGB part of it can be really binary and even transphobic as well, even though the letter T appears in the bigger acronym. Let's talk about the LGBTQ community, and how you address that in the book, and some of the nuances people miss who aren't really in those communities. ERIS YOUNG: LGBTQ+, etc. It's an umbrella term. It is an expression of a shared experience of marginalization in terms of sex, gender, and sexuality. Naturally that means it's not a monolith. There are always going to be conflicts within the community. What do I want to say about this? — BLAIR HODGES: It can be a touchy subject. The fact that you paused a little bit, what is that coming from? Just trying to organize your thoughts? Or are there some anxieties about unpacking this stuff? ERIS YOUNG: There definitely is a little bit of anxiety there in terms of, as you mentioned earlier, we're under a lot of pressure, especially right now, to present a unified front to the rest of the world. We have to act in solidarity with each other. The same people who are trying to take rights away from transgender people, if they succeed in five years, they'll be coming after gays and lesbians who only recently managed to secure any kind of real legal or social security. We all need to be acting in solidarity with each other, but that's not always possible. There is a lot of conflict. When you see LGB, and then you go T, and then you go Q, and queer sort of articulates a division within the community that I can see, which is you have assimilationist, usually LGB people, most often cis, and then you've got queer, trans, ace people who are more often likely, at least from my view, to be anti-assimilationist, who are more likely to want to reject the entire institution of marriage because of an understanding that marriage is a part of a heteronormative system. It can't be decoupled from that. I think there are divisions within the community and a lot of the communities I belong to, the genderqueer and trans communities, I do consider myself to be queer. I think that's a more capacious term a lot of us use to describe ourselves. I'm trans, and I'm also asexual. I'm a triple threat of anti-assimilationist queerness because those are the identities that don't really slot in easily into the existing system. There's been a lot of campaigning historically for gays and lesbians to be able to marry, though there is "marriage equality" in a lot of countries now, nonbinary people who don't have one or the other gender marker, often we are excluded from those so-called equal marriages. I think it's inherent to some identities, and obviously these identities don't have firm boundaries between them, but there's a lot of types of ways of being, of lived experience that don't have the luxury or the privilege of being able to assimilate. You see a lot of corporations getting involved with Pride now because the corporations have realized the gays have money now, and a lot of us don't have money yet. The T, that's the poorest subgroup within the LGBTQIA+. BLAIR HODGES: Economically speaking you can see lower incomes, more difficult job opportunities, education, violence committed against— ERIS YOUNG: —Housing, incarceration. BLAIR HODGES: I think there's been some temptation by old school LGB to throw that under the bus a little bit. They would say, I've heard this, "We fought for certain rights and we've got to protect those. We don't really get this other thing and don't feel obligated to it." They want to separate that out and even maybe display blatant transphobia. It's not the case that just because someone identifies as lesbian, gay, or bi they're going to be an ally of trans folks. That's just not a guarantee. ERIS YOUNG: I think that's something that at least I, maybe naively, have been quite surprised and disappointed at. I come in good faith to the community and then I find some people don't want me there. It can be quite frustrating. It undermines the solidarity we're going to need in order to survive the next ten, twenty, fifty years. It's quite disappointing to see. I do want to say at this point I think the handful of gays, lesbians, and “question mark” bisexuals—I think it's mainly cis gays and lesbians who are exhibiting transphobia. That's a very vocal, very limited minority. I think the vast majority of cis gays and lesbians are wholly supportive of the trans community and fully understanding our rights and our rights to dignity, health care, stability, security, they're all interconnected. I think most people within the community do understand that and are working alongside us. But there is a vocal and influential minority within the LGBTQ+ community working against full equality, the full equality of the umbrella as a whole. It's quite hard to see. BLAIR HODGES: These are folks who are going to get platformed, too. One of the dangers is there's a kind of extra credibility in the eyes of transphobic folks. ERIS YOUNG: “We have a gay we can wheel out who hates trans people, that means the whole community does.” BLAIR HODGES: Exactly. This happens with people who have detransitioned. A very small number of folks who transition and detransition in some way for any number of reasons, and then an even smaller subset of that then become spokespeople against trans rights and are platformed and given huge audiences. ERIS YOUNG: Simply because they are able to pander to that transphobic ideology. BLAIR HODGES: It's heartening to hear that solidarity continues, and is more prominent. Your book does a good job of talking about the necessary community building that has to happen if people are going to advance rights and protections. And celebrations too. It's not just about protection. It's also about celebration and embracing and acceptance and curiosity and exploring. That's important as well. ON MENTAL HEALTH (52:45) BLAIR HODGES: As your book talks about mental health issues, I think that's a good transition into that topic, your chapter on mental health is especially careful because some people believe identifying beyond the binary or outside of it, is itself a mental health problem. This has been pathologized even in scientific Enlightenment thinking, as scientists in the late 1800s are trying to classify things and start seeing nonbinary and trans identities as pathological. Talk about the trickiness of mental health. Because on the one hand, it's been pathologized in negative ways. On the other hand, mental health issues do exist within the trans and nonbinary communities, in part because of the pressures that surround it. Mental health is a real concern, but it can also be deployed in really negative ways. ERIS YOUNG: I think you pretty much said it. The mental health chapter in my book—that was one of the topics I knew from the beginning I wanted to talk about, because I wanted to know what was going on. I think that chapter for me was all about trying to pick apart where these negative mental health outcomes actually come from. On the surface we've got these two facts that seem to contradict each other. We have on the one hand documented, disproportionate experiences of mental illness within the trans, nonbinary, and genderqueer communities. On the other side you have this understanding—and this was intuitive for me—this understanding that there is nothing wrong with being trans or being nonbinary. It's not an illness, it's just another way of being in the world. I really wanted in while writing that chapter, to try and dig a little deeper and get at what was really going on. What I basically found was it's a combination of gender dysphoria and marginalization stress, which is this experience, this way of describing the negative mental health outcomes—anxiety, depression—that come when a person is living as a marginalized person. Any kind of minority might experience this. It's the stresses of dealing with microaggressions. The everyday stress of being misgendered, of feeling like you don't fit and that society isn't built for you. BLAIR HODGES: These are physical things that happen. You talk about blood pressure elevation, more stress hormones being released, which is hard on the body, and it impacts mental and physical health. When people feel these marginalized stressors it has physical impacts. As you said, if you were to set a group of nonbinary folks or trans folks and a group of cis het folks next to each other, you're going to see a disproportionate amount of marginalized folks with depression, anxiety, and other things. It would be easy to say those people are broken people and their gender identity issues are because they have mental problems, or they're depressed, or it's part of all that. Instead of saying there's nothing wrong with who they are, but what they experience causes these negative outcomes. That's a crucial distinction to make. ERIS YOUNG: It's a really crucial distinction, but it's also quite a pernicious assumption. I can easily see where it comes from. When you have someone whose existence challenges people in positions of power, I can see why it was very convenient for people in medical institutions to be able to say “It's an illness, look how depressed they are,” and just in that way sort of brush queers, trans people under the rug. ON MEDICAL APPROACHES (56:38) BLAIR HODGES: There's also a chapter here specifically about medical issues, which is another touchy subject. As you've already hinted at, there's some distrust between genderqueer folks, trans folks, and medical resources and medical practitioners because of a history of diagnosis, this history of assuming these identities are disorders, and a history of attempts to cure them. We think of conversion therapy today as a religiously grounded thing, and obviously there are religious groups still trying to practice it, but it also grew out of the medical industry and out of psychology. It wasn't just religious fundamentalists who wanted to fix gay people or trans people, but rather medical industry saying, "Is there a way we can fix this problem for them so their gender aligns with their sex?" That's a long history— ERIS YOUNG: So they reintegrate into society. BLAIR HODGES: Exactly. This is where it's tricky because medical advances have helped, with hormone blockers and helping people medically transition, whether it be through hormones, whether it be through surgical procedures, but behind all of that is a lot of baggage and ongoing distrust. ERIS YOUNG: I think trans people who decide they want to transition medically, whatever that means for them, are put in this contradictory position where you are forced to rely on a system that has consistently dehumanized and pathologized you and people like you. That can create a lot of trauma. It's like being in a position where someone has hurt you and you have to see that person every day. It can be quite harmful. That really does come down to this post-European enlightenment shift in mindset that made us start to see biological sex as a kind of scientific reality and to uphold that as the most important thing. It also comes down to the way we have this system of capitalism that exploded after the Industrial Revolution, and you had men and women's social roles become more and more divergent from each other. Women were increasingly relegated to the home and men were increasingly placed in positions of economic power that were now outside the home. What that meant was, for men in power, it was very convenient for them to use this new scientific knowledge to make claims about the people they wanted to exclude from power. Usually this was women, but it's been weaponized against trans people, colonized people, queer people, generally since that time. BLAIR HODGES: As though there's something inherently inferior about them. ERIS YOUNG: Inferior, broken, and somehow being unwilling or unable or refusing to conform to a very specific norm is a moral failing and an illness. BLAIR HODGES: And hey, we can fix it! Using science. ERIS YOUNG: That's why in the community we have these assimilationist and anti-assimilationist groups getting in conflict with each other, because society offers you a way to re-enter society. Come back to the bosom of society. All you have to do is promise not to challenge the people in power anymore. It's really tempting and I can see why people fall into that. BLAIR HODGES: That can even happen in the process of transitioning too. We're staring down the barrel of all these new laws people are trying to pass that prevent gender affirming medical care, especially for young people. It's at a critical time. The idea of puberty blockers is to prolong a time when a young person can come to terms with who they are. ERIS YOUNG: Just some breathing space. To get to know yourself a bit better. BLAIR HODGES: They want to be like, "That's too dangerous. Let's just cut that completely off and then they can decide when they're older." But that means a body has undergone changes it didn't necessarily have to to begin with. The medical community is offering options now for people to take more control over their identities and their presentation in ways that alleviate suicidality. This part fascinated me where you talked about, for example, a care provider you had who thought you were transitioning to male and was prescribing testosterone and was like, "Your levels aren't where they should be." You're like, "Oh, interesting," but you also felt like you couldn't say like, "They're where I want them to be." ERIS YOUNG: It puts you in this position of having to misrepresent yourself. I think this is not as common anymore. Here in the UK we do have gender identity clinics, for how much longer we'll have those I do not know, but I do know a few people I've spoken to have accessed those services. There are people who are being very open about their nonbinary identity and their desire to transition in a way that isn't strictly from one end of the pole to another. BLAIR HODGES: I'm pausing the interview for a quick second with an update because Eris's words about care being under threat were prescient. Since we recorded the interview months ago, the UK has paused the prescription of puberty blockers for minors, under the advice of a partisan report produced by Dr. Hilary Cass, who other reporters say has worked with anti-trans activist groups and conversion therapists. To get a better sense about why prescriptions are being paused, I suggest following independent reporters who've been covering these stories. Erin Reed and Evan Urquhart are two of my favorite resources to go to. I hope to cover more about these recent studies and these laws later on the show. Back to Eris Young. TRANSITION OPTIONS (1:02:30) BLAIR HODGES: Give us a sixty second snapshot of what the process generally looks like for a young person who, let's say from a very young age they've talked about not being a boy or a girl, or maybe they've talked about being a gender they weren't assigned at birth. What does the process look like to transition? There are many ways to transition, so just give us a snapshot of what people go through. ERIS YOUNG: It varies a lot between the US and the UK and from state to state, obviously, and country to country, region to region. I think rural trans people will experience, for example, using gender identity services in the UK a lot differently than someone who's based in a city. If they're very young they might be able to access puberty blockers. That would only be for a short period of time they would be prescribed. They are not generally prescribed longer than a few years from my understanding. That would just give them a little bit of breathing space, because generally at the point of access of the first point of entry into the gender identity medical system, that's the moment at which a child is able to declare there's something going on with me and I want to explore it in more depth. At the point of being prescribed puberty blockers, that would just give them a little bit of breathing room to talk to people, hopefully. I'm of two minds about speaking to a cis therapist about gender stuff, but explore the community, explore their options, think about what kind of gender presentation feels right for them, think long and hard about what kind of medical transition they might want to undergo or not undergo at all. Then after a few years, they would then in an ideal world access hormone replacement therapy, so either and/or testosterone or estrogen, while this whole time they'll be transitioning socially, ideally, if it's safe to do so, exploring different names, different pronouns. I actually don't know if this is the lived reality of people right now. I'm sure in very progressive cities it probably is. The reality I'm sure is much more difficult than I'm making it out to be. BLAIR HODGES: This is the impression I think opponents have, is this idea that it's super easy and these kids are being manipulated, or the word people use is “groomed.” This term that has been rightly used to talk about adults pressuring children into sexual situations or conversion therapy, but they're trying to use it as though these people are trying to brainwash kids into thinking they're different. ERIS YOUNG: That's the same kind of bullsh*t that was said about gay people back in the eighties or nineties. “They're grooming our children and making them gay.” No. No, we aren't. BLAIR HODGES: Opponents of gay marriage would say, “we can't have gay men in particular father children because what they really want to do is abuse kids” or whatever. We're seeing those exact same arguments play out here. For anyone who has spent any time with a kid who identifies as trans, good luck trying to convince them of something else. I can barely get my kid to brush his teeth every night. There's the claim that it's way too easy, that it's coercive, that kids aren't interested in this really. ERIS YOUNG: It's the reverse. It's the kids that are educating themselves and coming to this with clear eyes and letting go of the social programming they've had. The kids are so much more conversant with all of this stuff than I was at their age. They should be supported in that. BLAIR HODGES: The parents I see are involved. There's nervousness, there's anxiety, and fear and love and all kinds of emotions they're dealing with. It's not this simple process. Your book is helpful in laying out why these processes are necessary and helpful, and also some of the downsides. It's clear eyed about some changes that could improve the system, more patient-centered informed consent models, where medical professionals are laying out options and talking about drawbacks and talking about side effects and talking about possibilities. ERIS YOUNG: I think the biggest change that needs to happen within the medical community is to understand or to acknowledge trans people are the experts on their own lived experience and are capable of making informed decisions for themselves and are best placed to make informed decisions for themselves. Not some faceless gender recognition panel of old cis people. I think that's the biggest change I'd like to see in the medical system. I have no idea if we'll ever get there. LEGAL ISSUES (1:07:19) BLAIR HODGES: Speaking of changes, let's also talk about legal issues. So you say nonbinary folks are most concerned with two factors. First, they need basic legal recognition of their identities, especially on official documents, birth certificates, and other things. Then second, with greater visibility will come a greater need for legal protection from discrimination, from violence. Those are the big things. Tell us what legal protections exist now, and what legal protections you'd really like to see happen that don't exist mostly. ERIS YOUNG: It's a little tricky. These things are changing all the time. They vary by country, they vary over time, they walk forward and get knocked back. Just last year in the UK, we saw Scotland vote by a pretty solid majority to reform the Gender Recognition Act in Scotland. This was the Scottish people voting in favor of making the legal process and medical process for transitioning easier and more humane. It would allow people to start the process younger, and it would eliminate some of the more dehumanizing and traumatic aspects of the current UK gender recognition system. Then what we saw was that Westminster, so the overarching government in the UK, which is a conservative government run by the Tory Party, Boris Johnson or whoever they've got down there now, they simply decided to ignore it. They saw that Scotland had voted, exercised the democratic process, and they decided not to uphold it. The Gender Recognition Act has not been reformed, even though Scotland voted to do it. We've seen even in the course of one year massive progress and massive walking back of that progress because of a transphobic government the UK has. It really varies a lot and it's all extremely in flux right now. I'm pretty excited that I've now been able to, I think at the beginning of last year, I applied for a passport just at the time Joe Biden announced you can now get an X on your gender marker, so I got that which was very cool. I filled out my application and then had to come back to the UK but in my mom's house right now there's a driver's license for me with an X gender marker on it that I have to go and get. I've got these nonbinary friendly, inclusive gender markers on my driver's license. In California, literally all I had to do was fill out a gender declaration form. It took a minute to fill it out. It was super easy. I'm grateful my family is based in California. We have a lot of rights other queers in other states don't. Something I'm wondering is, the more we see progress being made in one area, for example in legal documentation, what then does that mean, for example, to the criminal justice system? Or I should say, the quote-unquote "justice system"? This is all theoretical. What happens to somebody with an X gender marker on their documentation if they get arrested, if they become incarcerated? BLAIR HODGES: If they're incarcerated, where do they go? If prisons are separated by binary where would they go? ERIS YOUNG: Is it possible to change your birth certificate right now? I'm not sure. I haven't looked into it. If it is, how much longer will we have that privilege, or that right of being able to do that? But the more we change things, the more we start to see how entrenched binary gender is throughout the entire system. Obviously, what passes for a criminal justice system in the United States is fundamentally broken and needs to be rebuilt from the ground up. Part of that is going to be, how is sex and gender treated within that system. I don't know if anyone has done any formal study of people with nonbinary legal documentation or just of nonbinary people within the criminal justice system in the States. I'd be very interested to see what they're finding because it would be another layer of complication on an already horrific experience. BLAIR HODGES: We're also seeing general access to care being affected in places. Utah, where I'm meeting you from, has passed legislation to prevent gender affirming care for minors. It's causing so much pain and damage. Hopefully the courts can help address that, but that remains to be seen. Legally it feels like we have a long way to go, and I think it's going to be a heavier lift in some ways than gay marriage because cis het people could more easily wrap our heads around gay marriage. It was just like, oh, these people want to get married. Cool. ERIS YOUNG: This is us asking for a separate thing. It's not an assimilation. We're asking for actual change, not just to access something existing. IS THERE REASON TO HOPE? (1:12:54) BLAIR HODGES: To be yourselves. Let us be us, not let us be like you. ERIS YOUNG: Yes.  BLAIR HODGES: With that in mind, are you generally optimistic? Let's close on that. What are some reasons for optimism, some things to keep our eyes on? ERIS YOUNG: Something I find reassuring is, it's not the same all over the world right now. We are seeing backlash, but it's not the same. One of my friends here in Scotland, they're nonbinary and their son is trans. They just went to Canada and stayed there for a few weeks. They said they felt safer and more seen and more understood than they had in years of living in the UK. It wasn't just that there are legal recognitions over there. It's the way they were treated in the day-to-day by normal everyday cis people. Just regular people treated them with respect and understanding. They didn't want to leave. In a way, it is cause for optimism because it makes me think it's not this way everywhere and it doesn't have to be. At the same time, it's quite depressing because we can't all move to Canada. There's space there, but you know. [laughter] I want to believe it won't be like it is in the UK or certain parts of the USA forever. I have to hope, but at the same time, and I think directly correlated with the increase in visibility that trans and nonbinary people have had in recent years, we've become really visible or we've been really visible and uncompromising when it comes to claiming space and claiming language for ourselves. What that means is there are a lot of people, especially people in power, who are made upset by that, who are afraid of it because it makes them think about themselves and think about their own position in the world. If they acknowledge us then they have to question a lot of the things they've based their whole lives around. Because they're people in power they've applied an equal and opposite pressure to our own attempts to demand rights and equality. I think the next ten years is going to be difficult. BLAIR HODGES: From where I sit—this is complete theory, there's no study backing this theory I have—but I have a theory that there are more people who would be supportive of nonbinary identities, that there are more people who could come to easily understand trans folks and their experiences, and the opposition is a very dedicated, vocal, and powerful minority of voices who have a disproportionate impact on what policies are passed, on how people are treated. What that means to me is if that's true, that puts more onus on me to use my voice and my position to advocate for equality and for greater understanding. It really becomes the sort of middle grounders or folks who are like, "Yeah, that sounds fine to me. But I'm also living my life over here." That's who I want to start paying attention. Because most queer folks are already in the fight. They kind of have to be. Some take breaks here and there or want to hop out because otherwise they might end their lives or something. For me, I want these folks who are interested, maybe kindly curious, to be more

Maggie Smith wrote a poem that went viral, but that wasn't the cause of her divorce. It was just one moment in a much bigger story about infidelity, raising children, and learning to live in a haunted house. Need some divorce catharsis? Join us.  Maggie Smith is the best-selling award-winning author of the memoir, You Could Make This Place Beautiful. She also wrote Good Bones and Keep Moving. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, New Yorker, The Nation, The Paris Review, and The Best American Poetry. Her awards include the Academy of American Poets Prize, Pushcart Prize, and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.  Transcript MAGGIE SMITH: It's like the Instagram fail where you try to make the cake based on the beautiful unicorn cake you see, and then it's like, "Nailed it!"—and it looks like it's melting off to the side. You know, no one wants to make something that doesn't become the shining image in your mind you think you're making. BLAIR HODGES: That's Maggie Smith talking about her national best-selling book You Could Make This Place Beautiful. Her cake metaphor gets at some of the anxieties any author might feel, but it also works as a description of the marriage she wrote about in that book. Things started off well, with high hopes and visions of a shared future, but it turned into a Nailed It scenario when she discovered her husband's affair. Maggie Smith joins us to get real about divorce, family, patriarchy, raising kids, and more.     WHAT SOME PEOPLE ASK (01:21)   BLAIR HODGES: Maggie Smith, welcome to Family Proclamations. MAGGIE SMITH: Thanks for having me. BLAIR HODGES: I thought we'd start off by having you read one of the pieces in your book, it's called "Some People Ask," because it's short but it gives a nice overview of a lot of the things you talk about in this memoir about divorce and family, about your career, and about all kinds of things. Let's have you read that on page ten. "Some People Ask." MAGGIE SMITH: These were my attempts at—people won't ask me these questions if I put the questions and answers in the book. Alas, that did not actually deter the questions. So this is one of them. Some People Ask “So, how would you describe your marriage? What happened?” Every time someone asks me a question like this, every time someone asks about my marriage, or about my divorce experience, I pause for a moment. Inside that imperceptible pause I'm thinking about the cost of answering fully. I'm weighing it against the cost of silence. I could tell the story about the pinecone, the postcard, the notebook, the face attached to the name I googled, the name I googled written in the handwriting I'd seen my name in, and the names of our children, for years and years. I could tell them how much I've spent on lawyers, or how much I've spent on therapy, or how much I've spent on dental work from grinding my teeth in my sleep, and how many hours I sleep, which is not many, but at least if I'm only sleeping a few hours at night, then I'm only grinding my teeth a few hours a night. I could talk about how a lie is worse than whatever the lie is draped over to conceal. I could talk about what a complete mindf*ck it is to lose the shelter of your marriage, but also how expansive the view is without that shelter, how big the sky is. “Sometimes people just grow apart,” I say. I smile, take a sip of water. Next question. BLAIR HODGES: I love the "Some People Ask" sections. They're scattered throughout the book, and they get at questions I think a lot of divorced people run into. I think this is why folks who have been through divorce can relate so much to the book is these questions that are so familiar. What strikes me is, all that thinking in the italic text that you read, that happens in a split second. All of that calculus is so fast. MAGGIE SMITH: It does. I mean, it has to happen fast. Because when you're on the spot—whether you're on stage at an event, or doing a podcast, or someone catches you at the farmers market, like a neighbor—you have to do that quick mental math. What do I really want to get myself into right now? BLAIR HODGES: There's something else behind the question of “what happened,” which is like, what really happened? People kind of want like—there's probably something that's not public, or they want the tea. The question can be asked out of sincere regard for you, but there's also, most of the time probably a little bit of that human impulse to just want to know the dirt. MAGGIE SMITH: I think that's true, but I also think particularly with divorce, the wanting to know—that curiosity is a self-protective impulse. People don't even recognize that impulse when they are asking, but what they're really asking is, how does this not happen to me?   GROWING APART (04:44)   BLAIR HODGES: Oof. That resonates with people. Throughout the book my mind kept going back to this pinecone. You mentioned the story about the pinecone. Basically this is part of how you found out your husband was cheating on you. He had given your child this pinecone, and then later on you discovered this is a pinecone he picked up on a walk with a woman he was seeing in another state. I can hardly wrap my head around him giving that to your child. It's connected to this whole other thing he was doing. MAGGIE SMITH: That was why I threw it away. [laughter] BLAIR HODGES: That's right. The line I kept thinking of too from this one is, "sometimes people just grow apart." Now that the book's out, does that line still work? Do you find yourself still in conversations like this? People can know more, a lot more, about the situations you went through. Do you still find yourself sometimes having to say, "You know, sometimes things just don't work out?" MAGGIE SMITH: You know, the deep irony of that is when I wrote that section of the book, I thought the truth was in all of that italicized internal monologue text. The sort of, not really lie, but the "let's just get this over with” quick and easy answer was “Sometimes people just grow apart,” and the longer I've been sitting with this, the more I realized that's true. Everything in the paragraph is true, too. But “sometimes people just grow apart,” as sort of toss off an answer as that is, it actually is not inaccurate, and it's not not what happened. I mean, that happened also. BLAIR HODGES: The thing is, the growing apart could be incredibly painful or the growing apart could be incremental over years and people diverge in interests or mature into different people. The growth apart can be really painful, so it can be a true answer, and at the same time what's behind that answer could be really different depending on who you're talking to. MAGGIE SMITH: I just had friends who celebrated twenty years together, and they're posting photos of their younger selves, and you swipe to see the current version, or how it started, how it's going—that kind of meme. It feels like a miracle to me now that there are so many people who grow together over twenty, forty, sixty years instead of growing apart. I think it's a beautiful miracle that some people manage to do that. I did not. BLAIR HODGES: We see you grieve that. There are several times in the book where you talk about grieving the loss of that kind of connected relationship over the years. At this point in your life you can't ever have that. You can't have a relationship you shared when you were in your twenties and are now in your forties. That person is connected to the person you were with and it's not possible to recover it. MAGGIE SMITH: I get a little envious of seeing pictures of people from the nineties and they're still with that person. I don't get to do that. I don't get to carry forward that human being with another human being. I suppose if I met someone and got married this year and live to be ninety-seven, I could still have a golden anniversary, if they also live to be ninety-seven. I think it's unlikely that's going to happen. That was actually a fair amount of the grieving process. It wasn't just my specific marriage. I think everybody gets this. It's all the things in the future you think are guaranteed you when you "settle down" with someone, and then all those things go up in smoke when it doesn't work out.   REGRETS (08:38)   BLAIR HODGES: Did you wrestle a lot with feeling like those years were lost? A lot happened. You had kids during those years. You grew professionally. You struck out on your own in bold professional moves. You became a successful and very known writer. I'm wondering if there's a sense of lost years, because even some people that have a lot of things to look back on fondly still might feel like, "Dang it, I wish those years were spent differently." Do you live with a sense of regret about it? MAGGIE SMITH: No, not necessarily. I think at the beginning I did. Like, "Really, now I'm in my forties and I have to start over? Now?" It would have been easier ten years ago, for sure. It would have been easier fifteen years ago, for sure. But when I look at my kids and the life we've built here it's impossible to imagine it happening any other way. Because to rewind the film far enough to get a different result, I would be erasing them from the story and I can't. BLAIR HODGES: I wanted to ask you about this. How long—to preface this question—how long was it from beginning to end of writing the book? Do you remember? MAGGIE SMITH: Some pieces of the book existed before I knew I was writing a book. I pulled some poems in. I pulled some previous essays in, but I wrote the book for a year. BLAIR HODGES: The reason I ask is because we get to see you grow during that year. This is one of my "gasp out loud" moments. There are a few of them in the book where I literally gasped. It usually involved something your ex had done. But this one, one of the biggest for me, was something you said. When people would ask you a question, "Wasn't it all worth it because you got the kids out of it?" Earlier in the book your internal voice says, "Actually, I might undo it all, even knowing that would entail the kids." What you verbally say to the person is, "Well, I can't imagine life without my kids." The thing you're not seeing in italics is, "Maybe,” or “maybe even probably." But we see you grow from that. Talk about that growth over the course of the book, because that was a huge admission to be like, "You know what? Maybe not. Maybe it wasn't worth all that pain." MAGGIE SMITH: Not just for me, but for them. A lot of what I wish for them is a different kind of childhood and a different kind of family. I remember thinking about if I never had my children I wouldn't miss them, because I wouldn't have known them and they wouldn't miss me because they wouldn't have known me, and so it's not hurting anyone to say I would rewind the tape and completely do this all over again. Throughout the course of writing the book and living that year and sitting with everything and really thinking about it, I got to a place where I was like, "No, actually, I'll take the heat." I think it's worth taking the heat myself. I think they can take the heat enough so we get to have each other and in the end that has to be worth it. I did a lot of that in the book. A lot of my thinking at the beginning of the book is not my thinking at the end. That's an accurate reflection of life. Not necessarily a convenient narrative arc. "Oh, on second thought, I changed my mind, reader, from what I told you thirty pages ago." But that's how we live. I don't know how we live without that.   ON SECOND THOUGHT (12:04)   BLAIR HODGES: It didn't feel like a setup. I felt like I was experiencing you process that in real time and that when you wrote that original piece you hadn't set out thinking, "How is this going to fit into my book overall?" You were writing the pieces as they came and we get to experience that growth with you. Here's the piece "On Second Thought." It's short. I'll just read it. It says: I've been thinking about what I said before about wanting to undo it all. The more that time passes, the less I feel that way. Rilke comes to me in these moments—this is a poet—whispering no feeling is final. I don't just want to have kids, I want these kids, though dammit, I wish they had an easier path to travel. I wish we all had an easier path. Here's what I think about the most. In some parallel universe I can save the children and jettison the marriage. This is magical thinking, as in some Greek myth we're yet to discover. A son and daughter spring from me whole. No feeling is final. It strikes me, that can turn in on itself when it comes to joy too. That quote usually we think about if you're depressed or something, no feeling is final, but there's also a sense in which the best joys can be fleeting. MAGGIE SMITH: That is the last part of a quote I actually have—I'm looking at it right now on a sticky note on my office window. It's been living there for so many years, which tells you I don't wash my windows. "Let everything happen to you. Beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final." I feel so much of life is toggling between beauty and terror. Sometimes in the same three-minute stretch. BLAIR HODGES: It's great to see your relationship with your kids throughout the book. There's a beautiful piece about Violet, your daughter, and mixtapes. You both have bonded over music. MAGGIE SMITH: That's one of the coolest things as they get older. I feel like I set a music syllabus pretty early with my kids. We had a “no kids music” rule in our house, like no Kidz Bop, no music for children. We just tried to choose clean-ish music so we could enjoy it. One of the coolest things is seeing what from my music syllabus they're carrying forward and what they like of early to mid-nineties indie rock, and then what they strike out and find on their own. That's pretty much a metaphor for living with children. BLAIR HODGES: That's exactly why I brought it up. Then also the reciprocal love, the love your children showed for you. There's a piece called "Hidden Valentines," where your son Rhett had gone out of town. I think he went to his dad's— MAGGIE SMITH: I have one right here! It says, "You are nice and you make me laugh." BLAIR HODGES: He put these all around the house for you. It's so sweet. So I see romance happening in the book even when your partner was gone after the divorce. A certain kind of romance. MAGGIE SMITH: It's funny. It's the end of a love story, but not the end of all the love stories. I really think so much of this book is a love letter to writers and writing, but it's also a love letter to parents and kids, and a love letter to my kids in particular. The real love story is a self-love story, and finding yourself in the mess, but we have each other.   DIVISION OF LABOR (15:26)   BLAIR HODGES: That's Maggie Smith, and we're talking about her memoir, You Could Make this Place Beautiful. Her writings appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Nation, the Paris Review, and the Best American Poetry. She's a best-selling, award winning author of the books Good Bones and Keep Moving. Those books are also available. Maggie, you write a lot in this book about a common problem in marriage. This podcast has other episodes that will touch more on this, but I liked how you explore it, and that's how professional success and a division of labor in marriage can make a big impact. You wrote a poem that went viral. This was a landmark moment in your journey toward divorce, because your partner had started out as a writer as well and then had diverged from that path to become a lawyer. And it seemed like because you persisted with writing your partner couldn't fully embrace your professional success and he'd even downplay and sometimes even ridicule your career as maybe a hobby or a little indulgence. He also wanted you to step into the traditional mother role, despite the fact you're both progressive-minded folks. There was one time when he called you on a work trip to come home because your son had a fever. That, again, was another one of these gasp out loud moments. MAGGIE SMITH: I think this happens in all kinds of families, whether one of the partners is an artist or a writer or not. It doesn't necessarily keep itself to families where one person has a more traditional job and one person has a creative job. Frankly, it doesn't only happen in families in cis-het marriages where the man out-earns the woman. I know women who earn more than their husbands who are still packing every lunch and doing every pediatrician appointment and having a hard time getting away for professional obligations. I know lots of women who, when they go to conferences, someone comes up to them and says, "Oh, who's got the kids?" BLAIR HODGES: I've never heard that. MAGGIE SMITH: Exactly. And I don't think men get that, "Oh, who's got the kids?" Everyone assumes your partner has the kids. It's a real issue, and it's not a poetry versus law issue. It's not a creative versus traditional issue. I don't even think it's about earning—although I do think it can make the power dynamic more pronounced when one person significantly out-earns the other. BLAIR HODGES: It's in the data. MAGGIE SMITH: It's in the data. And there is a sense of feeling somewhat exempt from some of the domestic responsibilities if you are the person who's paying most of the bills via your income. That sets up couples for a lot of resentment, frankly. I don't think there's anything that kills a relationship faster than resentment, feeling like you can't be your full self. BLAIR HODGES: I think that's right. You talk a lot about it in the book, but you also pull back somewhat, because you mention at one point there's this spreadsheet of the cognitive labor that you're doing in the relationship, the day-to-day schedule keeping. One example that comes to mind for me is when a dad feels like he really succeeded because he showed up to Junior's ballgame, but he didn't take them to practices. But he didn't sign Junior up for ball. He's not washing Junior's uniform. He's not bringing treats, blah, blah, blah. But he feels like a really involved dad because he shows up for the game. You talk about this spreadsheet of labor and then you say, "I thought about including it here, but I'm not going to." So you didn't include the actual spreadsheet. But really, you know it's peppered throughout the book, right? The spreadsheet is pretty much in the book. MAGGIE SMITH: It's pretty much in the book. Anyone reading this knows what's on the spreadsheet. We all know—or maybe if you don't know what's on your spreadsheet— BLAIR HODGES: Thank you. MAGGIE SMITH: —take some time and write it down. Sometimes I'll get done with a day, and I'll think I feel like “I didn't accomplish much today,” meaning I only wrote five hundred words or something. Then if I think about what I accomplished, I've done three loads of laundry, I took the dog to the vet, I signed up someone for a camp or soccer, I emailed a teacher about a project my child had a question on, I looked at something, I planned a vacation, I did this, I did this. It's so much of that domestic stuff that doesn't count as "work" that takes up so much time and doesn't really feel like accomplishment or achievement. It's not performative. It's invisible labor. The one thing I realized about my invisible labor is when I was gone to teach or give a reading or visit a university, the invisible labor your partner does becomes very, very visible to you when they are not there. You realize the dishes don't do themselves and the laundry doesn't just arrive folded in the dresser drawer and the play dates don't get scheduled without this human being. BLAIR HODGES: This reminds me of your "Google Maps" essay where you wrote this beautiful piece about tracing your divorce through Google Maps, because you can go back and see pictures of the house. You sent it to your partner after the divorce to say, "Hey, take a look at this. I'm going to be publishing this and it involves you so I thought you should take a look before it goes out." He sent you notes back and one of them was like, "Oh, see the recycle bin? I took that out." [laughter] MAGGIE SMITH: It was illuminating. His edits were like, all of my crying was deleted. Anytime I mentioned crying was deleted. BLAIR HODGES: That's too on the nose, Maggie. Isn't that too on the nose? [laughs] MAGGIE SMITH: I mean, that's why I said it was psychologically revealing. Wanting credit for household chores and wanting to not acknowledge the pain you've caused another person. I found that interesting. I published that piece in the Times. I didn't think I was going to write a memoir, so I thought that was it. But when I went to write the memoir, I thought, I don't know how to tell the story without offering these edits as a kind of shorthand. I mean, I'm not going to offer the annotated version in this document, but it said so much in so little space. You know how if you know someone well, you look at them across the room at a party and their expression tells you “It's time to go,” or “Get a load of this.” That's kind of how I received those edits. It was a lot of data in a very small space.   MOTIVATION(S) (22:11)   BLAIR HODGES: I imagine there were probably legal considerations or some interpersonal considerations about sending it to him first. As you were writing that piece and then the book more in depth, did you worry at all about his reputation? Maybe the lesson here is, don't ever marry an author. But at the time, he was one. MAGGIE SMITH: It's tricky. We have responsibility to other people when we write about them. I was careful and people who know me, very considerate. The people who know more about the situation are like, "Oh, yeah, you were really considerate." [laughter] And I was. And not just because of the legal considerations. That's always something, but also because I didn't write this book to hurt other people. I certainly didn't write this book to expose other people. For people who might be thinking about writing about their lives, whether in a memoir or an essay or something, if they think they're going to share it with other people, the piece of advice I have is to always think about your motivations. If your motivation is anger or revenge or “they thought they could do this, well now I'll show them,” then put your pen down. Or pick your pen up, but that's for your journal or something you can share with a therapist or a friend. That's like Happy Hour venting. If your desire is to know yourself better because you're curious about a situation, because you think unpacking this might be useful for you or for someone else, I think those are safer, healthier motivations for writing about your life, and will probably, if you keep true to those motivations, will keep you out of the weeds. BLAIR HODGES: I want to go back to motivations in a second, but also want to point out you don't name him. You call him “Redacted” sometimes. This is the age of Google though. MAGGIE SMITH: If people want to do the legwork, anybody can find anything. BLAIR HODGES: Is it weird to you that people do? I did. [laughs] MAGGIE SMITH: It's a little strange, but I think it's a human impulse. Have I read stories where someone was unnamed and have I tried to figure out who they are? Of course. We've all done that. I don't think there's any shame in it. We live in an age where if you can find Trump's taxes, you can find anything. BLAIR HODGES: It's true. I also wanted to point out too, here's a piece called "An Offering," where you say: I feel like I need to reiterate something. This isn't the story of a good wife and a bad husband. Was I easy to live with? Probably not. I crave time to myself. I thought I knew best what the children needed. I was stubborn. I disliked, dislike confrontation. So I could be, can be avoidant or passive aggressive. We see this confessional mode a few times throughout the book, too. MAGGIE SMITH: Gina Frangello, who's a terrific writer, said something really smart about memoir, which is there are two essential ingredients. One is self-assessment and the other is societal interrogation. I think this book has both, which I'm grateful for because I didn't know the two ingredients from Gina until after I was done writing it and had already turned it in. But that goes back to motivations. If you are writing a book in which you are going to be the hero of your story? No. That's the wrong motivation. Not only did I not want to write that book, I don't want to read that book. I don't want to read that book. That's too easy. BLAIR HODGES: That's right. It's wonderful to see you wrestling with motivations throughout the book. This book is very meta. You talk about the creation of the book throughout the book, and what we learn is you didn't have one single pure motive. There were times when you talk about being led by curiosity and writing was an exercise in trying to figure out what you thought about something. When you're trying to make sense of everything. Another reason why you would publish it is so you could share pain and share discovery with other people. This is where memoir becomes a sort of curation. Why we read memoirs is because we get to try on other people's lives. Or why we ask someone what really happened, in that question is, “I want to see how this fits on me.”   MY TEACHER, MY PAIN (25:57)   There's one particular lesson you're trying to draw out. This comes out in this piece I just read from called, "An Offering." You're quoting from a Buddhist teacher about how—and this is the Amazon highlighted quote by the way. If you go to your Amazon page, this is the top highlighted part of your book. MAGGIE SMITH: Oh, wow. BLAIR HODGES: Here it is. It says: Thank you for the pain you caused me because that pain woke me up. It hurt enough to make me change. “Wish for more pain,” a friend's therapist once told her, “because that's how you'll change.” That really resonated with people. Pain teaches us. There's a utility to pain. There can be an underside to that, of celebrating pain or of having a privileged pain when other people have worse pains. It can be easier for me to talk about pain when the pain could be worse. I wanted to explore that with you, about the limits of the idea that pain can teach us. Because I agree it can, but there's limits to that. MAGGIE SMITH: Of course. I would like to learn lessons any other way, frankly. I don't want pain to be my teacher. But I think the bottom line is we don't get to choose our teachers. And so I've learned a lot in my life through joy. I've learned a lot in my life through, frankly, confusion, and not knowing things and having to figure it out for myself. In the case of the end of my marriage, experiencing that pain and grief and loss taught me a lot about myself. I don't know if I would have learned those lessons another way. That doesn't mean the scales are balanced. I'm not at all saying the lessons I learned about myself through my divorce made all this suffering for myself and my family worthwhile because they got me this lesson. No. I would always choose not to have the pain any day of the week. I would rather know less about myself and feel better. Absent that choice, which I did not have, I'm glad to have at least made some progress with myself and my life via this unpleasant experience. I do think that's part of why we go to memoir, it's also to feel seen and feel understood. When we share our pain with someone else, whether it's a big pain or a small pain, I think we're telling other people, “This happened to me, maybe something similar happened to you.” You pick up the book, you read it, and maybe you've been through a very similar experience, and it makes you feel less alone. Maybe you've been through a completely different experience that rocked your world in a similar way. You see how someone else kind of got to the "other side of it" and it gives you a sense of solidarity and like, "Oh, yes, this is the human experience." That's what I'm hoping for in sharing it.   READING MEMOIR (29:53)   BLAIR HODGES: My partner joked with me when I started this podcast, like, "Oh, you're going to include memoir?" In the past, I've just done academic stuff—sociology, psychology, Religious Studies, and all these things. I was a little snooty about memoir, dismissive of it, skeptical of it. But I decided to lean into it for this show. Two things happen when I'm reading a memoir. The two things I love the most. First, when an author says something I already knew in a way I never would have been able to articulate or didn't even realize I knew. The other one is when they tell me something I'd never considered before, but suddenly it snaps into place in the clearest of ways. These revelations that happen when I'm reading. MAGGIE SMITH: That happens to me, too. That's why it's a genre I turn to a lot. I get that from poetry also. I think that's probably why I read primarily nonfiction and poetry because those are places I go to be changed. I can't pick up a book of poems or a memoir and not be a slightly rearranged, slightly different person when I close the book. I don't think we exit good books as the same person we enter them, and that is a gift. BLAIR HODGES: We carry pieces of it with us too. We're changed. I should point out as we're talking about pain and all the suffering you write about, and the grief, and there's anger, there's frustration, there's some joy, there's some love. But you say you're a lot funnier than your book is. There's a footnote that's so funny. It's like, "I wanted twenty percent more wit and twenty percent less pain in here, but this is what we got." [laughter] MAGGIE SMITH: I think my gallows humor comes out in this book because I feel like I meet people all the time, and they're like, "Oh, you're a lot funnier than your writing." That's probably true of a lot of people unless you're maybe David Sedaris. I'm not a humorist. I tend to write through things I'm puzzling over or grappling with, and that's not necessarily a space where I feel free to be funny, but in every other aspect of my life it's part of my life. BLAIR HODGES: It made me think about the function of humor, too. Because sometimes humor can be an escape hatch out of difficult emotions. It felt like you resisted that. You could have—you're a funny person and I'm sure you could have said lots of quips and witty things. But it seems like you resisted them because you're like, "No, I need to stay in this moment and I'm not going to take the escape hatch." MAGGIE SMITH: It's just not that kind of book. I think I could have maybe written a funny book. Well, maybe not that year. I was not in a place to have written a funny book. Maybe I could write the funny book now. But it's something even, and I write about this, it's something even my therapist notices, that whenever I'm telling a particularly painful story or talking about something painful, I laugh. It's so bad, I have to laugh. Like, can you believe that happened? It is that sort of emotional escape hatch, where you can't let yourself look it straight in the eye and go there. It was important for me to do that. BLAIR HODGES: Well, I'm looking forward to your sequel to this book, You Can Make this Place Hilarious. [laughter] MAGGIE SMITH: I know! I wrote a book called Keep Moving. Then after that I thought maybe the next book is just like, Sit Down, or Rest Up, you know? [laughter]   BLAIR HODGES: That's Maggie Smith. We're talking about the book, You Could Make this Place Beautiful. She's an incredible author, and as she mentioned, also wrote a book called Keep Moving, which is a lot more like, keep moving. It's got your happy aphorisms and more motivational stuff. I think pairing these books is a good idea.   BEING HAUNTED (33:18)   BLAIR HODGES: I wanted to talk briefly about being haunted. You kept the house you lived with your family and your partner there, you wanted to keep the house so badly. But it means you live in a haunted house of sorts, in a haunted city. You drive places and see where you went out to eat, or you see where this thing happened, or that thing happened. Then in your house, all the things that happened there. You mention how—you don't put it in this way, but this is what came to mind, that divorce is kind of marriage by another means, especially if you have kids. I mean the relationship has to continue logistically, also in your memory, so divorce is a hard kind of marriage by other means in this hauntedness you describe throughout the book. MAGGIE SMITH: I still live basically in my hometown. It's always been that way. I see people from different stages of my life all the time. I see places that meant things to me all the time. I live in the house I lived in when I was married. My kids are still here. That was never going to change. One of the commitments I've made is keeping my kids' life as untouched by all of this as humanly possible, which is laughable because it's not untouched at all. I mean, it sort of napalmed everything, but the house is still here, and we're still here, and our neighbors are still the same, and they're still in their schools, and they still see the same people all the time, and we still walk to the farmers market. It's important to me to provide as much stability as possible for them. What that means for me is not being able to get that "fresh start" so many people want after a relationship ends, where you want to leave that part of your life behind and move onto something else. When you've lived in the same place for forty years you don't get to do that. You're taking one for the team, but that's what being a parent is. It's taking one for the team over and over and over. To be honest, on one hand it's difficult because there are a lot of memories. On the other hand, I don't think I would have thrived through this challenging time without my community. I don't think that would have been possible if we'd been living someplace else. BLAIR HODGES: Right, like your first lonely solo Christmas when neighbors were coming by and dropping stuff off on Christmas morning. MAGGIE SMITH: It's ridiculous how kind people are to me. People look out for me so much. My family is here. We have Sunday dinners every week. People have asked if it's weird publishing a memoir and having so many people know about your life and then you're walking the streets knowing people are looking at you, maybe knowing more about you than you know about them. It doesn't actually feel that strange. I feel very held here. I feel really supported here. BLAIR HODGES: You could make “this place” beautiful. “This place” means so many things, but I feel like in the book it also means the literal place—that house, which it's so kickass that you bought it. It's yours. It felt really empowering that you were able to do that. Reclaim it as yours. MAGGIE SMITH: The most terrifying part of the divorce other than being on my own was, where are we going to go? Being able to stay in this house, and that was thanks to the book Keep Moving, being able to stay in this house, and being able to provide that for my kids was something I didn't think I was going to be able to do as a poet. It has been really empowering. It's a good way to think of it. It's a double-edged sword. Yes. On one hand, it's a haunted house. Yes, my ex-husband's handwriting is in some of the cookbooks. But on the other hand, we're here and we're still standing.   AFTERLIFE OF A BOOK (37:39)   BLAIR HODGES: I love that. Do you have any favorite criticisms of the book? Something where you're like, "Oh, that's really interesting," or have you tried to ignore any of that kind of stuff? MAGGIE SMITH: I don't think people really ignore it. If fifty people say something nice about your book and one person says something mean, that mean thing will live rent free in your head forever. I think that's just what it is to be human. I try not to tune in too much or put too much stock into either criticism or praise because both can be dangerous. Too much praise can make you complacent and not make you challenge yourself to do better. You're competing against yourself when you're a writer more than you're competing against other people. Most of the criticisms of the book I anticipated. I anticipated people would say, "Why are you airing your dirty laundry?" Which is why that's a question I posed to myself in the book. I anticipated that people would say, "Oh my gosh, aren't you worried about your kids reading this someday?" I anticipated some people not liking the meta aspect of the book or the direct address to the reader. I made those decisions anyway because it's my book. Those people can do things their way if they want to. BLAIR HODGES: I imagine when people meet with you who have read the book—Most of the time if you're going to a reading or something, people enjoy the book. You get to see a lot of different positive reactions. There's so much in the book that a lot of different things could resonate with a lot of different people. There were so many pages I marked, like, I want to ask her about this, I want to ask her about this. But time is limited. There was way more than I could possibly cover, but I saw on Instagram you're celebrating the year anniversary of this book coming out. It's heading into paperback now. You said this book has sparked meaningful life-changing conversations. Maybe before we go, talk about the afterlife of the book as it continues in your conversations. Maybe an example of a meaningful life-changing discussions you've been able to have because of the book. MAGGIE SMITH: Book tour is always an opportunity to do that because I get to go to different cities and sit down with different writers and hear their questions and have a conversation about big life stuff with them. We end up talking about not just divorce, but all kinds of things. We end up talking about patriarchy. We end up talking about parenting. We end up talking about memory and hometowns, and family and secrets, and silence and all kinds of things. Depending on who I'm talking to, that conversation takes a different shape and different texture and different color. If someone wanted to follow me like the Grateful Dead on book tour and come to all of my events for the paperback, they would be witnessing five or six different conversations because they're all so personal. Some of the most meaningful moments I get to have around this book are talking to readers. It's sitting at the signing table and having people come up and hand me a card, or hand me a crystal, or hand warmers they knitted me, a little something, or just to say “I gave this to my mom,” or “my best friend really needed this,” or “I wish I had this when I was going through my divorce twenty years ago.” Something that happens with memoirs when you share a lot of yourself, it inspires or encourages other people to share a little bit about their stories with you too. That's been a beautiful point of connection with readers.   FORGIVENESS (41:48)   BLAIR HODGES: I really hope people who haven't had a chance to check out this book, check it out. It's called You Could Make this Place Beautiful. There's so much we didn't mention, like the fact your husband wound up with Pinecone. I don't know if he's still with Pinecone or not, but that at least happened. He moved out of state, which was earth shattering for you, and how that disconnected him from the kids. There's a ton of stuff we didn't cover, but I thought we would close with having you read a piece on page 302. We started off with a "Some People Will Ask" piece and I thought it would be good to cap it off with a "Some People Will Ask" piece. MAGGIE SMITH: Some people will ask, “You say you want to forgive. Have you?” Someone will ask that, I'm sure, because I ask myself all the time. How do I answer? I could say it's difficult to forgive someone who hasn't expressed remorse. I could counter with questions. Why do I need to forgive someone who doesn't seem to be sorry? What if forgiveness doesn't need to be the goal? The goal is the wish, peace. Can there be peace without forgiveness? How do you heal when there is an open wound that is being kept open, a scab always being picked until it bleeds again. I could say this is my task, seeking peace, knowing the wound may never fully close. “Forgiveness is complicated. To be at peace I think what I need is acceptance. I accept it."   REGRETS, CHALLENGES, & SURPRISES! (43:04)   BLAIR HODGES: That's Maggie Smith, reading from the book You Could Make this Place Beautiful. There's always a segment at the end of these episodes called “Regrets, Challenges, & Surprises.” It's where I ask people about anything they would change about the book now that it's out, what the hardest part about writing it was, or what the most surprising thing was. You've touched on some of these already, but before we go if you have anything to say about regrets, challenges, and surprises, we'll close there. MAGGIE SMITH: I don't think I have any regrets about the way I wrote the book. Surprises? Honestly, I think the reception has been surprising. I did not expect it to be a New York Times bestseller. It's an Ohio poet's memoir. No one was more surprised about that than me. I think I was folding laundry—literally—when my agent called to tell me I made the list. So that was certainly surprising. BLAIR HODGES: And you had two of your favorite songwriters write songs based on your book, too! MAGGIE SMITH: Crazy! Challenges? Fear. I think that's probably whether it's a named challenge or an unnamed challenge, I think that's one of the challenges for all of us. Fear of failure, fear of exposure, fear of litigation, fear of falling short, fear of not making the thing you think you want to build in your mind. It's like the Instagram fail where you try to make the cake based on the beautiful unicorn cake you see, and then it's like, "Nailed it!" And it looks like it's melting off to the side. No one wants to make something that doesn't become the shining image in your mind you think you're making. Fear is always the challenge, and the goal is to overcome that. BLAIR HODGES: The goal is to “keep moving,” as a wise person once said in a book you can also pick up at your favorite local retailer! [laughter] Thanks a ton, Maggie. This has been great. I loved your book. I truly, truly did. I hope people check it out. Thanks for taking time to be on this little show. MAGGIE SMITH: It's my pleasure. Thank you. BLAIR HODGES: Thanks for listening. Special thanks to Camille Messick, my wonderful transcript editor. Thanks to David Ostler, who sponsored this first group of transcripts. I'm looking for more transcript sponsors, these aren't free so help me out! My email address is blair at firesidepod dot org. You can also contact me with questions or feedback about any episode. There's a lot more to come on Family Proclamations. And here's the moment where I do the thing you hear on so many podcasts: Ask you to rate and review the show in Apple Podcasts of in Spotify! Let me know what you think about it so far. Here's a new 5-star review from "Fan of the Sun," and check out the detail here: "I have really enjoyed the variety of books and subjects that have been covered so far. I have been able to incorporate some valuable aspect from each episode into my personal life. Blair is a fantastic interviewer who knows the material and asks engaging questions. He digs deep, yet is able to give the listeners a well-rounded overview." Love that. It's my goal: to go wide but also dig down deep. Thanks fan of the sun, and I imagine that you've already recommended the show to a friend too because you know that's the number one way that people hear about podcasts is through a friend. Thanks to Mates of State for providing our theme song. Family Proclamations is part of the Dialogue Podcast Network. I'm Blair Hodges, and we'll see you next time.

Jessica Pryce believed a career at Child Protective Services would be a rewarding way to help keep kids safe. What she learned on the job completely changed her mind, as the system itself kept getting closer and closer to home. Now she's a scholar of the system and works as a public advocate to help change it for the better.  Dr. Jessica Pryce joins us to talk about her new book, Broken: Transforming Child Protective Services—Notes of a Former Caseworker. Pryce earned her Master's of Social Work degree from Florida State University and a PhD from Howard University. She's currently a research professor at Florida State University's College of Social Work.  Transcript JESSICA PRYCE: I was very close to the people I worked with. I was in their homes. I was opening up their kitchen cabinets. I was talking to their neighbors. I was very close. But I wasn't engaging them. I didn't really see them. I was investigating them and objectifying them. BLAIR HODGES: When Jessica Pryce began working for Child Protective Services, she was shocked at some of the living conditions she encountered. She wanted children to be safe, so she worked with the courts and police to figure out who should be taken away from their parents or what parents needed to do to prove their fitness. It was a tough job, and it got even tougher when people she personally loved got wrapped up in the system. She started to see cracks in the foundation—ways the system harmed families instead of helping them. It set her on a path to advocate for big changes. In this episode, Jessica Pryce joins us to talk about her book, Broken: Transforming Child Protective Services. There's no one right way to be a family and every kind of family has something we can learn from. I'm Blair Hodges, and this is Family Proclamations. FIRST DAY WITH CPS - 01:31 BLAIR HODGES: Jessica Pryce, welcome to Family Proclamations. JESSICA PRYCE: Thank you so much for having me. BLAIR HODGES: Your book starts off right in the thick of things when you were a graduate student in social work. You'd landed this internship with Child Protective Services, CPS—this is a government agency that's tasked with protecting children from neglect and abuse. Take us to your first day in the internship when you visited the home of who you call Naomi Harden. JESSICA PRYCE: Sure. A big part of writing this book was me trying to make sure the reader understood what happens when you get a CPS case. On my very first day I was going to meet my internship supervisor and didn't really know what to expect. As soon as I got into the office, she had a case so we were thrust out into the field to go meet this mom. As an intern we're really supposed to observe and ask questions afterwards and take notes if we can. We weren't allowed to do any of the direct interviewing or things like that. It felt overwhelming at the time, but I still said, "Okay, I have my supervisor with me. I'll see what happens," and was bewildered by what we walked into. BLAIR HODGES: Naomi was a woman in her late twenties. She was Black. She was a mom of three. She'd been reported for an environmental hazard. When you got in the house, how did you feel? Do you remember walking in there and kind of taking it in? What was it like? JESSICA PRYCE: I do. It's one of those things you could never forget because I hadn't been in a house that looked like that. It looked very—you know, I'm trying to say messy, but it was it was deeper than that. It was clear that Mom was having some sort of issue around the home because typically, as I learned on that day, environmental hazards are deeper than a messy home. It really depends on the ages of the children, and because there was an infant in the home this became a huge issue for CPS. We know what infants do. They crawl around, they get into things. So I think that was why it was a big red flag for the system to go into the home in that way. Because again, I was shocked that we got called for messy homes, but because the child was so young they wanted us to come and investigate. BLAIR HODGES: You say you felt things like disgust and righteous indignation. You had an attitude toward the mom of like, "Who is this person? This is disgusting and terrible." JESSICA PRYCE: I did. I talk about the fact that I didn't grow up in a home like that and I had never seen a home like that. I immediately felt like, why would she do that? Why would she be raising kids in this sort of environment? So yes, absolutely came in thinking this is ridiculous. These kids shouldn't live here. We have to do something. That was my mentality at the time. ROLES IN THE SYSTEM - 04:07 BLAIR HODGES: It was so different from your upbringing. You grew up in this small town. Everyone cared for each other. It was a clean home. You didn't have to worry about environmental hazards in your house. You had parents who took good care of the home and of you. So this was like walking into an alien planet or something. You're learning quickly how removals of children might work, the type of people who are involved. Walk us through the roles of all the different people in the system who would be involved in deciding whether or not they needed to remove a child from a home. JESSICA PRYCE: We typically start with calling the reporter of the abuse. Around the country, there are mandated reporters. They call in a CPS report and we touch base with them on. what are your concerns? Is there anything else you want us to know about before we make contact with the family? BLAIR HODGES: This could be teachers, doctors, and stuff like that? JESSICA PRYCE: School social workers. We talk to the school, we talk to collateral contacts—which is sometimes neighbors. Again, these collateral contacts are people that don't live in the home but know the family. We're talking to teachers, school social workers, sometimes knocking on doors around the home to say, "We have this going on with this neighbor and her kids. What are your thoughts about it? Do you have any concerns about it?" After we compile all this information, if we feel there's a danger threat, we then have to call our attorneys, really debrief the case, tell them our concerns, tell them what we found, and they let us know, "Hey, this isn't enough for removal," or "I think we have something here, let's take it to the judge." That's how removals work. We have to consult with our attorney to see if there's enough to do that. BLAIR HODGES: You had to do it every time? Sometimes I'm sure you would just know based on the system's rules, you'd be like, "Oh, this is a pretty clear-cut case." But investigators have to call attorneys regardless, and then they would make the call, and then they would call a judge to get an order to remove the child—is that right? JESSICA PRYCE: What's interesting about that is we remove kids and then see the judge. We do talk to our attorneys to see if we have enough to petition the court, but that happens after the fact. As you read in the book, those children were removed before we ever went to court. So we do make the removal based on an attorney saying, "I think we have enough to do this. Go ahead and shelter the kids." Then we put the kids elsewhere, and generally the very next day we go before the judge. I learned very quickly during the early days of my internship that sometimes judges send kids back home. Sometimes judges say, “You know what? This looks like you did the right thing, let's keep them in foster care.” People don't realize we actually take kids away from families and then ask for permission to keep the removal. BLAIR HODGES: Sometimes police get involved too. That's another element of this, that cops can be involved in the removal process. JESSICA PRYCE: Absolutely. Generally, when we're removing kids we're encouraged to call law enforcement. In the book I take folks through my training, and during that training phase we are told if you're going to remove a child, also if you're dealing with family violence around intimate partner violence or domestic violence, we are encouraged to bring law enforcement. They play a big role in removals, because it gets very heated, and we wanted to make sure we had some support. BLAIR HODES: If I recall correctly, there are also special doctors who are licensed to assess children. They're going to look at a kid and figure out if there's been abuse and things like that, right? JESSICA PRYCE: Absolutely. If you're dealing with a case around particularly physical abuse, sexual abuse, and some cases with medical and physical neglect, we have physicians examine the child. That's really something we add to the evidence when we go to the judge. These are all pieces of the puzzle we're pulling together to take to the judge for a ruling. And sometimes the judge says, "Yes, the child should be removed." But the consolation prize, as I call it, for some families is, we're not going to remove your kids, but you're going to be monitored by the court for the next year or so. Again, somewhat a success, right? We didn't remove the children, but I think it's also important to know now you have the court system in your home really dissecting everything you're doing for the foreseeable future. NAOMI'S CASE – 08:28 BLAIR HODGES: Okay, so on the surface, Jessica, this seems pretty comprehensive. It seems fairly reasonable when we look at the process at this level. There are mandated reporters, there's investigators, there's attorneys involved, there's judges that make decisions, there's police that provide some protection, there's special doctors that assess the health of children, and it's an ongoing process. We all want children to be safe. This process seems important. It seems like it could work well. What your book does is show us the gaps in these services, the problems with some of these approaches and how yhe system disproportionately affects some people compared to other people. You experienced this firsthand. You had a follow up visit with Naomi, the mom you introduce us to at the beginning of the book, and she was told by the court to do certain things. When you went back, you were really troubled because you felt like she wasn't doing everything she could do. You felt like, “If I was a mom, I would be doing everything I could to prove I'm a worthy mom,” and you didn't see that with Naomi. So you were still bringing this judgment to her and now you had to build a case. Maybe talk about the case building that you had do at that point and the kind of things parents might be expected to do by the court to either prove they were fit to have their children or to get their children back. JESSICA PRYCE: With Naomi, I remember feeling like, why wouldn't she clean up her home in order to get her kids back? I just felt this was a very simple ask. But what I'm hoping people realize as they read the book, because a lot of these cases are left unresolved in the book—I give them what I experienced and then often I move on to a new case or I move on to the next part of my experience. And what I want folks to ask themselves, even if they're not in the field—I don't know who will read this book—is that what you would have done? Did that feel like a compassionate way to help a mom that was clearly going through something? If someone is not doing what you would do in a situation, how do we react? Do we react, saying, "You're not trying. You're not doing the right thing. Why are you doing it this way?" We need to ask ourselves, are we putting that judgment on this mom because it's something we would do? Are we projecting our standards on this person? Are we able to drill down into what's really going on? So she was asked to do several things, one of which was to clean up her home. There were several things I discovered a few weeks after her children were taken, and we realized she had been dealing with domestic violence in the past, that she was dealing with a lot of mental health issues. Her family started to weigh in on it. That she hadn't been the same since the domestic violence incident. She hadn't been the same since the birth of her child. It hit me in that moment, we saw what we saw, and we made—in my opinion, with our knowledge at the time, we made—the decision we thought was best. But what happens with a lot of families is we miss what's truly going on. As you saw in the book, we placed the children with Grandma, she lived about an hour away. We thought we were fixing a situation, but it created so many other issues with the kids possibly having to move schools, and Grandma being an elderly woman that doesn't drive much anymore. It became this issue of what does the system need to do differently with families? How do we pull the community in to help a family stay together? Somebody asked me who's read the book, "Why can't we bring in people to help clean the home? And mental health services?" Again, I know we're living in a certain type of world, but that was the point of the book. I wanted people to see what CPS professionals see every day and how they might have done things differently, and what we did in the moment and why we did it. INTRUDE AS LITTLE AS POSSIBLE – 12:07 BLAIR HODGES: I think you made it clear the one person in the entire scenario that didn't get support was Naomi. There were things that could have been done perhaps to help her, instead everything was put on her in a sense of blame and shame and personal responsibility, instead of looking at systems and things around her that were contributing to this. Postpartum depression, and abuse, and mental illness—all of the different things that could be addressed for Naomi, and that's not what the system was doing. You found that more and more as you were working there, because you didn't just internship there, you became a full-time employee. That's when they took you through a short training. It's so funny when you're talking about how short it is. You're like, compared to what we're doing, it was pretty lightning quick to tell us what to do. [laughter] I have this quote from the training materials, it says, "CPS intervention should intrude as little as possible into the life of the family, be focused on clearly defined objectives, and take the most parsimonious path to remedy a family's problems." That's an ideal that you say did not match the reality of what you ended up doing. JESSICA PRYCE: Absolutely. I was in that training cohort with other colleagues that had either been in the field or done an internship and we're in training thinking, "Wow, this sounds good." And I do understand what they're asking us to do, but how are we not translating what we're learning into actually what we're doing in the field? That continues today, where people are trained, and then they come into the field and their supervisors and colleagues say, "I know you just got trained, but let me tell you what we're really going to do." I think that disconnect continues to create confusion and moral conflict with folks that are coming into the field to actually promote child safety. What we really start to do, as other colleagues of mine have said, if we start to police families and over surveil them—a lot of families are under surveillance and we're really not getting to what's actually going on. BLAIR HODGES: The idea of “intruding as little as possible,” that's fine to say, but there weren't a lot of actual ways to monitor that. To say, what does it look like to intrude as little as possible? Because a CPS case against a family can really take over a life. JESSICA PRYCE: Indeed. And someone recently asked me what would that even look like if CPS wasn't intrusive? My only answer to that was, a lot of things would need to change. We would need to partner with families in a different way—as opposed to going in their home, walking through rooms, opening up cabinets—we would actually have to partner with not just that family, but extended family on, what are the needs? Do I need to go in here and do what I just did, or can we actually sit down and talk about, do you have food? Do you have material needs that are not being met? What can we do to support you in that way? BLAIR HODGES: There would have to be a lot of trust built there too, because as the current system is, people might be reluctant to say whether they needed food or not or anything like that. That's because of stories they hear about how CPS works, and the adversarial relationship you describe between investigators in the system and the families that are undergoing it. We're talking today with Jessica Pryce. She's a research professor at Florida State University's College of Social Work. Her book is called Broken: Transforming Child Protective Services. SCOPE AND SYSTEMIC RACISM – 15:23 BLAIR HODGES: Jessica, I wanted to zoom out a little bit and just talk broad scope, give us a general sense—you might not have the exact numbers off the top your head, we're just trying to get an idea of how big the CPS system is. How many investigations are happening, how common it is for kids to get taken into the system? Give us that broad scope of the system. JESSICA PRYCE: Absolutely. In a given year, there could be four hundred thousand youth in foster care. I believe in one of the years that I wrote about in the book, there were seven million cases called in across the country. That gives you a sense of how many people are calling in reports. I believe four million of those calls were actually screened in. I talk about in the book, every call that comes in isn't taken. We were thankful for that. The folks taking these calls try their best to screen out ones that don't seem like abuse is really happening. Then they screen in ones that really meet the protocols and the metrics they have to look for in order to accept a case. The data is clear in most of the states in this country, Native American children and Black children are experiencing disparate outcomes. They're spending more time in foster care. They're spending more time under court mandated services, meaning they didn't get taken out of their home, but their families are being overrun by the courts for a period of time, usually minimum of one year. And these youth are also moving from place to place more once they're put in the system. And the path to reunification is much longer for Black and Native youth. So that's a little bit of the data around disproportionality, disparity, and the broad strokes of how many cases the system is seeing each year. BLAIR HODGES: Let's look a little more at the racism here, because some people might hear what you just said and say, "Oh, well I guess Black parents and indigenous folks need to be better parents. It's on them. Of course, they would have more because XYZ." How do you educate people against that kind of racism and bias? JESSICA PRYCE: A lot of people feel that way. They really look at the fact that these families are who they are and they have a certain mindset toward these families. They say, "Well, of course that makes sense. They're abusing their children more." But there's actually data and scientific studies that have been done that actually have evidence against that notion. That Black and Brown families don't abuse their children more, but they're reported more and have their children taken more. So I try to educate people on what's happening and not the narrative, and also not the narrative we have in our minds around certain family. There's also a big discussion right now, that in my opinion, continues to happen around the conflation of neglect and poverty. At this point we're at 76% of the cases that come into child welfare nationwide have a maltreatment code of neglect. Often neglect is parents not meeting needs. That's the definition. They're not getting enough food to their kids. Kids are going to school and stealing lunches. These parents may not be taking their children to get medical care. These parents may not have a place to live. This broad idea of neglect is driving families into the system. When you think about the fact that indigenous families and Black families are overrepresented in the impoverished population, you start to realize there is this connection between poverty, systemic racism, and the long journey of social and racial disadvantage for families. ERICA'S CASE – 19:05 BLAIR HODGES: So it usually affects people in poverty, more often than not. Sometimes people aren't in poverty when they get trapped into the system. I think one of the most arresting parts of your book is the personal stories you tell, because things got personal for you really fast when you started working for the system. I'm thinking about your friend Erica. Tell us a little bit about Erica and how she got tangled up into your experience as a caseworker. JESSICA PRYCE: I'm so grateful I was able to share that story because that was really pivotal for my development. When people ask, "You thought a certain way in the system, and then you started to shift," I said, "Yeah, because I started to see people in my familial and social networks become entangled in the system." That's what brought me to sharing the story of Erica. And I appreciate her walking alongside me as I wrote this book. Essentially, I was in my full-time position at the Department of Children and Families, doing CPS investigations. One day there was a case that came in and a colleague took that case, and it was on my friend Erica. I was very shocked. I knew Erica had been providing caregiving duties for her godchild at the time. She had been going through a lot. She was a college student and trying to figure out how to take her courses, take care of this four-year-old, and the child's parents were in many different ways just unavailable, unreachable, and not helping at the time. Stress got to her in a situation where she did corporal punishment as a consequence for behavior. And she was reported to CPS for physical abuse. As I share in the book, everything that happened after was insane, in my opinion. I was caught in the middle of it because I understood on the system side, we have a four-year-old with evidence of abuse, based on what we call abuse and what the policies say about physical abuse, and we have a person who is not her biological mother. We need to shelter this child right away. I understood that in theory, but having the close connection I had with Erica, knowing that at that time there was possibly no other person on the earth that cared about that child as much as she did, it was really a tough situation to walk through. BLAIR HODGES: Erica is caring for this young girl. The girl's parents are experiencing poverty. Mom went back to New York, believed they would leave the girl with Erica for a certain time. And you describe the corporal punishment thing, because technically corporal punishment is legal. That's a big question about whether that should be the case, but it was. And it was something Erica seemed reluctant about herself, but felt backed into a corner, just didn't have the parenting tools and the skills and the support as a parent to deal with a child who was experiencing real trauma. That trauma was coming out in bad behavior and causing problems for Erica's life. So that's when she started spanking and doing this, and at one point leaves bruises on the child. In the meantime, the child's mom who's experiencing poverty was seeking public assistance, and that's how CPS got involved on her side of things—not to find out how to help but to assess her. She went to get help, and instead of, "How can we help?" it was like, "What's wrong with this person. We need to evaluate this person." Again, the system has this adversarial approach, even when people try to seek help it can start to cause problems. This little girl, her mom on one side and Erica on the other, were both going to get sucked into the system. As you said, you knew Erica as a wonderful person. She's your best grad school friend. What a shock it must have been. You describe the scene where the girl, who you knew, shows up in your office. You have no idea what's going on. All of a sudden, she's right there behind your chair, excited to see you because she knew you. JESSICA PRYCE: Yeah, and children don't come into the office unless they're on their way into foster care. When I saw her I knew something has gone terribly wrong. I did not know what had happened at that point. I had been working the entire day on my own cases and realized pretty quickly that Erica was about to be under a lot of scrutiny and was about to go through a situation and a process I take a lot of parents through. But watching how it affected her really made me reluctant to do that to other parents. To your point, Erica is on this side of the situation, and then Didi—which is the pseudonym I gave Madisen's biological mom in the book—Madisen is the little girl—is on the other side of this trying to get herself together in a very difficult, in my opinion, place to live in this country. It's super expensive. Trying to rebuild her life. Meanwhile, this chaotic exchange has happened in Florida around corporal punishment, which a lot of people have feelings about. I could have written, "There was a corporal punishment situation," but I wanted people to think about their reactions to that scene in the book. Because I know people are going to react to, “That should never have happened, this is completely inappropriate.” But I think that is a snapshot of a much larger picture that I knew of at the time, but others didn't. I realized when I go to meet a mom on a case I am seeing a snapshot and this person has an entire life and existence that is worth trying to figure out. BLAIR HODGES: I was shocked by the numbers you report. Anywhere between forty and seventy percent of parents have reported spanking at some point. That's huge. That's a lot of people. When does it cross the line from legal corporal punishment to abuse that the system would intervene about? JESSICA PRYCE: This is a discussion that's been going on for quite a while, but I can say when it comes to CPS if there are marks or bruises—and often these marks or bruises are left unintentional, and I know that might sound strange to people because they think, "Well, if you hit a child, you're intentionally causing that”—There are a lot of people that spank their kids and there are never any marks. So I don't think most parents intend to leave marks on their children when they are trying to provide a consequence to certain behaviors. For CPS, the line is crossed if there's evidence of marks and bruises on the child. But again, even when that happens I'm hoping the system continues to evolve into, what do we do at this point and what should be our next steps? Because the immediate ejection of a child because of that isn't working very well for the system. There are a lot of issues going on—not enough foster parents, not enough placements, too many kids in the system. So how can we tease that out and find some nuances. Like okay, maybe there is stress, maybe this parent made this decision and it went further than they thought it would go. But is that an immediate ejection? Is that an opportunity for the system to say, Hey, we see this happen. We don't like it. We don't think it was the best thing to do. But how do we partner toward a future where this doesn't have to happen and this mom actually gets the help, and what you said earlier, the parenting tools she needs? BLAIR HODGES: Erica felt up against the wall. She's a student. She had to start working to afford daycare and other expenses. That made her spend even less time with Madisen. She's desperate to find a way to get Madisen's behavior to change because daycare is saying maybe we can't have Madisen here. She's desperate. She's trying to find anything. Again, it comes down to whether she had enough money to keep this going, whether she could be supportive, whether she could learn parenting tools different than corporal punishment. None of that was happening. Instead, the bruises happened and then the system comes in to say, "Did this person harm the child? We need to protect the child and possibly prosecute the caregiver." In fact, Erica was later arrested for this, and you describe the case in the book. RACHEL'S CASE – 27:12 BLAIR HODGES: Now, if that was all you had encountered as a caseworker, in terms of it touching your personal life, that would have been a lot. But that wasn't the only way your personal life got tangled up. This next part really shocked me. I have to say, Jessica, it shocked me because I'm thinking about Rachel, this is your sister. You actually yourself reported her to CPS while you're working for the system. What was it like to include this really personal story in the book? JESSICA PRYCE: Essentially, I will say it was not easy to include it because it talks about culpability and the way I used to think and what I thought in that moment. I really appreciate that my sister to this day talks about how the system intends to help but often they exacerbate already very fraught situations. I appreciate her willingness to continue to advocate for change, specifically relating to domestic violence and child welfare. Although it wasn't easy, I wanted to include it because this continues today. When there is a domestic violence situation, we're trying to figure out which victim we're going to actually come in and try to help, and who gets protected in a situation like that. At the time I felt very much like CPS and law enforcement was the best route to take when I made the call. But I realized perhaps I was naive. What happened after that with my sister, I realized her life all of a sudden became even more stressful than it was before. Again I, at that moment, maybe being a little bit naive, called it in because she was experiencing domestic violence, but realized after that her stress levels were increased and services and support weren't there the way I thought they would be. BLAIR HODGES: You talk about the double bind your sister was in, and that a lot of women are in. She was abused by her partner. She was abused. When the system got involved, she also becomes a suspect of the system because they want to know if she is a perpetrator for not protecting the children from domestic violence, or even perhaps just witnessing domestic violence. Now she's gone from being a victim to being a suspect. JESSICA PRYCE: Absolutely, and I think states are moving away from the term "failure to protect." There was a time where that was the buzzword, that this mom is failing to protect her children. Although we're moving away from that term, there are still ways in which we come on the scene and there is a mom victim, and we're trying to ask questions here and there about, "We see this is happening, what are you going to do next to protect these kids? What are you going to do next to protect your home from this perpetrator?" This is a tough situation to talk about. I think people who read the book might have certain thoughts and feelings about it. And I welcome that. I welcome folks to say, "Well, a mother should protect her kids." And “She must do this, and she must do that.” And what I'm hoping they also stop and think is what it feels like to be a victim of domestic violence, because that's an entirely other phenomenon we need to really consider. Again, I don't know if CPS is prepared to understand the dynamics associated with that sort of abuse. BLAIR HODGES: There are all kinds of reasons why someone like your sister might not call. They might have some mental health issues because of the abuse that would lead them to want to cling tight to the relationship out of trying to be protective. Or maybe there are financial reasons. They're trying to protect the circumstances they're currently in and if they left, they wouldn't have resources to care for their kids. There's a ton of different reasons why. And again, the system is not coming in and saying, "How can we support this person who's been abused and their kids and get them out of the situation?" It's trying to figure out if they have culpability in some way. JESSICA PRYCE: Yeah, and they come with a lot of, "We want you to go do this, we want you to go do that. We want you to go and take care of this." It becomes this rat race of a mom trying to do these things, because now you're under surveillance and one wrong step, or one thing you don't do, are you going to lose your kids today? And I think that was the fear she had. A lot of parents I talk to have that same fear. I'm going to go do what they told me to do, even though it doesn't feel relevant. It's not helpful. It's not genuinely something I need. But if I don't, what are going to be the repercussions for me? Again it's policing and pushing families into experiencing certain services, when we didn't do the due diligence to actually see what they really needed. MORAL INJURY – 31:57 BLAIR HODGES: They might be telling them to go take some classes or do things that further burden. Maybe they already don't have time for stuff and now they have to do a bunch more. Like you said, it's not meeting the immediate need. It's adding more needs. You describe this time, and again it's not just the people who are being investigated that the system can harm, you also talk about the dangers of the system on the employees themselves. You experienced a lot of work-related stress, and double binds, and difficulties that affected your own mental health and your own sense of wellbeing. “Moral injury” is a term that comes up in this context. I wondered about your thoughts about moral injury and the impact on employees themselves. Because you saw burnout. You saw people working and then leaving. So many people came in, worked, and then got out of there. You yourself did that. Talk about the moral injury side of things. JESSICA PRYCE: I didn't want to write this book and not mention this, because if I'm anything, I am going to speak truth about the system, but I'm also going to say the professionals on the front lines doing this work, it's far bigger than them. I think there are systemic issues, systemic racism, systemic dysfunction, and we are on the front lines trying to do the work to the best of our ability. Some people start to really experience that moral conflict, this idea of, "I'm making decisions, I'm doing certain behaviors to protect myself or protect the system. But am I really helping these families?" I started to feel that big time with what happened to my friend, what happened to my family, and then how that impacted the moms I started to interface with throughout my career. I also realized that, as it related to me and law enforcement, I think I put in the book that people don't know who's there to help. I arrive with law enforcement and I'm there trying to investigate child abuse, but these parents are looking like, “Are you here to arrest me? Are you here to help me? What is actually going on?” That conflict started to manifest in me as well. I call law enforcement because I feel safer. But what is that creating with this interaction? What is that actually doing to this interaction for the next few moments? And as you said, I started to experience a lot of anxiety. Ultimately, that impacted my departure from the system. The anxiety got to the point where I really couldn't manage anymore, and the stem of that anxiety was just the feelings of moral distress and moral injury I was perpetuating on families. ABOVE THE FRAY OR ON THE FRONT LINE – 34:43 BLAIR HODGES: That's Jessica Pryce. For the past fifteen years, she has been working in child welfare from multiple angles—directing casework, and then researching, teaching and training, and policy development. She's provided training to over two hundred child welfare organizations now, and we're talking about her book Broken: Transforming Child Protective Services. Jessica, you left the system, but you couldn't leave it alone, so to say. You wanted to know more about it. You went to Howard University to study it. A lot of people think universities are disconnected from life. There's a stereotype that if you become a researcher or go to university, you're in the ivory tower. You're away from real life so you're not able to grasp it. You brought your own personal experiences of being on the ground to the university and say in some ways it gave you an even closer perspective than you had before. You could really zoom in on the history of it. What did you learn about the history of CPS when you went to Howard University? JESSICA PRYCE: I often talk about the importance of proximity to families you're serving. When I first read a book called Just Mercy years ago, Bryan Stevenson talked about how you really need to be in close proximity to folks you're trying to help. It dawned on me I was very close to the people I worked with. I was in their homes. I was opening up their kitchen cabinets. I was talking to their neighbors. I was very close. But I wasn't engaging them. I didn't really see them. I was investigating them and objectifying them. When I zoomed out, when I left the system, I did go to the ivory tower but then I was able to look at the history of child welfare—something I never knew about, something that wasn't taught in training, which of course it wouldn't be—and realized that at the onset of child welfare, Black families weren't even allowed to be serviced by the system. They had to go a completely different route, because they were seen as inferior. And as I tracked child welfare over time, I started to realize those remnants of systemic exclusion and systemic racism were still around in many facets of the system today. That's when I went down the path of looking at disparity, disproportionality—looking at Black professionals and how they viewed the system. Also looking at leadership changes and how that impacts policy. So it was huge for me to go—I think it took about five years—to really look at the system, write a dissertation, do some research. But I felt closer to the system at that point than I did when I was actually working with families. Because again, I was too close. And I think when I zoomed out I was able to get to the bottom of a lot of things. It really ignited this advocacy that I wanted to do something to help child welfare professionals, and by helping them create more ethics and create more compassionate services, ultimately to help families. WHEN INDIVIDUAL BLAME GOT BAKED IN – 37:36 BLAIR HODGES: I think laying out the history matters so much. You show how in 1974 the United States passed this law, the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act. It was informed by a group called Mothers Anonymous, then called Parents Anonymous. A woman who went by Jolly K. was abusing children. She came to see the error of her ways, changed, and then became this huge advocate for preventing child abuse or addressing child abuse in the United States. This law gets passed. Then you point out something really important here we've talked about all along the way, that it was a very individualist ideology here. The idea was to identify parents as the perpetrators and to not really, at all, look at systems around the parents. Don't look at the economy. Don't look at jobs. Don't look at parental leave. Don't look at anything else other than, “If you harm a child, you're a bad person, and you made that individual choice, you bear all the blame.” So that Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act was intended to help kids. It created this reporting system and then, to this day, laws direct money to programs that investigate parents based on this individualist approach, instead of putting funds into better mental health services, into better affordable housing services, into schools and programs that can help parents and children have better relationships and help alleviate the stresses that can lead to abuses, that can lead to neglect. Rooted in how these laws came together, you show clearly how society is focusing on individual blame, not systemic change. When you learned that at Howard, I'm just interested in your own process there because like you said, you were so close to the system. What was it like for you personally to learn that history and start to have to digest it? JESSICA PRYCE: It was bewildering and it was overwhelming, but it also created this motivation to make sure that I'm educating others, and to make sure I am always challenging people to look at how we perpetuate harm, how we perpetuate the very harmful parts of history in modern times. So it has created in me this idea that I'm not going to shy away from saying to child welfare professionals, “I used to be you. It's really hard. You're overwhelmed. You're overtaxed, and you're possibly dealing with burnout and moral injury, but families deserve a person that is going to do everything we can ethically to consider the full picture.” I appreciate you bringing up Parents Anonymous, because that was really eye-opening for me when I started to look at that, and look at congressional testimony around Jolly K. I think her story captivated America during that time because she was accepting accountability, some would say, that she was abusing her child. But she was very vocal that nothing was impacting her doing that. Now later, we found out that Jolly K. experienced so much mental illness, that she herself had been abused, and there were so many things that were going on with her that people didn't really pay much attention to. But again, I think that time in history created for child welfare, a microscope on the mom or a microscope on the dad, and what are you doing? Why can't you be better? BLAIR HODGES: You had seen that microscope come into the lives of people you loved. Erica, as I mentioned, your friend, was arrested. She does eventually get out of jail, and somehow is able to make it through the system. She adopts Madisen. People might say that seems like a happy ending then because it all worked out. But first of all, you invite us to remember all the things Erica had to go through, and Madisen, the child. But you also want us to say hold on, what happened to Madisen's mom? To Didi? There was no help there for her. So a happy ending is really complicated here. JESSICA PRYCE: Absolutely. And in the first iteration of this book, Didi's perspective wasn't included and the publisher said, "Is there any way you can get some interviews with her?" And I took a long shot. I said, "I really don't want to write this without your story." So I appreciated being able to interview her because again, in one way, it was a happy ending—we had a permanent placement between a child and a person where they were bonded and loved, and this wasn't a stranger she was being adopted by, this is somebody she really cared about. But I want the reader and folks that are considering adoption to stop and think: What world do we need to build where Didi would have had the help, the services, the support, to bring her child back in her home? Because again, I think people are going to have mixed feelings and thoughts around Didi and her behavior if you focus on the actual behavior and decisions she's making without looking at the systemic barriers she was also experiencing. WRITING AS AN ADVOCATE -  BLAIR HODGES: You say this wasn't necessarily the book you set out to write. Your publisher helped with that. You talk about in the book that originally you conducted research with Black women in particular who were in the system. You wrote in a third person voice as a researcher, an intellectual book, and the publisher and your editor challenged you to dig deeper and said, "You know, I think you can reach more people if you make this a personal story." That was intimidating for you. Talk about that, because there's a big shift. You were a CPS agent, an academic researcher, and this book is written more in the voice of a public activist. That's a different role altogether. JESSICA PRYCE: I was overwhelmed and a little bit scared about switching gears. As I sit here today, I'm extremely grateful I was challenged and pushed in this direction because I want child welfare professionals to read the book, maybe they feel certain things about the book, maybe they feel like, "Oh, I'm pinched here. I'm jabbed here. But I'm supported there and validated there." Because there are nuances to doing this work that I don't want people to miss. I don't want people to assume all child welfare professionals are evil creatures that are snatching kids. I don't want that. But I also don't want them to assume they're all benevolent. So how do we bring this together in a balanced way to say this is a very difficult job, and I was able to show that, I hope, in the pages, because it was very difficult for me when I started in that work. But how do we push ourselves as a workforce and challenge ourselves to do things differently, not just better, because we can get better and better because in many ways we have, but things haven't changed. There's not a difference in how we're approaching the families we're supposed to be serving. JATOIA'S CASE – 44:31 BLAIR HODGES: Oh, that reminds me of Jatoia Potts. This is a mom who lost her children because of no fault of her own, it turns out. This is a story of grave injustice. Maybe take a second to tell us about Jatoia Potts' story. The follow-up question I have for it is whether it ever feels completely overwhelming. You're facing such difficult odds and change seems to be slow. Tell us about Jatoia's experience and then how it affects you personally now that you're an activist. Is there activist burnout? Is there activist fear? JESSICA PRYCE: As you read the book, you see I'm taking folks back to when I first started in the field, but I also wanted them to see these things are still happening. So you have stories that happened in 2008 and 2009, which feels like a long time ago, so you could read the book and say, "Oh, that's over. Why has she taken us through all that?" But then you see a story that happened in 2021, 2022, and 2023. That's where Jatoia came in. She was at the other end of my career, where I'm moving into the academic space. I'm speaking, I'm training, and I'm also doing quite a bit of expert testimony in TPR trials—TPR is the “Termination of Parental Rights.” If folks don't know what that means, it's when a court says legally you are no longer the parent to this child, and that clears children for adoption. When I became connected to Jatoia, I became an expert witness in her TPR trial. Again, this was someone who started to suffer at the intersections of all the things we've been talking about: systemic racism, systemic dysfunction, and this narrow view of, “What did this mom do? Did she react the way we wanted her to react? Did she make decisions the way we would have made a decision? Surely she's done something wrong.” There was this mindset toward her, as folks will read, that she can't be exonerated. She certainly did something that hurt this child. And I'm so grateful Jatoia shared her story throughout this book. I think her placement in this book was huge because I don't want people to think the early cases of me when I was a twenty-two-year-old investigator are a thing of the past. These things continue to harm mothers to this day and it often results in literally severing the ties between a mom and her children. BLAIR HODGES: Someone like Jatoia becomes connected to you and is willing to use her voice to speak out about these issues. So some moms will turn into activists about the system, but not many of them either, and you also understand that. Talk about that, the fact that some moms and dads even can step forward and advocate, but a lot of others can't. Talk about those dynamics. JESSICA PRYCE: I'm always amazed when parents turn this sort of pain into purpose. That is a really good example for Jatoia and another mom in the book that I was able to highlight. To them, they want to do all they can to discuss their story, to connect with other mothers or other parents that are going through this, and to do as much community work as they can to make changes. I often say if I were Jatoia, I would want nothing to do with this case. I would want nothing to do with CPS. I would want nothing to do with being front facing for the movement. But I'm always astonished by her power that she's taken back, right? And also her resilience, and as I put in the book, Jatoia sees this as a much larger purpose than her individual story. When a mom goes through this now, Jatoia is a resource for them. And I think it's amazing. PLAYING JENGA: AN ANALOGY FOR THE FUTURE - 48:18 BLAIR HODGES: Take us through the Jenga analogy. Jenga is this game people might know where you're building these blocks, and the blocks are all stacked up and you're pulling one block out and putting it on top. You just kind of keep doing that. You use this Jenga analogy to talk about the system itself because a lot of listeners might be wondering, does the system get anything right? How solid is the system? Are there some people that are being helped by it? Are we just looking at rearranging a few pieces or do we need a fundamental change? JESSICA PRYCE: I'll start with responding to the question of, “Is the system doing anything right? What are we doing well?” I'll start by saying that I often talk about this, I believe the system needs to be here. I know not everybody believes that, but I believe that we need a CPS system—but we need a CPS system that investigates actual child abuse. I hope in my lifetime I see a parceling out of, what is child abuse and what is a family crisis? What is economic stratification? What is poverty? What is mental illness? I personally don't think CPS should be investigating as much as they're investigating. So back to the question. When there has been abuse, when there has been a child that has been willfully harmed by their caregiver, I absolutely think CPS is a structure that comes in and it's very clear this child needs protection and there needs to be accountability for what happened. I just wanted to put that out there, that I do think when it comes to willful abuse and children that are in need of help, this system can really step in in that way. Then when I go to other issues that are societal and community wide, CPS in my opinion is a little bit out of their depth. I think when it comes to neglect and poverty and mental illness and things of that nature, I don't think they're the best source of support. I don't think they're the best mechanism or structure to really come in and try to figure out what's going on with that family. You brought up Jenga, and Jenga became a powerful metaphor for me because I play it a lot with my nieces. And I realized we do that with child welfare. The entire point of Jenga is you move a block and you put it on top of the Jenga system. You're doing all you can not to make the system fall. You're just keeping it standing up. You're moving blocks from here and there, very rarely touching the bottom. If you're touching the bottom, you're being very meticulous about it, because again, we don't want the system to fall. I realized we're doing that in child welfare, and we have for a hundred years, continued to move programs, move services, add something here, add something there, but we're putting it back on the same system. But we're not getting to the root. We're not getting to the dysfunction and the assumptions that have been found in years of policies that are really driving the things we're doing. And until we actually get to the bottom of child welfare and until we start moving blocks from below and changing those blocks, I think we're going to continue to perpetuate what we're seeing. If we continue to have a block at the very bottom of our system that is absolutely targeting and blaming parents, then we're going to continue to be punitive and blaming parents with the policies and the practices we're doing. So I challenge folks to consider letting it fall. It's scary—the idea of letting the system fall down is huge and scary. People are like, "This is my livelihood. This is how I work." I think it takes courage to build something new, but that's what I'm advocating for—not being too afraid to go to the foundation of a system and say, “Why do we think this? Why is it built on that? Why are these families excluded? Why don't we send every parent to a parenting class? Why do we do the things that have built this system?” If we start to really tease that out and dismantle that part, and then rebuild a system that actually investigates actual abuse, right? And then diverts families that need assistance and support, I think that's when we get to rebuild something that we're actually proud of and rebuild something professionals can come into and feel less moral conflict, hopefully less burnout, and the families can really experience a different system. BLAIR HODGES: Do you have hope that we can move in that direction? JESSICA PRYCE: I do. I do. And the reason why I have hope is because child welfare, as a system, is doing things differently today. I was just at a convening this week around kinship care. Kinship care is when you remove a child from the home if there's a safety threat, but you place with family. Although I think we've always wanted to place with family, we haven't been having discussions about, “Are we supporting kinship here as much as we support a foster placement?” So we're having those discussions now. Don't just place with Grandma and say we've done it—which reminds us of the Naomi case. Don't place with Grandma and say we've done it, we placed with kinship. Now, how are you going to support that grandma? How are you going to support making sure those kids are connected to their mom? Because now they're far away from their mom, and not in communication. SoI do have hope we're moving in that direction. Again, I don't know how quickly we'll get there. But I think people are having those hard discussions about, “Why do we provide all of this financial support to foster parents, but we don't have that same energy toward a grandma or an older sibling or an aunt or uncle that have said, ‘I want the child to stay with us. They're our family.'" EVERYDAY ADVOCATES – 53:46 BLAIR HODGES: Is there anything actionable you would suggest everyday listeners do—like listeners to this show that might not have direct ties, a lot of them might not have any kind of direct involvement in the CPS system. Is there something that everyday folks can do to help push things in the direction you're advocating for? JESSICA PRYCE: Absolutely. I'm so grateful I was able to include some resources in the book for folks, particularly around reporting abuse. I tell people all the time, there's a resource in the book that says consider these things before you report abuse. For everyday listeners, as you said, if you have thoughts about a neighbor, or you're concerned about folks in your life—is this abuse? Should I call this in? I do offer some things that hopefully make you pause and consider certain aspects of the family before you make that call. Some people when they go through these considerations, they no longer want to make the report, right? But some people still do. Now they have a lot more information to provide to the system because they've actually thought through what's actually going on. I am grateful I was able to include that resource for folks that might be wondering about a family, might be wondering how they might be able to support. I want people to understand what happens when you report a family, what they experience when a CPS agent comes to their home, and with that sort of knowledge I hope that it makes reporters pause. REGRETS, CHALLENGES, & SURPRISES – 55:08 BLAIR HODGES: The resources you offer have some ideas for mandated reporters, and also for people who might be considering talking to CPS, and you're inviting them to think about how well you know the circumstances in that family's life. If you've considered connecting them with community or social supports that can help them out, if there's a trusted colleague or community advocate you can connect with to brainstorm about what to do. There are things people can do if they're wondering what to do in situations where they're wondering about children. The book, again, it's called Broken: Transforming Child Protective Services, really gives some good ideas and good tools that people can consider when they're trying to help out kids. Because at the bottom of it, I really believe that pretty much everybody truly does want to protect kids, and even the people who are overseeing the system and making policies that are actually damaging families, I don't see any evil people that are like, "Let's destroy lives." [laughs] JESSICA PRYCE: Yep. BLAIR HODGES: They're thinking in individualistic terms and not addressing systemic issues. The more we can get people thinking in that way, the more likelihood we have of impacting the CPS system. Jessica, I just want to say, the book was so helpful for me. I learned so much about the system. It was also really personal. I felt connected with you. So I hope people will check this book out, because together we can start to make inroads in the system. Again, that's Jessica Pryce, research professor at Florida State University in the College of Social Work there. Alright, that brings us to our final segment of the show. This is called Regrets, Challenges, & Surprises. Jessica, this is your chance to choose your own adventure. You can speak to one, two, or all three of these things. If there's anything you'd change about the book now. This book's just now coming out, so this is one of the freshest books on the show. Maybe you haven't had time to think about what you would do different at this time. But you can also speak to challenges, what the hardest part about writing it was, or the surprises, how you changed in the course of making the book. JESSICA PRYCE: I really appreciate the question. I'll start by saying the most challenging part by far was feeling that I've done justice to the stories that were shared with me. And also, connecting with former colleagues and really re-living what I did in the system. I did this exercise around narrative journaling, just writing out cases I've been on and how they impacted me and what I remembered about them, and how I thought in that moment, and how I think today. I think that was challenging in general to take that journey back. Another challenge is making sure I've done justice to the best of my ability to the stories that were shared with me. As far as surprises, I think for me, a big goal of mine was for people to see my development. I could have written this book from the seat I'm in now, and we've only talked for an hour but there's a lot of things I could have said about data and science and organizational change and culture. Because that's where I'm at now. I understand these things. But it was important for me that people saw my developmental trajectory because I hope it shows them they can also change. That if they think a certain way, if they see parents a certain way, if they have a certain opinion about certain communities, that you can get on the other side of that if you continue to educate yourself and you take a journey with colleagues who actually want to take this introspective journey. That you can also get on the other side of this work, do this work ethically, and do this work with compassion, and advocate and become an activist toward social justice and racial justice. So again, I think that's been the most surprising and the most edifying, that I was able to really show my development, and it surprised me how much I appreciated being able to share that. It's not easy to share how you used to think about families. But I think in sharing that it might show someone else they too can change. BLAIR HODGES: I certainly hope so. That's part of why I do this show myself, because I'm on a journey about all my thinking about families, what they are, about how we treat families, and your book is a really important part of that story. Again, it's called Broken: Transforming Child Protective Services by Jessica Pryce. And again, Dr. Pryce, I just want to say thank you. Thank you for writing this book, and thanks for taking the time to talk to us about it. JESSICA PRYCE: Thank you so much for having me. BLAIR HODGES: Thanks for listening to this episode of Family Proclamations. I invite you to listen to other episodes if you haven't had the time to do that yet. Special thanks to Camille Messick, my wonderful transcript editor, and to David Ostler, who sponsored the first group of transcripts. If you'd like to sponsor transcripts, please let me know. Reach out to blair@firesidepod.org. You can also send feedback about any episode you want. There's a lot more to come on the show. If you're enjoying it, please take a minute to rate and review. It makes a really big difference. It truly does. Go to Apple Podcasts and let me know your thoughts—like Ryan G. Mullen, for example. He went to Apple Podcasts and gave me five stars. He said, "Wow, I just listened to the episode with Cat Bohannon, author of Eve. I initially thought, this will be good to listen to so I won't have to read the book. But Hodges and Bohannon gave such a lively interview that I changed my mind." I'm sorry about that, Ryan. This podcast can be hazardous to your book buying budget, that's for sure. Thanks for leaving that review. Also, another thing that would help is recommendations. Let people know you listen to this show. This is the number one way people hear about podcasts. Reach out to a friend or family member and let them know about the show. Thanks to Mates of State, a great band, for providing our theme song. Family Proclamations is part of the Dialogue Podcast Network. I'm Blair Hodges, and I'll see you next time.   [End]   Transcripts are edited for readability. 

Caregiving for aging and dying parents can be tough for anyone, but it's even tougher when it forces you to confront longtime family dynamics of abuse. Sociologist Deborah Cohan blurs the lines between academic research on family caregiving and violence, and her own personal story about a father she calls both adoring and abusive.  Her memoir is called Welcome to Wherever We Are: A Memoir of Family, Caregiving, and Redemption. Transcript DEBORAH COHAN: Time is really strange in a nursing home. People are motivated by the mealtimes. Newspaper delivery is listed as an activity. They're just mundane activities in my life or your life, but they become these big events at these nursing homes. When you're there, and you're well, and you're witnessing that, it's really hard to watch and to do time the way they're doing time. BLAIR HODGES: Deborah Cohan knows there's nothing easy about caregiving for a dying parent. She watched over her father as he spent the last few years of his life in a nursing home. Witnessing a parent's decline into dementia is hard enough, but Deborah's situation was especially complicated because it happened after she endured years of emotional and verbal abuse from her father. What's it like to want abuse to stop, but a relationship to continue? Is it possible to forgive someone who can't even remember what they did? Deborah's answers to these questions might surprise you. She draws on her expertise as a sociologist and a domestic abuse counselor to make sense of her own life after her father's death. Her book is called Welcome to Wherever We Are: A Memoir of Family, Caregiving, and Redemption. Deborah joins us to talk about it right now. There's no one right way to be a family and every kind of family has something we can learn from. I'm Blair Hodges, and this is Family Proclamations. A UNIQUE BOOK ON ELDERCARE (1:50) BLAIR HODGES: Deborah J. Cohan, welcome to Family Proclamations. DEBORAH COHAN: Thank you so much for having me, Blair. It's great to be here. BLAIR HODGES: It's great to have you. Deborah, there are a lot of books out there about caregiving for aging parents. There are also a lot of books out there about what it's like to witness and experience abuse in families. But there aren't a whole lot of books that are about both of those things in the same book. You've written a book here about what it means to care for an ageing and ill parent who also happens to have been an abuser. That's how you introduce it. Talk about the decision to write a book like that. It's a unique book. DEBORAH COHAN: Thanks for noticing that. I guess sometimes we write the books we wish existed so we could have them as our own guide, and as an expert in domestic violence, and also as someone who's studied the sociology of families, it made perfect sense for me to create what I call a "braided memoir." These two stories are very much interlocking in the book, and in many people's lives. Even if there's not actual abuse in someone's family, there's so much relatable stuff in the book because of the different complicated dynamics we all find ourselves in just by living in our families. Most families have some complicated dynamics of some sort. I was really trying to help others to think about that, and to think about how these two things that are happening in the culture are really often happening at the same time, which is the complicated family piece, and also the fact that more and more people are involved in some amount of caregiving. And it tends to be gendered, where women tend to be doing it more. BLAIR HODGES: You're a specialist who's studied family violence as well. You say “family violence is a dynamic process. It's not an event or an isolated set of events.” It's an environment and you say it unfolds and takes different shapes, often over years of time. Now in your own personal experience, you've come to see how it can be lodged in caregiving. Talk a little bit about that. DEBORAH COHAN: A lot of times when domestic violence is talked about, especially in the media, we hear about it as an episode, or we hear about it as an incident—sort of an isolated event. What I learned through working with violent men for so many years at the oldest battering intervention program in the country—which is Emerge in Boston—and also working with survivors, is that these things that are referred to as “incidents” or “events” or “episodes,” they are connected experiences. It usually escalates over time. If practitioners and advocates and others in the field, and even just people's friends, can help people to see the connection and help them connect the dots between this episode and then this one—because I talk about how there's connective tissue, if you will. For example, most abusers don't start being abusive by punching someone or strangling them or any of those sorts of things. These things start out in lots of other ways. They get accelerated through time. I think it's important to see this stuff isn't a one-time thing. These things build on each other. SHADOWS IN SHAKER HEIGHTS (3:46) BLAIR HODGES: Maybe take a minute or two really quickly here to give us the broad strokes of your family. Who is this book about? Where are you from? DEBORAH COHAN: Currently I live in South Carolina. But I was born and raised in Cleveland in a pretty storied suburb, actually— BLAIR HODGES: This is Shaker Heights. DEBORAH COHAN: —Yes. Lots of books, and magazines, and articles, and all sorts of stuff on it. It's an interesting and complex place. I think people who don't live there think of it as this sort of gilded community, upper middle class, et cetera. Lots of other things are happening there, as they are everywhere. The one interesting thing is when you grow up in a community where there is an amount of privilege, and there are resources and things, things like family violence do become even more secretive. It's not until I published the book that I found even high school friends and acquaintances coming out, reaching out, telling me, "Oh my gosh, I experienced the same thing," or, "I had no idea you were going through that in high school. So was I." People are left feeling even more alone in a situation like that. So as I said, I was born in Cleveland and I was raised as an only child, which is a very big piece of this book because of the ways that kind of complicates things. Especially because my parents had also divorced very soon before my dad got sick. Then I wound up as his main person, his caregiver. My dad was someone who was really adoring. He was an amazing dad in many ways, actually. You know, I still, I miss and love him every day. He died eleven years ago this month, actually. But he was also abusive. That's something we can talk about later on, but that's a really big issue to me, is for people to understand the multidimensionality of the abuser, and the fact that, by all accounts, I guess people would say I grew up in a loving home. I grew up getting to do a lot of cool things with my parents. My parents were very successful. All this kind of stuff. But there was also this other side behind closed doors—or not always behind closed doors because my dad also was an expert at public humiliation and stuff. It was a lot to manage. My parents also—and I think this is really interesting, some of the demographic issues and stuff—is my dad had me when he was forty-two years old, and my mom was about to be thirty-five. In 1969 those were really older parents. Most of my friends, their parents were much, much younger. So that meant when all this started with my dad being sick, I was catapulted into caregiving at a time where my friends' parents were playing tennis and golf and retiring and doing other cool things like traveling and stuff. There again, I was sort of alone in this process. They married late because it was a second marriage. They had me later. They got divorced very late in life. They were almost sixty-five and seventy-two. All of these dynamics, all of these demographic trends, if you will—It's actually funny how the book stands at the intersection of all of these trends. And we're seeing them more and more. We're seeing people having kids later. We're seeing people divorcing later. We're seeing people living longer. BLAIR HODGES: Right, and adult kids caregiving for their parents or parent. DEBORAH COHAN: Often while caring for their own children. Then the other thing I talk about is the living apart together, where I'm partnered with someone where we don't live together. My husband lives two hours away. When I wrote the book, I didn't think about all the ways in which my life is sitting at these intersections of demographic shifts and trends and stuff. But it is, and I think some of those are really important to the way the book unfolds and to the way I think about all this stuff. BLAIR HODGES: You do sit at intersections of a lot of things. Just to flesh it out a little bit more, too, I'll mention that, as you said, your family was upper middle class in Shaker Heights. You say you were Jewish-identified but your family wasn't affiliated or practicing. Your parents were politically progressive. Your mom was artistic, an abstract artist. Your father worked in advertising. He wrote the Hawaiian Punch song. Is this true? DEBORAH COHAN: The line, yes. "How would you like a nice Hawaiian Punch?" BLAIR HODGES: Yeah! DEBORAH COHAN: Isn't that wild? BLAIR HODGES: That really caught me off guard. [laughter] Your parents were also married and divorced before they got married. Your father had two children you never got to know, just from this different phase of his life. That also fills out this background. If you have a copy of the book there, I thought it would be nice to hear you read from the Introduction. The first page gives us a good picture of what's to come. Can you read that for us? DEBORAH COHAN: "When I first set out to write about my dad, I thought my book would only be filled with stories of his abuse, his rage, my own resulting rage and grief, and maybe even his grief as well. However, the writing process revealed other emotions. Things that surprised me, disgusted me, delighted me, and saddened me. At moments, I was glad to be reminded of all the love I still feel for my father and reassured of his love for me. “I've anguished over whether in my promise to tell about my father's abuse with integrity and honesty, the story would somehow be diminished by this other story of the great love we shared. It's only now that I see that the one seemingly pure story of his abuse is not even a pure story. And interestingly, I don't think the abuse is even the grittiest or rawest part of the story. “As it turns out, the story would be easier to tell if all I needed to do was report about all the times that my dad behaved badly. You might get angry with him. And you might even feel sorry for me. But that's not what I wanted out of this book. You need to also know and feel the love we shared, the way I felt it. And I still do. “The much harder story to tell is the one that unfolds in these pages. It's the story of ambivalence, of what it means to stand on the precipice of both love and fear, and what it means to navigate between forgiveness and blame, care and disregard, resilience and despair." HIMPATHY (11:37) BLAIR HODGES: Thank you. A couple of things come to mind as I'm reading that. First of all, I wondered if you were presenting yourself as an exemplary type of person who'd experienced abuse. As it turns out, throughout the book, you don't. You don't set yourself forward as "everyone should process abuse the way I did." You don't expect people who have been abused to be forgiving, or to seek all of that. I want to let people know that right off the top. I did want to talk about Kate Manne's idea of "himpathy," because that's what came to mind here at the opening of your book before I knew what was coming. Himpathy as I understand it is this idea of extending sympathy to men who are doing crappy stuff, basically. The guy's the problem, but we tend to side with the guy or try to get inside his heart or his head and extend sympathy to someone who's done terrible things. You have a background of working with these domestic violence survivors and perpetrators. So I just wondered about your thoughts on that idea of himpathy, and how you negotiate with that as you think about your own relationship with your dad and as you were writing this book. DEBORAH COHAN: I have to admit I have not heard of that word or that theory. That would be interesting to read more about. I certainly did worry about that a bit. Here I am, trained in feminist sociology, and have done all this work, and it's almost like I didn't want to let people down or something, or didn't want to seem like I was giving him a pass, so to speak. BLAIR HODGES: Right. DEBORAH COHAN: I also had to write it in that authentic way I feel I did, and just realize the much more nuanced approach is actually the approach I took—which is that no one is purely one thing or another. Neither am I. I come out as pretty flawed in the book too, which I'm glad about because it's the “no one's perfect” thing. I think there are certainly people who might read the book who might say, "Oh, my gosh, I would never still love my dad," or, "I would have stopped talking to him," or "F– you" kind of stuff. I don't know. To me that would be too easy. I think the harder piece is to deal with that ambivalence. And as you say, it's not right for everyone and it's totally dependent on different people's situations. I also think, for some people, it's like some readers have told me, it's very valuable to have gotten to juggle both, so they can see how to juggle both themselves. It's not really that rare that someone who's been hurt by someone still wants a relationship with them. I guess the real essence of dealing with an abusive relationship is you want the abuse to stop but you want the relationship to continue. BLAIR HODGES: You “love” the person. DEBORAH COHAN: Yeah. We see that with sexual abuse survivors a lot. There's a lot of research on that. It's complicated. It makes me want to read about this "himpathy" piece. BLAIR HODGES: Look up himpathy. It's this sympathy for men, basically. DEBORAH COHAN: She's critical of it. Obviously. BLAIR HODGES: She's critical, but it's very thoughtful. It resonates well with what you present in your book, which is, you're not giving your dad a pass or excusing his behavior, you're just also recognizing the ways you loved him and why. That's different than saying, "You know what, actually the abuse was okay," or even, "The abuse was maybe beneficial or maybe deserved." Or that all your attention would be focused on protecting your father's reputation, rather than talking about what the relationship really was and processing your feelings for other people to kind of witness and maybe go alongside with you. I think it's helpful. DEBORAH COHAN: Yeah. If I grew up in the home my dad grew up in maybe I wouldn't have done anything different either. So it's really hard truths to reconcile, but I think they're really important. WHAT HE DID (15:31) BLAIR HODGES: It's important to think about individual responsibility, but also context. Sometimes it's easier to offload our anxiety that stuff like this happens by just demonizing an individual person. I want to be a strong proponent of justice and of attending to the person who has been abused first and foremost. I think their experience really needs to be attended to. I think if we just demonize an individual person, it excuses the ways we participate in a society that can facilitate stuff like that, basically. DEBORAH COHAN: Exactly. BLAIR HODGES: They're really bad. I can kind of overlook the crappy ways I treat people because here are these evil enemies over here I can identify as the bad people and not think about the ways I might be implicated. It's complicated, though. It's complicated. DEBORAH COHAN: Right. BLAIR HODGES: Let's talk about some abuse examples from your father. You say he was financially generous, but he was also financially controlling. You've seen this dynamic in other families. There comes this moment early on where he makes this comment to you. He says, "You'd make my life a lot easier if you'd just commit suicide." It seems like he wasn't saying that as a joke. It comes across as though he just said this to you as a matter of fact. DEBORAH COHAN: Yes, that was in the context of something that was financially abusive and controlling. It's so interesting to hear that comment restated to me, and I've heard it so many times since the book came out. It was even really startling the first time I saw it on the jacket of the book, and then it's on Amazon. It's like people glom on to it because it's so over the top for a parent to say that to a kid, or in this case a young adult woman, because I was in my twenties. I think that's the comment that makes people say, "Oh, I could never have cared for him. I could have never had a relationship with him." There is something odd about hearing it back and realizing that in a way, at the time, it was really upsetting but it almost—I guess like so many other acts of abuse, things get minimized or forgotten or denied. It's interesting to think of probably how soon after I still was able to talk to him or willing to engage with him, that sort of thing. And at the same time, I wouldn't really tolerate that. It's just one of those things where it's very hard to describe how I know that comment is so searing to readers and anybody hearing it. It's just so disturbing. At the same time, it's such a good example, though, of how his feelings were the priority, as is true in abusive relationships. Where it's like the abuser is so focused on their feelings and the other person's actions. It was such a prime example of where he completely distorted what I was saying and where I was trying to do something that could be helpful—to find out something about insurance and his financial contribution with stuff, and he just jumped into me verbally with this accusation and assuming the worst of me. In a sense, what I would want people hearing this to understand is not just the intensity of what he said, but how it encapsulates so many different pieces related to abuse. Like the threats, the focus on his feelings and my behavior. All of this. The assuming the worst of me is really the key piece of this. BLAIR HODGES: This is the kind of abuse you experienced, this verbal assault. You even say your father never actually hit you, physical abuse, but you did always have the perception he could. There was always a sense that he might, and you say that was its own sort of terror that can give a person trauma. DEBORAH COHAN: Oh, for sure. Because somebody who says something that vicious and cruel and brutal: "My life would be easier if you commit suicide." It is a slap in the face. It is a punch in the gut. It is all of those things, kind of metaphorically. I mean, this is why I think it's so crucial and I always try to encourage my students, and I talked about this with violent offenders, is to not create a hierarchy of what sort of abuse is worse than another. Because right, it's true. He did not pull my hair or spit on me or punch me or throw me against a wall or strangle me or any of these awful things that happen. But the threat of violence, the constant berating, the criticizing, the defining of reality—when someone says something like that to you, what are you supposed to say? I mean, there's no way to respond. It was his ability to try to exert that level of power and control, and that level of silencing me, and putting me in my place in this way. Those are some of the core defining features of abuse. BLAIR HODGES: I learned a lot more about abuse and seeing these patterns of abuse—for example, you talked about how maybe you would be together during a trip and he would freak out. He would scream and swear at you publicly. So not only did it hurt you because your dad's treating you that way, but also, it's embarrassing and other people are witnessing this, which compounds the hurt. This would happen during a trip where he was visiting. Then at the end of the trip you say he had this tactic of minimizing and mutualizing. Talk about the tactic, what that looks like to minimize and mutualize after an assault like that. DEBORAH COHAN: It's comments like, "It's not so bad," or, "Didn't we have a fun time?" Or glomming onto the parts that were fun. “Wasn't that wonderful when we saw the Lion King?” Or, “Wasn't that amazing when we ate at this restaurant?” By highlighting the goodies it forced me—again, it's part of his defining reality, but then it made me have to think, “Oh, that stuff was really nice. That was good. So maybe that's not so bad, the other stuff.” BLAIR HODGES: It doesn't feel like he was really asking, either. It seems like what's happened here is control. He needs to control the story. He's not really looking for your input about how you felt about everything, but really telling you, “By the way, this trip was awesome, you better think it was and if you don't, there's a problem with you.” DEBORAH COHAN: Not just that there's a problem with you, but also that you're insatiable and that you— BLAIR HODGES: That you deserve my yelling and stuff? DEBORAH COHAN: Or nothing I do for you is ever good enough. Then it turns into I'm not grateful enough, which was a huge part of the narrative. **WHEN REDEMPTION ISN'T FORGIVENESS (22:16) BLAIR HODGES: As we said before, this isn't a book of forgiveness for your father. You do repeatedly express your love for him and describe to the reader where that love comes from or what it looks like. But you're saying there's a sense in which you want some redemption for that relationship, but not necessarily forgiveness. That was an interesting distinction I'd never thought about before. Talk about how you see those two things of seeking some kind of redemption versus just forgiveness. DEBORAH COHAN: I love that question because so often people still conclude I've totally forgiven him and then decide, "Oh, I'm not sure I could forgive him." Like I talk about in the book, forgiveness is a bit overrated. As someone who does not identify religiously, forgiveness feels far too rooted in notions of religion. I'm not totally comfortable with that. I mean, I think the redemption is more that now I'm fifty-three years old, I understand people like my parents did the best they could with what they had at the time they did it. So I have more sort of acceptance of the multidimensionality of my parents in a way, and I think their deaths—because my mom has died also—their deaths helped to do that, even though that was something I dreaded for so long. But then it turns out there's something about it now, that I can see the full humanity of both of them in a way that maybe it was harder to see when they were alive. The other piece of the forgiveness thing is that in working with abusers, I remember working with a counselor. We were co-facilitating a group one evening and he was pushing this abuser, really holding him accountable. He kept saying to him, "What are you sorry for, who are you sorry for?" It was like, "Who are the tears for?" Really trying to get this guy to see he still didn't really seem like he was apologetic, really truly remorseful. That it was more about his own saving face. So I guess the reason full forgiveness still feels hard for me is my dad and I never had that full, totally open, me totally exposing all of my thoughts on this, kind if conversation, maybe over a period of months and years, where I could come to that, or where he asked for it in a way that I could give that to him. So I feel the most we can do here is redemption. BLAIR HODGES: How do you define that then? What is that redemption? DEBORAH COHAN: I feel like it's maybe that acceptance of all that imperfection and all the flaw and all the limitations and things, and that there are still these redeeming aspects of him as a man in the world, of him as a father, of him in my life. I mean, I guess I couldn't have the level of loving and missing him every day without that level of some redemption. And then some people have asked me, "Well, it does sound like you forgive him, though." It's almost like people just want to use that word so much— BLAIR HODGES: I feel tempted to that question, too. I wanted to say it's sort of a “brand” or a “genre” of forgiveness or something. [laughs] DEBORAH COHAN: Exactly. It's so interesting, though. I was friends with a couple. The woman has died and the man is much, much older. He's probably in his nineties now. Their daughter was murdered by their son-in-law. I had them speak at my classes and they were often asked, "Do you forgive the son-in-law?" Shirley, the mother, would always say, "No, and he never did anything to ask for it. He really never apologized. There was no authentic anything that would have warranted it and he never really accepted enough responsibility for forgiveness to be possible." I guess I'm still kind of at that piece. BLAIR HODGES: That's a forgiveness that seems like it has to be mutual, like the other person who hurt you needs to get inside your story, show they understand it, and make some kind of reparation or connection there. And for that kind of forgiveness to happen, yeah, you have to have the other— I think what people might be thinking when they suggest you have forgiven is the sense that you still find good in your dad. You love him. But there's also, as you say, there's always that disconnect that's a result of the years of abuse, you can't fully reconcile because reconciliation requires both people to be involved with it. And so it's just not possible. That kind of forgiveness has to be mutual. The other person has to be involved for that forgiveness to even work, I guess. DEBORAH COHAN: Yeah, that it's more of a process. It, like the abuse, is not just an episode or an instance or a moment. It's much larger. One of the things that's difficult is my dad seemed to have in certain ways, he softened and almost showed me the possibilities of redemption once he was quite ill. Once he was very needy and dependent. He was in a nursing home, and that's when towards the end of the book he's telling me about his experience growing up and his father being abusive to his mother and witnessing it and thinking it was an outrageous thing. And his empathy went to his mother as a child. Yet he still reproduced this as an adult. But here was a man with dementia and he was totally immobile, and by then incontinent and all these other things. It was just—That wasn't the time to start digging into our relationship. But had he told me all that and had we been able to have that conversation when he was well, I don't even know if that would have been possible. Had that happened, had he been able to show me more, really that actions speak louder than words, really show me in a consistent, meaningful, trustworthy way, "Deb, I can't believe I did that to you." Really showing me through living out life with me that he would never do it again. But we never got there. FAMILY DYNAMICS WITH MOM (28:50) BLAIR HODGES: It was thirteen years before he died—eight of those years, he was very sick in these care facilities. You say you were lodged in an uncomfortably intimate relationship with him, as you mentioned, because you were an adult child of divorce. The family dynamic you grew up with was one where you trended toward being closer to your dad. I think there was probably a protective element to that. Your mom felt sort of sidelined. You really paint a compelling picture of why the divorce happened later on, the way your mom was sidelined, the way your family was this triangle that you felt pressured to make feel whole, which is something no child should have to reckon with. But then later on when they get this divorce, here's a quote from you, "During the years I cared for my dad, my mom's absence felt like a death." I realized, Deborah, how hard that must have been to basically be the only one who could really care for your dad during those eight years because your mom was gone. You're an only child of these divorced parents. DEBORAH COHAN: She kind of would accuse me of being angry at her for leaving. She would say that somehow I thought it was her responsibility to stay. She could tell it was really hard for me. In a certain way, though, she was very compassionate at times about what I was dealt with in those moments. Then there were other times in which she, as I say, almost accused me of being angry about it. Which is a whole other piece. BLAIR HODGES: Was that like a “They protest too much” kind of thing? It seems you were in some senses abandoned to care for him. I'm not suggesting that your mom shouldn't have gotten a divorce or anything. But their child is involved. You were stuck with handling that. It seems like a lot for a child in a family, even though you were a grown up at this point, to manage by yourself. I wonder if she worried if you resented it. It seems like— DEBORAH COHAN: Absolutely. She didn't just worry about it, she accused me of it! [laughs]. And then it was a little confusing. BLAIR HODGES: But did you feel that resentment? Was her charge valid? DEBORAH COHAN: That's a really good question, because I teach this book now in my class, and it's very interesting how I ask my students if they find my mom to be a sympathetic character. The reality is, I guess she is and she isn't. There are a lot of people who come to the conclusion, a little bit what you were just alluding to, of I should not have been left like that. It's kind of like my mom did something wrong, that I got stuck with all of this. What's interesting is, the book came out in 2020. My mom died a few months later. Here I am teaching the book. I can't have this conversation with my mother, which I would really like to have, which is, "Oh my gosh, if only you could hear all the ways in which I stand up for you." You know what I mean? I constantly am saying to students, "No, I don't blame my mom for leaving." In some ways I just wish she had left sooner, so they could have each had their new lease on life. To me it feels very sad that she did this at close to sixty-five and he was seventy-two. I'm not sure what else could have been done, though. I wouldn't expect people to stay in a marriage that isn't good or healthy for them. I can't fault my mom for leaving. It's more, I wish she had been able to do it earlier and I know I was probably part of the reason she didn't, which is a hard thing to deal with at the same time. BLAIR HODGES: Would you resist it if I said something like, “I wish your mom had tried and pitched in a little bit to take some of the pressure off?” DEBORAH COHAN: No, I think that's true. She did in certain ways, but she couldn't in other ways. From a legal standpoint, all this financial stuff, everything. She was certainly financially generous in her own way later and about other stuff. It might have been helpful had she just said, "Gosh, I see you're going to Cleveland again." I wasn't taking trips and doing really great stuff. I was going to Cleveland many times from Boston as I was in graduate school, as I was adjuncting, and teaching in different places, and commuting to Connecticut. I wish in those moments instead of just taking me out to dinner or—because she was living on Cape Cod by then so we were living much closer together. It might have been nice if she had just said, "I'll buy the airline ticket," or, "Let me make the reservation for you at the hotel," or whatever it was. That might have lessened the burden. Although, she did in other ways because then she might have helped fund something else I did need. It was just a very difficult time. AT THE NURSING HOME (33:54) BLAIR HODGES: That is helpful. I didn't have hard feelings toward your mom, I just wondered a little bit about— As you said, your mom was still alive when you were finishing this. It makes sense that some of that stuff couldn't have been processed yet. So that's helpful. I think people that pick up a copy of the book and check it out, that's a really great supplement to it. I'm glad to hear you can talk to people about that as you teach the book, too. The book we're talking about, by the way, again, is called Welcome to Wherever We Are: A Memoir of Family, Caregiving, and Redemption. It's written by Deborah J. Cohan, who is professor of sociology at the University of South Carolina Beaufort. You mentioned this a minute ago—finances. You basically witnessed your father's finances completely collapse. This is something a lot of people are experiencing and will probably be experiencing more and more because the social safety net in the United States is not great, but he went from a sharp dressing, fancy food enjoying ad executive to this man in filthy sweatpants sitting in this dilapidated care facility, living on Medicaid. And he ended up dying with about fifty dollars to his name. So you witness over the time he was there, his complete impoverishment. DEBORAH COHAN: Yeah and also I think that's some of the redemption for him too, is just knowing if he was aware of what was left at the end, and what happened—I mean, his dream would have been to leave me with more to pay off my student loan debt, you know, all that kind of stuff. He would have been ashamed and humiliated in many of the ways that breadwinning and masculinity are so entangled with each other. BLAIR HODGES: Ah, that reminds me, there's an excerpt I thought you might read on page twenty-seven. You actually take us to the nursing home with some stories about what it was like when you visited him. It's that middle paragraph there. If you could read that excerpt—it's a list but wow, it certainly evokes experiences I've had. DEBORAH COHAN: "The nursing home: paved driveway. Automatic doors. Cigarette butts. Patients waiting for the next distribution of cigarettes. Orange sherbet and ginger ale and Saulsbury steak. Sticky floors. Dusty roads. Vinyl recliners. Bed pans. Bingo and sing-alongs. Stashes of adult diapers in the closets and drawers. Motorized wheelchairs. Schedules. Forms. Nursing aides and personal attendants. Styrofoam cups. Stale urine. Plastic water pitchers and bendable straws. Hospital beds. Dark, dingy rooms. A small rod for hanging clothes. Non-skid socks. No privacy. Open, unlocked rooms filled with demented wanderers. Whiteboards with washable markers stating the day of the week and the nurse on duty. Dead plants. Almost-dead people. Harsh overhead lighting and overheated rooms. Not enough real light. Tables that roll across beds for getting fed. Call bells and strings to pull in the bathroom. Air that doesn't move." BLAIR HODGES: The stories you tell there, Deborah, visiting there seemed really hard for you, let alone what it must have been like to live there. You felt such ambivalence about it. Because you say you almost couldn't stand being there at the moment, but you also would get really distraught about leaving there. DEBORAH COHAN: Absolutely, yes. And thanks for having me read that piece, by the way, because it's been so long since I've actually read it. It takes me back to the room also. The ambivalence showed up in so many different ways. I think that's so true of people who are visiting people who are frail and dying, or very ill. This sense of, you want to go, like I would be in Boston, I would want to go so badly. I would want to see him. I would want to give him a big hug. I would want to finally bring him food he craved or food that was a special treat instead of some of the things I listed in that piece. Then I would get there. It was like, “Oh, gosh.” I just wanted to flee. I walked in and it was just the chaos and the bureaucracy and just the antiseptic but actually filthy quality of these places that I illuminate in that piece. Then the guilt that totally seeped in in that moment, because then it was like, "Wait, I got here. I'm here. I'm supposed to want to be with him. I'm supposed to want to stay,” and now I'm counting down the time. It's sort of like, "Oh my gosh, I've been here twenty minutes. It feels like four hours." Then when I'd leave it was almost like that, "Oh, but I spent three hours," almost like I did good time or something. BLAIR HODGES: A Herculean effort just to get through the three hours. DEBORAH COHAN: Yeah, and time is strange in a nursing home also, as it is in a hospital. People are motivated by the mealtimes. The newspaper delivery is listed as an activity at the place. These things that are just mundane activities in my life or your life, they become these big events at these nursing homes in ways that, when you're there and you're witnessing that, and you're well, it's really hard to watch and to do time the way that they're doing time. BLAIR HODGES: On a bigger scale, too, the cycle that would happen. So you talk about how there would be a medical crisis, things would seem really bad, but then he would kind of rally, show some resilience, kind of recover for a bit, you'd get a little bit of hope, and then it would crash again. And this cycle kept happening. It reminds me of this paragraph I highlighted here. You say, "Perhaps many adult children caring for dying parents deal with this dilemma. How much to let the parent in. How much to keep the parent at bay. It's hard to get that close to almost-death, to anticipatory grief, and when an abusive history is part of it, that push/pull with how to have healthy emotional closeness and distance becomes that much more intensified." You're talking about the already complicated dynamics and then you add the layer of abuse into it, which makes it all the more complicated. DEBORAH COHAN: I appreciate you did such a close good reading of it, because I don't know that everybody picks up some of the pieces and the nuances and especially the contradictory realities that are present. I really appreciate that and what you've read and shared and asked and are revealing to the audience. That's just the hardest part of all, is reconciling those pieces. Okay, I spent most of my childhood really worried my parents would die or my parents would get divorced. As an only child, those two things felt incredibly scary, that I would lose one or both of them, or that they would get divorced. It kind of haunted me up until they died, really. And my dad, like any one of the things he suffered from people die from pretty easily. You know, he had an aneurysm. He had a heart attack. He had diabetes. He had so many different things— BLAIR HODGES:  —He had dementia, yeah. DEBORAH COHAN: Yeah. And then at the same time, though, he kept—like you're saying—bouncing back. It was like the Energizer Bunny. It was like nothing's going to get this guy. In a way that's an interesting parallel with the abuse. It was almost like, unstoppable. It was the sense of like, he could be abusive and then quick fix, make it up. Apologize, be really sweet and kind, and then do it again. But it's like… BLAIR HODGES: Another kind of cycle. DEBORAH COHAN: Yeah, another cycle. And also the cycle of vulnerability coupled with this omnipotence. That was present when he was ill. Like he was totally vulnerable. There was a time in 2006, I think it was, where I really thought he was going to die. There was no doubt. It just felt like this is imminent now. He was hallucinating and all these other things. He didn't die for six more years! And between those six years he moved to different nursing homes, basically, because of bad behavior. But it reminds me of those inflatable dolls, or those inflatable things on lawns. BLAIR HODGES: Like outside the car dealership thing? DEBORAH COHAN: Like you hit it and it keeps coming back. BLAIR HODGES: Oh, yeah. It falls and then pops back up. DEBORAH COHAN: And it'll keep standing, exactly. And that was my dad in everything. BUTTERFLY EFFECT FIXATION (42:54) BLAIR HODGES: You say nothing could really prepare you for that. There was this moment when he falls at the Cleveland airport, you kind of pinpoint this as a turning point for him, where he seems to be in relatively good health, but he fell and broke his hip. You were involved in that trip too. You carried these feelings about that. DEBORAH COHAN: Absolutely. BLAIR HODGES: You were worried he was about to die then, and you weren't ready. Then again, you were less prepared for what ended up happening, which was years of this cycle of health crises and then recoveries. Nothing could have prepared you for that. DEBORAH COHAN: And the reality is you're never ready. It's almost like you can know what's happening. He was never going to get better. But I also didn't think he was going to die three days before I started my new job in South Carolina, three weeks after I moved here, after just being divorced myself. I didn't really, it was like, “That was interesting timing, Dad.” [laughs] But you just said something that was really interesting and reminds me of the passage I just read from being in the nursing home, and it relates to the moment he fell. So when my dad fell at the airport, he was going there in a limo, being dropped off, got out of the car and fell on ice in Cleveland at the airport. My friend, who's now, I mean he's ex-husband, Mark, he and I were heading to Cleveland to meet my dad to then go to Florida. BLAIR HODGES: With him. DEBORAH COHAN: With him. It was supposed to be this vacation. My dad had packed his red suitcase, and it turns out that red suitcase, which is also featured in the book, that thing was screaming at me every time I would go and visit him in a nursing home. I don't know why I didn't think to trash it. Maybe because I kept hoping we would get to pack it and he could go home. But like, honestly, that suitcase was just—it was like a bully, you know?  It was this sense of like—it was taunting because I felt, and I still kind of do, if my dad wasn't taking us to Florida, he wouldn't have fallen on ice at the airport and he wouldn't have broken his hip, and then he wouldn't have—then his whole life wouldn't have come tumbling down with it. BLAIR HODGES: Butterfly effect moment, right? DEBORAH COHAN: Yeah. But at the same time, that's sort of abuse survivor logic. BLAIR HODGES: Oh, you're putting it on you. DEBORAH COHAN: Yeah, like if I hadn't have done this, he wouldn't have done that to me. Or if I had done this, he definitely would have behaved differently and then I wouldn't have been told “I wish you'd commit suicide” or something. It's interesting how even in a moment like that, that has really nothing to do with abuse, the psyche that's been dealing with abuse and those dynamics, is still contaminated by that. There was still that sense of, “God, if only we hadn't gone to Florida! If only we hadn't made that trip!” And the reality is, I was actually very tentative about wanting to go on that trip. My dad really wanted this for us. He really wanted the three of us to go and have this wonderful time and be at this resort. And I was haunted by some of my memories of my dad on trips. I didn't want to deal with that with my husband at the time. BLAIR HODGES: Right. DEBORAH COHAN: And then I also dealt with the guilt and the shame around not really wanting the trip. And then he actually—his whole life tumbled down as a result of a trip he really wanted that I didn't want because I wasn't grateful enough. So it did this whole thing. I mean, I can still feel it. BLAIR HODGES: It recurs. You bring it up throughout the book. This Cleveland airport is a recurring moment you keep going back to. DEBORAH COHAN: Yes. And then isn't it wild that I got the news of his death at a different airport— BLAIR HODGES: Right! DEBORAH COHAN: —as I was about to board a plane to go and see him for the last time, which at that time really I knew was the last time because they called me to pretty much tell me that earlier in the day. So I arranged to leave that evening, and then missed it. Again, at the time it was like, “Oh my gosh, you're such a screw up! You can't even get to see him when…” It was just this… BLAIR HODGES: The reflex of self-blame. DEBORAH COHAN: Criticism, yes. I had internalized that so much, and so it was a process to try to realize like, no. My dad could have fallen anywhere. Something else could have happened. Because of course something else would have happened. But it was so hard to see in that moment. ONE LITTLE EXTRA SOMETHING (47:49) BLAIR HODGES: This reminds me the ways you're very confessional and vulnerable yourself in the book. This isn't a book about Deborah Cohan the hero who cared for her dying father. This is a book of Deborah Cohan who's wrestling with the ambiguity of being someone who experienced abuse, who has really hard feelings about that, and who also has feelings of love. But there was, I think one of the most arresting— Well I probably shouldn't try to qualify it. To me, the most arresting moment in the book is when you're listing all the medications he's taking on any given day when he's in a care facility. There's Ambien, Glucotrol, amoxicillin, mycelium, and even more. You see this one-month pharmacy bill that added up to twelve hundred dollars. Then you add this startling line. You say, "One extra little something slipped into this whole mess would be untraceable." This is one of the darkest thoughts a caregiver might experience, but you're not the only caregiver who I've heard talk about this. So I wanted to spend a little bit of time there about what it was like confessing that, talking about that in your book. DEBORAH COHAN: Yeah, I certainly—I hope it's understood in the book that it wasn't about revenge. BLAIR HODGES: Right. DEBORAH COHAN: It wasn't like because of that moment when my dad thought his life would be easier if I committed suicide that I want to somehow poison him or kill him. It was this very deep in my bones feeling of, “No one should have to live this way.” BLAIR HODGES: It was, you were witnessing suffering. And your brain was like what can we do for this? DEBORAH COHAN: To stop it, yes. My parents, as I said, and you identified it as well, they were very progressive. And I still remember conversations when I was growing up where my dad would say, "If that ends up happening to me—” like, you know, he would talk about people who— BLAIR HODGES: Right. “I don't want to live like that." DEBORAH COHAN: “I don't wanna live like that. Just kill me. Do something.” So I think even he would have been compassionate and understanding to the thought I had. But what's also interesting that you didn't reveal in your question though is, when I revealed it to myself, I was also telling it to my husband at the time, who thought I was just totally crazy for thinking it, for saying it. It was almost like I should be ashamed of myself. And then there I go, retelling the whole thing in the book. So I wasn't, I really never wound up being so ashamed of it. It was more the sense of the absolute desperation a caregiver feels. The absolute helplessness to stop the suffering and to also stop witnessing it, too! It was like, how much longer can we all go on like this? It was sort of like this is an untenable situation. BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, this wasn't a revenge plot. DEBORAH COHAN: Absolutely not. BLAIR HODGES: This was a desperate moment of trying to figure out how to make the suffering end. I mean, you talk about how caregiving amplified your childhood instincts, your hyper-responsibility and hyper-vigilance, and what toll that could take on you over a number of years. What was it like being hyper-vigilant, hyper-responsible about your father? DEBORAH COHAN: Well you almost alluded to it in the list of the medications. I was carrying around like, a file box in my car with all sorts of information about his health, with all sorts of papers, with duplicate copies of things, because I don't want to be caught off guard, not prepared. If someone calls me, I want to have it all ready. I always had pen and paper with me. Yeah, it's true that there's a hyper-vigilance that happens when someone's experiencing an abusive relationship or witnessing abuse. That sense of being on guard, of trying to have every base covered. That sort of thing. BLAIR HODGES: Be blameless, really. DEBORAH COHAN: Yeah, you know I did that, I extended that into caregiving. I made a list of—I mean, it was sort of crazy, but I did—I sent a copy to my mother, I sent a copy to the nursing home, I sent a copy everywhere. And actually it was when he lived at home, before that, where I had something on the refrigerator that had his social security number, all of his information—like the drugs he takes, his health history, the dates of surgeries—so that any of the nurses caring for him in his home could see that, could know what was going on, could assist. BLAIR HODGES: You were also on call all the time, expecting any phone call. It seemed like you were just tied to your phone in case there was a phone call that would come in. DEBORAH COHAN: Right. And when he died, I talk about how that night after talking with my friend for hours on my couch, afterwards then I just go and I turn off the phone. And I've done that every single night since. I never leave my phone on. BLAIR HODGES: Right! From that point on. DEBORAH COHAN: It's like he'll call me at three or four in the morning. If I'm up, I'll answer, if I'm not— I could be called at any moment about anything and there was just no boundaries on it. Because again, it's the sense of they have to for different liability reasons, but I was being called about anything and everything. DOES THE CHILD BECOME THE PARENT (53:22) BLAIR HODGES: It took up mental and emotional space twenty-four hours a day. And as you watched all these losses pile up—he stopped being able to drive, he stopped being able to walk, he stopped being able to write, then read, then feed himself, then he lost control of his bladder, he couldn't think straight, he couldn't remember. The dementia took over. And you tell us about a friend of yours called Julie. She's a geriatric care specialist. You said she's actually not comfortable when she hears people talking about a role reversal in this situation. It's common for people to say the child becomes the parent and the parent becomes like the child. You're doing a lot of the same things. They're helping feed them, they probably wear diapers, there's all these things going on. You say Julie is not comfortable with that comparison. But you kind of disagree with her. I wanted to hear your thoughts about where Julie's coming from and how you see it. DEBORAH COHAN: Well I mean, she was so compassionate to me about my dad and about all that has happened. In fact, I remember saying to her, I'm going to be using your name, if you don't want me to use it, I can give you a pseudonym. BLAIR HODGES: It's the risk of being friends with a writer. [laughter] DEBORAH COHAN: Exactly! But I mean, nobody's really talked about in a singularly bad way in the book. Not even my dad. So with Julie I think that's a common thing in gerontology, in her field, is the sense of empowering the person who is being cared for. BLAIR HODGES: Conferring dignity. If you say they're like children that's undignified or that's demeaning. DEBORAH COHAN: Exactly. And that's why these nursing homes will ask families to post pictures of when the person was younger and more robust and vibrant on the door or in the entrance to the room, so when people are going in to see the patient they're also reminded, “Oh, this is really who I'm seeing. I'm not just seeing this person who's only weak and sick and vulnerable.” But you know what's interesting to me about that is I felt that a lot with my father. I felt like I wanted to just scream to [laughs] anybody who would listen or any of the nurses or anyone, this isn't really my dad! This is my dad! Kind of asserting the strengths and the brilliance he did have. At the same time, though, it was very hard for me to give that credit to other people, you know? [laughs] So when I would see other residents who were really bad off, I had a hard time thinking about them in their prior phases of their life. I think that's just something caregivers struggle with. I certainly wasn't unique in that. BLAIR HODGES: Sure, and I'm sympathetic to Julie in the sense of conferring dignity and being mindful of this person as a person worthy of concern and care and not infantilizing people. But you also say, when you're feeding your dad and he's spitting up down his shirt and all these things, you can't help but feel like that role has been reversed. I'd like to find a way to both dignify and honor the parent, and also validate and recognize the experience of the child who is now being a caregiver. I think both things are possible. DEBORAH COHAN: That's why when I talk about feeding my dad birthday cake, there's this point where I talk about it as like a terrible beauty in feeding a parent. That gets at that to me. Again, the ambivalence, the contradictory reality, the sense that we should be there in a certain way. They did this for us. We should do this for them with no sense of negativity. At the same time, this is not really how it was supposed to go. BLAIR HODGES: There was no rehearsal for it, too, for you. You were just there. The cupcake was there. And here you are, you're feeding your dad. DEBORAH COHAN: And he wouldn't have wanted that. The last thing he would have wanted was to have me feed him, I mean oh my gosh. LETTER TO DADDY (57:34) BLAIR HODGES: There's one more excerpt I'd like to hear you read here. You wrote some of this book in your dad's presence there at the nursing home when he would be asleep, and you were at his side. This is on page one 142. You wrote to him in that moment in 2009. If you can read it. DEBORAH COHAN: Sure. It's just funny. I'm laughing only because I feel like I have that page memorized. I have actually read this piece quite a bit when I've spoken about the book. It does feel like a really evocative passage, and not because it talks about his abuse at all, but also because of the writerly technique that I used in it of taking almost like field notes that I wound up using. It's exactly the same, I didn't change anything. But I didn't know I was writing a book at that moment either. "I watch you as you sleep, not unlike you probably watched me as I slept as a newborn baby and as a young girl, and wonder, in awe, in calm, and in worry. A parent watches a child sleep with anticipation of a future. An adult child watches a sick parent sleep with a sense of the past. You are finally still and quiet. You, a man who I know is chaotic and loud. We rest in this calm as you fall in and out of slumber and I grade papers. I need to study your face, memorize it, because I know I'll need it one day. Yet the you now is not the you I want to remember. “In a few days, I'll be back with over a hundred students, giving lectures, attending meetings, going to a concert, a lunch with a friend, a performance of The Vagina Monologues. And in my week ahead, I worry about being too busy, about running from one activity to the next, breathless. “Yet one day, Daddy, you did this too, right? How would you restructure those days now? What did you hope for? What do you look for now? You look tired, though I can't tell if you're tired of this life. Yesterday I brought you coffee from Caribou with one of their napkins that made a jab at Starbucks that said, 'Our coffee is smooth and fresh because burnt and bitter were already taken.' Whenever I see great lines and logos I think of you. Your creativity still shines through as we leaf through metropolitan home and marvel at minimalist spaces. Your stained sweatpants are pulled up halfway toward your chest and your stomach looks distended. “Earlier today I saw as you put imaginary pills to your mouth with your fingers, something I assume to be a self-soothing ritual you performed after the nurse told you it was not yet time for more medication. Being in Cleveland, I'm surrounded by childhood friends hanging out with their dads, younger men than you in their sixties and early seventies. Robust, athletic, energetic men vigorously playing tennis and golf, working, traveling and chasing after their dreams, not figments of their imaginations in thin air. “Oh, Daddy. Your eyes open suddenly, and you ask, ‘What are you writing?' I quickly respond, ‘Oh, nothing really, it's just for school.'" LATE-STAGE CONFRONTATIONS (1:01:06) BLAIR HODGES: That's Deborah Cohan, professor of sociology at the University of South Carolina Beaufort. She earned her PhD in Sociology and a Joint Master of Arts in Women's Studies and Sociology at Brandeis University. That excerpt is from her book, Welcome to Wherever We Are: A Memoir of Family, Caregiving, and Redemption. You mentioned a little bit about this already, Deborah, but maybe just take one moment and talk about the ways your father maybe tried to reckon with the abusive dynamics of your relationship later in life. If there was any indication that he came to regret how he treated you. You talk about, for example, when he tried to volunteer at a domestic violence clinic. Even in that context, it didn't really come up. It doesn't sound like you had many opportunities, or that you felt safe enough or whatever, to straightforwardly confront him and say this was an abusive situation. DEBORAH COHAN: I certainly tried. There was a time when I was doing the abuse intervention work and I was working late into the night and our groups ran from 8pm to 10pm, after men had worked their jobs and then came to this program, and then I was leaving Cambridge—This was when I was in Boston, and leaving late at night, 10:30, 11 o'clock, and walking into a parking lot by myself and driving home. And I remember this one day my dad and I were on the phone, he was so concerned for my safety. It really upset him that I was doing this, and doing it late. And I did in that moment really try to question his fear and to try to help him understand, though it didn't really work, but to really try to say, ‘Dad, the things that these guys do are no different than things you've done. I'm not afraid of them. That was not an issue for me.' I guess he didn't want to also see me driving around late at night. But the reality is had I been afraid I wouldn't have been an effective counselor for these guys either. I had to try to help my dad understand that I was working with them in as fearless and compassionate a way as possible, but I guess in that moment I also felt fearless and compassionate in the conversation with him, of trying to say, ‘Dad, you're labeling these guys as monsters, as demons. And actually, your behavior is on a continuum with theirs.' And that's disturbing to hear from your daughter, obviously. But it was important for me to say. So I'm really glad I had a moment to tell him that. It didn't lead to a very productive conversation because he, like many men in the program, still wanted to minimize aspects of their behavior or rationalize it, or it was like this—"But Deb, I never hit you. Deb, I never did this. I never did that. Like that would be horrifying. But what I did wasn't as bad." I didn't really let him get away with that, and that's another reason why, for me, writing this book was critical. Because there really is not enough out there to highlight the damage of verbal and emotional and psychological abuse and threats. There's so much out there around physical abuse, and also sexual abuse. Movies and books and things like that. And those are really important cultural documents we have in the world. But the thing that also has happened is, people don't understand enough about the damage of the emotional abuse and the verbal abuse. And as a result, with so much less written about it, I really felt this tremendous ethical responsibility to write the book. SEE YOU AROUND (1:05:06) BLAIR HODGES: You talk about how much your dad is still with you. You close the book by saying you see him in so much of life. I wondered what's an example of that? And whether you think that fades over time at all? DEBORAH COHAN: No, I don't think any of this fades. I definitely don't think time heals everything or any of that stuff that people say. No, I do—I see him in so much, I guess in the past six years or so I have gotten much more involved as a public sociologist, translating ideas and concepts and theories and things for the larger public. So getting quoted in major news outlets and doing a lot of writing and things like that. That's probably the part where I so miss my father, because he would get such a tremendous kick out of the fact that I wrote for Teen Vogue, or that I, you know, was quoted in Time magazine, or I wrote a piece for Newsweek recently. I mean he just, that was his bread and butter. That's what he loved. I mean, he would have loved that I was on this podcast. He would probably be really angry and humiliated about some of what I'd be talking about. But he definitely had this overwhelming pride and interest in my accomplishments. And that has been a really hard thing to deal with because my career really took off since I've lived here, and that's when he died. And he always dreamed of living in the Carolinas, or in New Mexico, or Arizona. So sometimes I feel like I'm sort of living out something he really wanted that he didn't actualize. I think he would be pretty over the moon about the fact that I moved to South Carolina and have made a good life for myself here. I'm a lot happier as a person than I ever was before. Some of that is probably healing from abuse. It's being in a new relationship. It's so many different things. Like, I wish he could know me now. I wish I could talk to him and know him now. It's just such a strange thing, you know? But I do feel like, hopefully somehow, he knows. I had him for a long time. I'm partnered with a man whose dad died when he was ten years old. I'm often thinking to myself, "Man, I wish he knew Mike." I mean, he really missed out. He really missed out, and Mike missed out knowing his father. And I didn't have that. But instead, I had this very torturous, very complicated relationship. It's really tricky. But it's interesting because the conversations I grew up having with my dad that were really fun and provocative and helpful to me were often conversations around advertising and marketing and all that kind of stuff. Funny enough, my partner, Mike, that's his thing! He's a Director of Media Relations. So here I am still having those conversations at dinner. It's a little bit bizarre. **REGRETS, CHALLENGES, & SURPRISES (1:08:19) BLAIR HODGES: In some ways, that circle continues to close. DEBORAH COHAN: Exactly. BLAIR HODGES: Well, Deborah, let's conclude with the segment Regrets, Challenges, & Surprises. This is when you can talk about anything you regret about the book now that it's out, what the most challenging thing about writing it was, or what kind of surprises you encountered as you created this book. You can speak to one, two, or all three of those things. Regrets, challenges, and surprises. DEBORAH COHAN: I would say I don't have any regrets, which I'm so pleased about because of the nature of the topic. And the fact that surviving abuse and dealing with caregiving are riddled with regrets, the fact that I could write a book and not have regrets about it is pretty remarkable to me. BLAIR HODGES: You didn't even find any typos or anything like that? [laughs] DEBORAH COHAN: There might be I don't know— BLAIR HODGES: I didn't notice any. [laughter] DEBORAH COHAN: There might be, I don't know, but I'm kind of crazy about that kind of stuff though. My dad was too. Oh my gosh, I inherited my spelling and all that craziness from him. BLAIR HODGES: Funny. I didn't notice any. So no regrets. Alright, well, challenges and surprises? DEBORAH COHAN: I mean I don't have any regrets! I don't feel like there's anything I revealed in the book that I wish I hadn't revealed. There's nothing I wish I had included that I didn't include, that kind of thing, which feels really good to me. Yeah, I mean I actually have been thinking about this a lot as I've been writing this new book I'm working on, because it's that sense of, you just really don't want to forget something. You want to make sure that whatever you wanted to say is in it. BLAIR HODGES: Once it's out, it's out, so. DEBORAH COHAN: Right. And at the same time, though, I've started to grow more comfortable with the fact that writing itself is a process and that I will come to think about things and know things in new and different ways. And I guess, when you ask what's surprising, I will say it has surprised me that the thing I was most afraid of—which was the death of a parent or both parents—has been also freeing. It's been a pretty startling revelation I guess you could say. BLAIR HODGES: Is it hard to talk about that? Some people might say,

With the legalization of same-sex marriage in 2015, queer families are more visible today than ever. But the path to becoming a parent is complicated for LGBTQ people.  Dr. Abbie E. Goldberg, psychologist and researcher, provides LGBTQ parents and prospective parents with the detailed, evidence‑based knowledge they need to navigate the transition to parenthood and help their children thrive. Her evidence-based research can benefit all families.    Transcript   ABBIE GOLDBERG: For me, it would have been a light bulb even to see one LGBT family and to know this was something that was real, and this was happening. But it wasn't being talked about. And the invalidation those families face is heartbreaking to me because it doesn't have to be this way. Everyone's families can be recognized as valid. We don't have to demonize certain kinds of families. BLAIR HODGES: When Abbie Goldberg was growing up with two moms, she didn't see any families that looked like hers. People had a lot of questions about LGBTQ families, like whether kids like Abbie would turn out alright being raised in a queer household. Today, Abbie's a clinical psychologist and an internationally recognized scholar of LGBTQ families. She's an expert on how queer families are made—especially the practical and legal obstacles they face. She also understands the strength these families bring to the family-making enterprise. In this episode, Abbie joins us to talk about her new book, LGBTQ Family Building: A Guide for Prospective Parents. There are many ways to be a family, and every kind of family has something we can learn from. I'm Blair Hodges, and this is Family Proclamations.   MAKING FAMILIES VISIBLE – 1:43   BLAIR HODGES: Abbie E. Goldberg joins us today on Family Proclamations. Abbie, it's really great to have you on the show. ABBIE GOLDBERG:  Thank you so much for having me. BLAIR HODGES: You've done decades of research, you've written a lot of journal articles, a lot of books and academic work about LGBTQ families. What inspired you to write about this topic and to research this as your career? ABBIE GOLDBERG: I'm going to go way back. I was raised in a queer parent family myself in the eighties, mostly in the suburbs of New York. I did not see my family represented in most media depictions of families and most of what we were reading about families in school. I grew up thinking a lot about what families are visible and what families are invisible. I was always really passionate about trying to understand and to make visible different kinds of families. BLAIR HODGES: Wow. That was well before, obviously, the legalization of same-sex marriage. What was that like for you? Were you only child? Siblings? What was the family like? ABBIE GOLDBERG: I have two brothers, one much older than me and one younger. We experienced our heterosexual parent's relationship dissolution at different times in our life. So it shaped us, I think, in different ways. Our family from the outside looked pretty typical, like a divorced family. On the inside, my mother was partnered with a woman. That was really not something most people knew. It was only something we started talking about when I went to college, maybe late in high school. A few people knew, but it was mostly a secret. I thought a lot about that over the last couple of decades, about how keeping those kinds of secrets—when there's really nothing wrong with your family as it is, it's that it's just not accepted in the broader society—how that can shape kids. BLAIR HODGES: That makes me think of two things. One, the fact that there's been a sea change here in your own lifetime, you're a part of a big change in visibility for families. Also, the fact that families like this have always existed in some way, or people have always been experiencing feelings in love, and trying to make that work in a society that hasn't always been accepting. The work you're doing for prospective parents in this book is really valuable. In a way your own family was pioneering things, and now you as a scholar are a pioneer in helping move that along. I didn't know that about you before I set up the interview. That's really fascinating. ABBIE GOLDBERG: Thank you. Oprah Daily did an interesting piece profiling my work and how my personal life influenced me and a little bit about my trajectory. It's a fun piece. It's done by a wonderful New York Times reporter I've worked with over the years and who I trusted enough to tell my story. It gives a little bit more detail.   GETTING PERSONAL – 4:26   BLAIR HODGES: Say a little bit more about that "trusted enough," because obviously this is a really personal thing. When you're thinking about being public about it, what was that like for you? ABBIE GOLDBERG: When I was earlier in my career, I was advised by some folks not to really talk about my own personal experience and how it shaped my interests and my trajectory. I think that's complicated advice. I'm not going to say it's bad advice. I think what people were concerned about is, so many of the high-profile researchers studying LGBT families were gay themselves and there was some concern that their work was invalidated because of that. Here comes this nice cisgender, straight woman, by all intents and purposes that's the way I am perceived, and so I can sort of elevate my work in a different way, and maybe be taken seriously and get the work taken seriously in a different way. I think because of that, there was a kind of excitement. On the other hand, I think the personal is important. I'm at a stage in my career where I don't really have concerns about sharing my story in the way that it could affect my access to certain opportunities, for example. BLAIR HODGES: That's interesting you got that kind of advice. We've seen a shift where people are a bit more confessional now in the academy. Scholars might be more willing to talk about where they're coming from, about their background, but there are ongoing taboos. I think this still exists, and there is a fear it could call into question people's research or something. On the other hand, I think knowing a little bit about your background helps because of who you are as a person. There have always been questions about whether non-heteronormative families could raise successful children, or what those families would look like, and so not only are you doing research, in some ways you yourself complicate stereotypes that way. Thanks for sharing that. I'll make sure to link to that piece in the show notes so people can check that out. This book is set apart from your other work because it's written for a broader audience. Doing academic research, an article might reach dozens, if you're lucky. [laughter] After so much work, you've turned to write for a broader audience for this. Talk about that decision a little bit and how that's been for you. AUDIENCE – 6:52   ABBIE GOLDBERG: My work has straddled both the traditional academic audience and the more popular press over the last ten years, but definitely I've been increasingly moving towards a more mainstream audience. I wrote a book in 2012 called Gay Dads, but it was with an academic press. A lot of lay people seem to have read it, because I still get emails about it. But it was more of a story about how do gay dads become dads. This is taking all the things I've learned in the last twenty years and saying, "Here's some information I hope will be helpful to you." There are stories in it, there are vignettes, there's a lot of data for people who want that. But there's a lot of guidance and exercises and thought questions, and really trying to make this information interesting and usable for a wider range of folks.   DECIDING TO BECOME A PARENT – 7:52   BLAIR HODGES: The questions you include for the reader are so helpful. Throughout the chapters there are different places where it'll just have a series of questions you can ask yourself, or you can talk to a partner about, about things like whether you want to have kids, or just a lot of different things. The kinds of questions that it's helpful to have someone who's spent so much time in this space give some ideas for people to discuss. To me, one of my favorite parts of the book were those question sections, because I'm cis-het—I have a partner and two kids. We look very "traditional." And even for me a lot of those questions were useful. ABBIE GOLDBERG: I think a lot of the questions are great for anybody to ask themselves. We need to start thinking about parenthood, I hope, as something people think through before they endeavor to pursue it. Do I want to be a parent? Do I feel like I need a partner? When do I want to be a parent? What kinds of things do I have to have achieved or reached personally before I pursue that? What's valuable to me? I think right now we're at a point where so many folks are really considering parenthood much more seriously in the sense that they're not just automatically assuming they'll do it. But they're thinking about the state of the world. They're thinking about climate change. They're thinking about things that make them pause a bit. I think that's great. I don't love the reasons for why people have to pause, but I love that people are really asking themselves, why do I want to be a parent? Is this an important part of my journey in this lifetime? BLAIR HODGES: One thing that really stood out to me in your chapter about deciding to become a parent is, when people are thinking about that question you suggest that LGBTQ folks are usually more likely to spend more time on this question, in part just because of being a new visible type of family system. Talk a little bit about that. There's probably been more deliberation for queer couples than for heteronormative couples. ABBIE GOLDBERG: A big piece is parenthood has not been expected. It's not seen as a normative life goal or transition, which of course is evidence of heteronormativity—the idea that's just something straight married people do. In a way that encourages that deliberation, that consciousness, but of course, there's also so many more practical barriers. Will my family support me? Will I be able to be a parent? Especially right now if I want to adopt, can I find an agency that will work with us? If I want to pursue biological means of parenthood, what are the implications, for example, of the Dobbs decision for my access to in vitro fertilization? Thinking through the many, many hurdles folks have to go through, inevitably it's going to be a much more deliberate ponderous process. BLAIR HODGES: It's much rarer to have an accidental pregnancy or something for queer couples. ABBIE GOLDBERG: Right. I mean, it does happen because there are so many bisexual folks, for example, and queer folks and people who have sex with people with different reproductive organs, that it absolutely can happen. In fact, there's some data showing that among young people, among teens, that queer and trans people are actually at a higher risk of unintended pregnancy because they don't experience or receive appropriate STI prevention that is geared towards their specific circumstances. It's all very heteronormative. Or they think they can't get pregnant.  That aside, there are unintended pregnancies, but it's not typical for the situation we're thinking about, which is a same-sex couples.   REIMAGINING THE FUTURE  – 11:35   BLAIR HODGES: One of the most moving parts, I don't remember who the person was—I think you were quoting someone who had grown up thinking it wasn't a possibility for them. It was a gay man who was saying he wanted to have a family but it just wasn't on the radar and so it was something he had emotionally relinquished with grief, and then realized the possibilities and was able to think about it again. What a gift for someone like that. ABBIE GOLDBERG: It can be a real roller coaster. For many of the men I talked to, especially those who grew up at a certain time, they buried their desire. There was a grieving process—"This isn't going to happen for me. I came out and everyone kind of grieved for me. My parents were like, oh, I'm so sorry, we love you, but we're really sad you're not going to be a parent." It was only when they reached adulthood and realized this was an option, they kind of reimagined this possibility for themselves. BLAIR HODGES: You interviewed a lot of people for this book as part of a broad survey. What kind of reasons did you hear from people about why they wanted to have children? ABBIE GOLDBERG: Many of the reasons would be exactly what you would find from cis straight people. A lot of them wanting to shape and have an influence on a young person, wanting to have some sort of legacy and live on, even an adopted child that wasn't necessarily through bloodlines or anything, but impacting another human being and having your influence live on. Teaching moral character. Some people joke, but I don't think it was entirely joking, that they wanted somebody to take care of them when they got older. But much of it, especially because so many LGBT folks adopt, a lot of it does come from altruism. We have a certain amount of resources, we've reached a certain level of stability in our lives, we want to give back, we don't want it to just be about us, and we would like to give a home and give a family, and provide for somebody who otherwise wouldn't have a family.   NAVIGATING DIFFERENT GOALS – 13:41   BLAIR HODGES: You also talk about how sometimes a gay couple has different levels of desire. One partner might be driven to have children, the other might be more ambivalent or even opposed to it. There's a great thought exercise you suggest in the book. I like this a lot. I think this could work for a lot of different people. You say, "Live in the ‘yes' for a week. Imagine you've decided to become a parent. And then live in the ‘no' for a week. Imagine you've decided not to. Write down all of your thoughts and feelings and questions. Write in a journal." You suggest using different colors when you're feeling more excited or when you're feeling more ambivalent or maybe even scared. Then after living in the yes and the no, to then evaluate that with your partner. How did you come up with that? That is such a great idea. ABBIE GOLDBERG: I drew from a bunch of different resources. I've been leading different workshops for many years, and I sometimes think my greatest ideas literally come on the spot. I'll be working with some parents or prospective parents and I'll say, "Okay, this isn't working. Try this,” you know, or, "Go home and try this." I think that particular exercise came from a couple different sources and then with my particular spin on it, which is usually to really be thinking about how there's really no single right answer. The idea that maybe you're not going to be a parent. Or maybe you're going to become a parent alone, maybe your partner is ultimately going to say, "I'm not doing this." It's looking at the reality head on and not necessarily making an assumption about what's going to happen. For some folks, they complete this exercise with their partner and they realize, "Wow, one of us is not so onboard and one of us is," and then there is a reckoning there where we either do this, and we do it not knowing really what will happen, or we're going to go our separate ways, or we're not going to do it, this relationship is the most important thing to me and I don't want to start this parenthood journey without a completely committed partner.   FACING BARRIERS – 14:29   BLAIR HODGES: So many people face these crossroads. It's a great opportunity for regrets, but this is life and the fact your book is guiding people and helping coach people through these questions, it's extremely valuable. What kind of barriers do LGBTQ folks talk about that get in the way of becoming parents? What are some of the responses you got to that? ABBIE GOLDBERG: There are the internal barriers, which are the things like, "I can't be a good parent, I won't be a good parent because I'm gay," or all this internalized homophobia or transphobia—the things we're getting from society saying you shouldn't be a parent. BLAIR HODGES: Or “you'll harm kids.” ABBIE GOLDBERG: You will harm kids, or most of them say, "I don't think I will harm kids," they haven't fully internalized that, but they think, "My kid will be teased, my kid will feel like an outsider, my kid will be bullied." They may actually be hearing that from their own families. Families will say, "I'm sure you would be a great parent, but it's other people I'm worried about. I'm worried about other people treating you badly. Your neighbors not accepting you, your kids' peers not accepting them, other parents being cruel to you." It's certainly that, but it's all the external stuff. It's the fact that in many states, it's really hard. There are many agencies that are either explicitly or implicitly biased against LGBTQ foster carers or adopters. Many of the folks I talk to face barriers where, even if they can find an agency that's willing to work with them, maybe they don't get any calls for prospective children, or birth family members don't choose them to be the adoptive parents in open adoptions. The stigmas sort of have many, many different tentacles of potential influence. There are all those structural barriers. For many folks, too, they don't really consider it until they're maybe older, and so that curtails their options a little bit more. They're in their forties, for example, then they're thinking, well, my reproductive options are more limited. Now I'm turning to adoption. Now I maybe face bias based on age as well as sexual orientation, as well as gender for many gay men because many people think men can't be as good of parents as women. There's all those gender related barriers as well. Then, of course, for a lot of folks, not all LGBT people have access to financial resources and they don't necessarily have supportive families. If you have limited income and you don't have family support, those can be significant barriers as well.   CHILDREN WITH LBGTQ PARENTS – 18:32   BLAIR HODGES: Let's spend a second, too, on—we've both mentioned this—the claim that children in LGBTQ families are at a disadvantage compared to children who are in other families. This is a big talking point amongst people who are opposed to marriage equality, for example—that this would be bad for the children. What does the data show about that? There's been research about this. What do we learn from that actual research? ABBIE GOLDBERG: We know from decades of research on kids with LGBT parents who were not married, and then we have some data from kids whose parents were married, that concerns about the wellbeing of children are unfounded, that children do fine. They show similar social emotional developmental outcomes. There are some places where they even arguably outperform kids who are raised in cisgender heterosexual parent families. It's not entirely clear why. For example, they may do better in certain areas because they are born or adopted to parents who have more resources. Because the folks who become parents are a little bit more rarefied, they're a little bit more select, because they have had to get through so many things to become parents, they may have more resources. That could help to explain that. It could also be the challenges their parents have had to face have built a certain resilience that those parents then pass onto their children. It could be they work harder in school, or have greater access to therapy because of their parents' alertness to the ways their families might be perceived. There are so many different reasons why, but they don't seem to show negative outcomes. They're not mad they have gay parents. The only challenges they experience systematically comes from outside. It comes from external judgment. Right now what we're seeing, as I'm doing a lot of work in Florida looking at how that legislation around the Parental Rights in Education Act is affecting LGBT families, those families, they are stressed. They are stressed by the fact that they now face pressure, for example, not to talk about their families in school or feel they can't be as open about their families. But that's coming from outside. The limited work we have looking at kids in married families, or what happens to kids when their LGBT parents get married, shows really positive outcomes. For kids, having one parent whose legal status might be tenuous or unclear, that was stressful too. Having a biological and a non-biological mom and only being connected to your biological mom—that's very stressful for families. Having some greater legal protections is incredibly beneficial. BLAIR HODGES: Speaking personally, what would it have meant for you to just see other families like yours when you were young? Because you talked about stressors and it's connected to visibility. Personally, what would it have meant to you to see more visibility growing up? ABBIE GOLDBERG: It would have been huge. At the time I don't think there was a single poster family of LGBT for our families, that happened much more in the nineties when Rosie O'Donnell and other queer parents became more visible. But there was nothing. For me, it would have been a light bulb to even see one and to know this was something that was real, and this was happening. It was something that wasn't being talked about. Secrecy and isolation breeds shame. For kids, for example, right now living in states where they're being told they shouldn't talk about their families, that could really turn inward to feel something is wrong with me, something is wrong with my family. The invalidation those families are facing is heartbreaking to me because it doesn't have to be this way. Everyone's families can be recognized as valid. We don't have to demonize certain kinds of families. BLAIR HODGES: There seems kind of a bad faith effort on the part of people who are already discriminating against LGBTQ families, to then try to say, "Oh, these outcomes are bad. Look, these kids are being hurt," when societal pressures and discrimination themselves are harming people. Any kind of negativity, or any kind of bad things that happen in the LGBTQ family can then be used as a referendum on the idea of marriage equality. Instead of saying, "Oh, here's some of the difficulties these particular families face. What can we do as a society? What can we do as therapists, whatever to help these families?" Instead, they're really talking about those things as a way to disqualify LGBTQ families, rather than address how to improve situations for LGBTQ folks. ABBIE GOLDBERG: One hundred percent, and I don't ever want to assume LGBT people are somehow immune from stress. We don't want to say that. Actually hard things do happen in these families. These families also, like straight cisgender families, experience challenges with mental illness and substance use and family struggles and dysfunction. All families struggle with those issues. Children with behavior problems, physical illness, and death—all of these things happen. It's not fair to take any family and look at something that's happening within it and blame that family structure for that thing, especially when we're denying them access to resources. If we see, for example, that queer parents in Florida suddenly report higher levels of depression, it would not really be fair or make sense to blame them for those high levels of depression and how it might be impacting their job performance or their parenting. It would make a lot more sense to think about the laws and the policies that are creating the circumstances where they are becoming so stressed that they're becoming depressed.   FIGHTING INTERNALIZED STIGMA – 24:35   BLAIR HODGES: How do you recommend LGBTQ folks deal with any internalized stigma they've grown up with? That sense of shame, or the questions they have about whether they would be fit parents because of stereotypes they've heard? What are some ideas for people as they're dealing with their own internalized stigma in deciding to become a parent? ABBIE GOLDBERG: Community support, so having access to other queer people and parents who have reached some level of security in themselves and who are confident and competent around parenthood, can be really powerful and empowering, to see role models and to begin to take those lessons on oneself. Access to LGBT competent therapists can be helpful in processing those feelings of inadequacy, doubt, self-doubt, doing a lot of that personal work, and being able to eventually situate those beliefs where they belong, which is that they're coming from out here. They don't have much to do with us in here. Could be society, but it could also be your parents, or your religion, or your extended family.   ADOPTION – 25:45   BLAIR HODGES: That's helpful. People can check out more in that chapter. Let's move to adoption here. Your second chapter talks all about adoption. You say LGBTQ folks are somewhere between four and ten times more likely to adopt than heterosexual couples. You've already touched on some reasons why that is, so let's talk instead about what kind of questions you suggest LGBTQ families think about when they're thinking about adoption as their option for expanding their families. What should they be thinking about together? ABBIE GOLDBERG: It's important to think about the basic question of how important it is to be biologically related to a child you are raising. For some folks, that is not an issue. They imagine parenthood not connected to having a child that looks like them or that will carry on certain characteristics. Some amount of flexibility, cognitive flexibility, emotional flexibility, is really important with adoption, because, hey, any of us who are parents know, you just don't know what you're going to get. Your kid could be so different from you. You're going to have so many things you never expected you'd be dealing with. But when a kid is adopted, that's kind of to the nth power. Just because you really love to read, and you love to do puzzles, you went to college, and you got your PhD, good for you. But your kid may have no interest in any of those things. They're not going to share, say, your whatever—your sense of humor, your attention span, who knows. To be open is really important. Then you start to winnow down into the other kinds of decisions around how important it is to have a child that is racially similar to me. How would that be for my extended family? What kinds of things am I open to in terms of prenatal drug exposure? Or an older child or sibling group? Where do my values and my sense of my own abilities and limitations, where do those fall? Having a sense of your own limitations is an important thing as a parent in general, but especially when you're thinking about adoption.   TRANSRACIAL ADOPTION – 28:05   BLAIR HODGES: You mentioned race. There was a section that talked about some of the anxieties that a particular couple talked about with you. Basically, the idea that this person wasn't sure if they were equipped to raise a Black child, for example, in the United States. It wasn't from a sense of racism in the sense of, "Oh, I don't like Black children," or whatever. But rather, "Am I equipped to raise a child. I'm white. I don't have that background. It would be in a white circumstance." One of our episodes is on transracial adoption, so this comes up. Talk a little bit about how LGBTQ folks might wrestle with that idea of race. There's this weird like, "Oh, I don't want to seem racist if I don't want to adopt children who aren't white or who aren't my same race." But at the same time there are real reasons why that can be a concern. Transracial adoption can be really difficult. ABBIE GOLDBERG: It's not fair to adopt a child of a different race than you are if you are not up for it and comfortable with it, period. That being said, most kids are not just in these little boxes. First of all, there's a lot of multiracial kids. We don't want to encourage a practice where people say, "Well, I will be open to adopting transracially if they're mostly white." That leads us down some not great paths. In terms of race, you need to be thinking beyond yourself. You need to be thinking about your community, your school, and your family. There are plenty of families that say, "I'm open to a white person adopting a child of color," but then they bring this child into their world and they live in a white community. Their children would be attending a predominantly white school, their extended family is white. It's important that parents do that work, to think, “Is this even really fair?” before they go down that road, because a child who, say, is Black and is living in a white town, white school—that's not great for that child. It's not fair as a parent to immerse that child in that world. You may need to decide, I'm going to move so I can have access to these resources. I talked to many parents who did make choices. I have a whole area of research about how parents choose schools for their kids. Many parents will say, "There's this school, which is mostly white, and it's a really good school. Then there's this school, which maybe has less of a great academic reputation, but my kids will be surrounded by people who look like them." That's more important.   UNIQUE STRENGTHS – 30:37   BLAIR HODGES: It's a helpful chapter. It talks all about different adoption options, public and private, international adoption, a lot of different things. People that are considering adoption, this is a great primer for that. What strengths would you say LGBTQ folks bring to the table when it comes to adoption? Are there any unique strengths you found as you were doing your research? ABBIE GOLDBERG: Many folks will tell you something they feel, which I do think is a strength, which is they have a history of being discriminated against, or being judged, or people making assumptions about them based on their sexual orientation or gender identity. That, in turn, makes them more open to adopting a child of a different race or with a variety of different potential differences. They feel like as somebody who's faced stigma in the world, or as somebody who has faced challenges, I could feel I can be a more sensitive parent because of that. It makes me more open both to adopting children, but it also makes me more open to dealing with whatever issues the child comes along with. The challenges they feel they faced in their life when they have actually made them better parents.   DONOR INSEMINATION – 31:51   BLAIR HODGES: Your book also talks about donor insemination and surrogacy. These are more ways LGBTQ families are formed. What kind of advice do you offer for people that are thinking about donor insemination when they're thinking about having children? ABBIE GOLDBERG: We're moving towards a place where, both in the adoption world and reproductive technologies, we understand kids will want information about their origins regardless of how their families are formed. There's a movement towards if you're going to pursue donor insemination, for example, people want to access donors where there's an option of them becoming known if they're not known already. For example, the child can contact them or know more about them at the age of eighteen. It used to be that we had mostly fully anonymous donors, and now we're realizing children eventually want to access that information. Likewise, in the adoption world we're really moving towards open adoptions, where children have access to their birth families, or at least birth family information. BLAIR HODGES: This is very child centered. Parents might feel protective or want to be like, "I just want separation from that." But then they're finding as kids grow they don't want that separation. There's a drive to know more. ABBIE GOLDBERG: Many parents would say, “Before I had a kid, before I adopted a kid or early on, it was very important to me to have those boundaries. We are the parents.” As they're parenting real human beings who have real questions, that becomes less important than helping that child access information. They realize all those concerns around boundaries, and who's really the parent—that's actually less important. BLAIR HODGES: Your chapter has a lot of great questions, again, for people that couples can talk about together, like, will we be genetically tied in some way? Who will? Why are we making that decision? How are we going to feel about that? Also, you talk about trans and nonbinary folks, and how providers who are helping people transition, especially younger folks who are transitioning, should be well informed about options for reproductive technologies to help them. If someone who's assigned female at birth is transitioning to male there are ways to preserve eggs, for example. They're not making a decision to use those eggs. They're just keeping those options open. Talk a little bit about that for trans and nonbinary folks. ABBIE GOLDBERG: First of all, trans and nonbinary folks may not know when they're teenagers, for example, or young adult if they even want to be parents. It is, as you said, a matter of keeping those options open and finding providers who will help them to make the kinds of decisions they may not know they might want later down the road. Helping to fully inform them of their options, what things are reversible and what things are not reversible. This isn't a barrier to getting the care they want, absolutely they should have access to the hormones, for example, that they want, but enable them to make those decisions that will help them have those options. For reproductive providers who are working with trans and nonbinary folks when they're actively trying to get pregnant, for example, we also need providers to be knowledgeable about that as well. What are the options? When does somebody need to go off of hormones? How can we support them in getting pregnant? What kinds of things can we do to make the birth experience more pleasant? To make visits more pleasant? How can we refer to body parts, for example, in a way that feels affirming and respectful and not alienating and offensive?   TRADEOFFS – 35:37   BLAIR HODGES: Chapter five is so good on this. You talk about how important it is for LGBTQ families to consider agencies they're working with to be tuned into where discrimination exists, and also recognizing they might have to make tradeoffs. They might have a provider they'll be working with who is throwing microaggressions around or making them feel uncomfortable, and there are tradeoffs that LGBTQ families end up having to make in navigating the medical system and the adoption system and fertility system as well. Spend a little bit of time on what kind of problems were waiting in the wings once marriage equality became the law of the land, for example. Now couples could be legally married and now they want access to these different services. What kind of issues are people still confronting, even though we're years past the legalization of marriage equality? ABBIE GOLDBERG: I could go in so many different directions. In terms of tradeoffs, people often make tradeoffs when they're building their families, when they're thinking about agencies or where to give birth, where to put their children in daycare or school, or where they live. It's all a matter of balancing. Say I have a black child who also has two dads and we live in a rural area. What am I going to do to create the best environment for my child? I probably won't send them to a top academic school that is very racially diverse and has lots of two mom families. What's most important for my child? What's going to help them to develop into a confident person? There's constantly that tradeoff. Likewise, if you're pursuing a birth—you're trying to figure out where to give birth as a trans person. You're balancing finances and geography and comfort, maybe a medical condition, maybe you're an older parent giving birth so you're also thinking about that. It's a constant place of tradeoffs. Right now we're at a place where there's the explicit barriers people face and then the more subtle or implicit barriers. You may go to a hospital, for example, or a school that says, "Oh, we're LGBTQ friendly", or "We have other two-mom families here." But what that looks like in practice can really vary. Likewise, you might be living in a red state that seems to have very little access to LGBT friendly providers. But you find a place and the people are quite wonderful and lovely. You just don't know. There's a lot of variability. Sometimes it's about finding the right people or the right person within a given agency who will be an advocate who maybe has a personal connection, maybe has an LGBT child themselves, who will be a warrior for you even in those places in the country where it can be hard to access formal supports. BLAIR HODGES: I like how you talked about the networking that LGBTQ families engage in as well. The internet makes it even easier than ever to network with people, to get advice, suggestions, to read reviews about different places and experiences people have. In some ways, despite ongoing discrimination, we're also at a time when people can feel more empowered because we can talk to each other and connect with each other and get ideas from each other too. Barriers, but also opportunities to navigate those because we can communicate more easily. ABBIE GOLDBERG: One of the suggestions I always tell—I do a lot of workshops with schools who are trying to become more LGBT affirming—I say just offer names and contact information to LGBT prospective parents so they can contact other folks who have had students at your school because that's the in-person version of the Yelp review. They can talk to another human being and ask questions and they can network. It also shows you're confident enough to be able to share that information, which is a good thing.   SURROGACY AND GENDER ASYMMETRY – 39:15   BLAIR HODGES: It's your own personal Yelp. That's great. Let's talk about surrogacy for a second. You say this is an option that's mostly chosen by gay, bi, or queer men in particular. What are some of the things people consider when it comes to surrogacy, so having someone can carry the child for a couple? ABBIE GOLDBERG: For folks who are pursuing surrogacy, I always have to start by saying it's about $150,000 or $200,000. It's really an option for a very small segment of the population, unless you do overseas surrogacy which has its own real ethical issues, which is less expensive but you're going to another country and paying a woman to carry your child. BLAIR HODGES: There may be safety issues. Your book goes into these. Inequality. ABBIE GOLDBERG: Travel. There's a lot that goes on there, and a lot of uncertainty in terms of that process. In terms of things to consider for folks who do pursue surrogacy, who go down that route, there's a lot of uncertainty there too. It may seem like the most obviously certain outcome versus adoption, where everything seems very unclear, but surrogates do not always get pregnant right away. They may not conceive. They may have a miscarriage. They're a human being. Just as many unexpected issues can come up there. Some folks really bond with their surrogates and other folks there may not be that same relationship. It is a relationship like all others. There's also so many people and institutions involved in surrogacy, there's so much legal interaction, that it's a very complicated process. It's not even legal in some states. BLAIR HODGES: There are legal issues. People that want to pursue it, again, your book does a fantastic job in a short chapter laying out a lot of questions. Not just about practical things but about emotional things. "Genetic asymmetry" is a term you bring up that I hadn't really thought of. We've touched on this a little bit, but the idea that if one partner is genetically related to a child and the other one isn't, that could cause complicated feelings people might not have anticipated before they actually have a child. ABBIE GOLDBERG: In many cases, if it's either surrogacy or conceiving, through donor insemination, there is usually one partner who is biologically related and one partner who is not. That's significant to the outside world in that we place a lot of emphasis on biology and to primacy of biological bonds, which can lead that nonbiological parent to either be perceived or to feel like less of a parent. I'm of the belief we shouldn't pretend those things don't exist, there are many ways to bond with a child and have a great relationship with a child. But we shouldn't say it doesn't matter because that's disingenuous. I do know of surrogacy families where they do not tell their child who the parent is that is biologically related to them. Which dad, for example, is biologically related. I have questions about that. To say it's not important kind of almost reaffirms how important it is. If we're not going to tell you it's clearly so important. As somebody who doesn't really like family secrets, I think it's more important to say he's the biological parent and we're a family, and here's all the reasons why we're both equally your dads.   TRANSITIONING TO PARENTHOOD – 43:15   BLAIR HODGES: So many things for people to consider. Again, a lot of the questions in the book will help people think through things they might not anticipate if they haven't talked to people about this or spent a lot of time thinking about it. That's Abbie Goldberg, clinical psychologist and professor. We're talking about the book, LGBTQ Family Building: A Guide for Prospective Parents. All right, there's a chapter on the transition to parenthood. You talk about the ways people can become parents, and then you talk about how becoming a parent is a huge transition for anybody. The book is helpful because it talks about the general life changes people can expect, but also what LGBTQ people in particular might face. You pay special attention to mental health, for example, and there's a stat here that really surprised me in this chapter. You say there are some studies that suggest that most parents, seventy-two percent of parents, said their life satisfaction increased during the first year of parenting. That's a really challenging year and that's a really high number. I'm interested in what you make of this life satisfaction increase. ABBIE GOLDBERG: It points out the importance of looking at different dimensions of change, because most people looked at stress and they look at mental health. You do see stress increase, and you do see mental health decrease. What we have to always think of is joy and life satisfaction are other components of life. You can have a really stressful job, for example, but have a lot of joy associated with your job, a lot of satisfaction associated with your job. To some people that's valuable. It's more valuable than having an easy job where there's very little stress, but very little satisfaction. It makes sense because most people will say “parenthood transformed me, it transformed my life, it's changed who I am, and I'm a lot sleepier, and our relationship is a little bit more tense, we don't have as much time together.” Really understanding parenthood causes changes in multiple domains. The ideal, of course, is that mental health will eventually recover, and often it does. We have to also know that some of those negative changes, they're really temporary. They're not always temporary, but they're often temporary. BLAIR HODGES: You lay out some of the stressors that happen. There's the obvious stuff that happens to every kind of parent—lack of sleep, redistribution of household work, which can be distressing. Whether LGBT couples take on traditionally feminine or traditionally masculine, provider/nurturer, or whether couples find ways to create their own family dynamics. What are some tips, some practices, some advice you would give to people to navigate those early parenting years? I know it's hard to rank that kind of stuff, but does something immediately come to mind that's like, this is a crucial thing for couples to do? ABBIE GOLDBERG: I think two things. One is that relationship is important. Presumably, if you are a member of a couple you want to stay together. So many couples I've interviewed have said, "We put our relationship on the back burner." You can only do that for so long. In an ideal world you will have access to some time alone where you can honestly just laugh or enjoy each other's company without the constant challenge of caring for another being's needs. Whether that means taking time at the end of the day to talk and sit outside and catch up, or going out, whatever. But making sure that relationship remains a priority. I think some flexibility and awareness that what things are now won't always be this way and being flexible to change things up. Especially around the division of chores, for example. Reevaluating and reevaluating how that is going, I've done so much work on the division of tasks, and how couples divide up chores. One thing that seems important is a lot of times nobody really likes most tasks, so it's really about who hates it the least. That's how I think about it. Who hates cleaning the litter box the least? Who hates unloading the dishwasher the least? Checking in about whether that's continuing to be a satisfactory and fair division of labor. When things feel unfair and when people feel unappreciated, that's when the problems start. If I feel like I'm doing seventy percent and I don't even feel like my partner appreciates me, I'm much madder than if I'm doing seventy percent and I feel like we're constantly acknowledging that I'm doing seventy percent because I'm maybe working outside less, for example, and how things need to change but this is the way it is right now. BLAIR HODGES: You say that, overall, studies show that same-sex/gender couples tend to share paid and unpaid labor more equally on average than heterosexual couples. Perhaps because they already have higher expectations for equality, or perhaps because they don't easily slot into your 1950s Leave it to Beaver view of how Mom and Dad should be. But also, you say there are some couples who do fall into these more traditional patterns where, let's say there's a gay couple who one partner has a higher paying job, they're gone more often. And then the other partner, he's at home doing more of the "domestic stuff," the unpaid stuff. Those circumstances, that doesn't mean one of them is necessarily more or less happy, you say differences in contributions don't necessarily lead to tension or conflict, it really depends on the particular relationship and how the couples actually feel about the stuff. Some couples might feel okay with a division like that. That works for them. It's not like everyone needs to fit a particular vision of marital equality. It's more about making sure people are informed and feeling they're treated fairly. That is what people should pay attention to. ABBIE GOLDBERG: It's really about the match between values and expectations than what the actual division of labor is.   ESTABLISHING A FAMILY STORY – 49:19   BLAIR HODGES: The last chapter talks about the early years. Let's talk about this briefly here. You encourage people to establish their family story really early with their children, to have a story of how their family came to be, what it is, especially because they're still living in a heteronormative society where a lot of people around them, a lot of peer children, might be casting judgment or even making comments like kids do. Like, “why don't you have a mommy” or “why do you have two dads?” You say communication with young kids is important. Some people might think, "Oh, I just want them to stay innocent and not even think about stuff until they get older," rather than establishing a family story early. Why do you think that might not be the best approach? ABBIE GOLDBERG: You can establish a family story early and do it in a developmentally appropriate and age progressed way. If you don't tell them anything or you avoid those questions, you're not being truthful, and so giving them a simpler story they can internalize and then maybe share with others, even if it doesn't have all the details, it may not be perfectly truthful for what they share with others— BLAIR HODGES: Every parent does this. [laughter] ABBIE GOLDBERG: Right, I was going to say. There's a lot of things parents are explaining to their kids, they're not going to give them the whole story because they're going to tell their friends or whomever, but they're going to give them enough information that they need. "I have two moms. We got help from somebody else to make our family." Okay. That's what you got. BLAIR HODGES: You also give great advice on gender expansive parenting practices, like using “they” pronouns for people that people don't know. So you can kind of normalize they pronouns so things aren't so binary essentialized. Also, actively challenging gender stereotypes. So if someone says, "Oh, boys can't have long hair," just say, "I actually think they can," or talk to your kids about those. Reading books that show diversity is really important and modeling some nonconformity and being conscious about that with kids. This chapter has a lot of practical advice on dealing with kids in their early years. That's where the book cuts off. It takes people through the process of deciding to become parents, the methods they can use to become parents, and then those early parenting years. It seems to me your overall hope in the book is that people will have choices, understand what the choices are, and be empowered to make those choices. That seems to be the driving purpose of your book. ABBIE GOLDBERG: Absolutely. For folks who can pick it up, they can pick it up at an earlier stage in their life, maybe when they're not even thinking about parenthood but are interested to know what the different pathways might look like in the future. Or folks who are at a crossroads in trying to figure out what they're going to be doing, as well as people who are already parents and maybe are thinking through their next transition of parenthood, or maybe they would like some guidance around supporting other people in their life around these decisions.   REGRETS, CHALLENGES, & SURPRISES! – 52:28   BLAIR HODGES: I can honestly say I found the book to be helpful. Again, my family—me, my partner, my two kids—there are questions we probably should have asked before we had our second kid or before we had our first child, but it's not too late to even address that, though. To think through those things together. Even though we've passed some of the chapters up, it still for me has been helpful to go back and look at some of these questions and to see how LGBT families are navigating them and what the differences are and the unique strength. I think this is a book with broad applicability. We need more books like this. So many of the parenting books are very heteronormative, which I think limits their strength. Now we're going to talk regrets, challenges, and surprises. You can speak to one, two, or all three of these. Is there something you would change about the book now that it's published? Or something that was challenging in the process of reading, or something that surprised you that sticks in your mind as “wow, I didn't expect that” as you were researching the book. ABBIE GOLDBERG: I'll speak to two. In terms of change, it's not that I would change it. It's just so much has happened since I wrote the book. We're in such a different state with respect to this country I probably would give more time to if you're living in a particularly challenging geographic area or state with respect to figuring out how you're going to become a parent, what are the things to think through in terms of relocation, or working with providers across state lines and the kinds of challenges that might come up there. Some of the challenges I talk about are intensified for certain folks. In terms of a surprise, it's hard to overemphasize how much money matters. How much your access to financial resources impacts everything from where you live, what options are available to you even as you start the family building journey, can you pursue private adoption, can you pursue infertility treatments, or are you working with the child welfare system? What kinds of access to therapies can you have if your child is having challenges? Can you think about private school if you're living in a state where you don't really want to send your child to public school because of what they might be exposed to in terms of ideas about their family? Just in terms of the access to resources, it shapes so much of what people have available to them. BLAIR HODGES: Your work continues, Abbie. What are you up to now that the book's done? You said you do workshops, you do a lot of things. What else is what else have you got going on? ABBIE GOLDBERG: One of the things I'm doing is I'm doing a lot of work looking at how the Parental Rights and Education Act, the "Don't Say Gay Act" has affected families in Florida, as I mentioned. Doing some research there. I'm also going to be writing a human sexuality textbook which really centers LGBT folks as opposed to them being off in the periphery. There are many human sexuality texts that don't give enough attention and foregrounding to how those experiences play out. I'm continuing to do different talks and workshops for folks, different audiences, a lot of lawyers, and the legal realm is very interesting to me, serving as an expert witness in trials where custody, for example, on same-sex couples is an issue. BLAIR HODGES: That's Abbie Goldberg, clinical psychologist and professor, author of the book LGBTQ Family Building: A Guide for Prospective Parents. She's also been featured in places like The New York Times, The Atlantic, USA Today, and more. She's director of Women's and Gender Studies at Clark University. Abbie, thanks so much for spending this time with us to talk about this great book. ABBIE GOLDBERG: Thank you so much for having me. BLAIR HODGES: Thanks for listening. Thanks to Camille Messick for being a wonderful transcript editor. You can check out transcripts of every episode on the website familyproclamations.org. I'm also grateful to longtime supporter David Ostler, who sponsored the first group of transcripts. I'm always looking for transcript sponsors so if you've got a little extra change rolling around in your purse, let me know. The email address is blair@firesidepod.org. You can also send me feedback about any episode to the same email address. There's much more to come on Family Proclamations. If you're enjoying the show, tell a friend. Get some podcast chatter going at your next family reunion. You can also rate and review the show on Apple Podcasts. Check out this review from mountainbluebird: "Blair always finds the most fascinating variety of guests and does a stellar job guiding a conversation. I learn a lot every time I listen." Well thanks for that review. I learn a lot every time I do an interview. Thanks to Mates of State for providing our theme song. Family Proclamations is part of the Dialogue Podcast Network. I'm Blair Hodges, and we'll see you next time.   [End]   Note: Transcripts are edited for readability.

Divorce can be a difficult process today, but it's nothing compared to what it used to be. In the late 1800s, women from around the country had to fight for the right to separate from their husbands on their own terms. April White tells their stories and how they still impact us today in her fascinating book, The Divorce Colony: How Women Revolutionized Marriage and Found Freedom on the American Frontier. April White has served as an editor and writer at Atlas Obscura and Smithsonian Magazine. Her historical stories have also appeared in publications including the Washington Post, Boston Globe Magazine and The Atavist Magazine.   Transcript   APRIL WHITE: Each of these women goes out to Sioux Falls for a very personal reason. We start to see the shift in the understanding of divorce. These women have very little traditional power at this moment in history. They are not in any of the rooms where divorce and divorce law are going to be debated. They're not in the legislatures. They're not in the judiciary. They're not in the White House. They're not in religious circles. They're not in those conversations. Yet, they are driving those conversations. BLAIR HODGES: Once upon a time in the late 1800s, Sioux Falls, South Dakota became the hot destination for women from all over the United States. These women weren't coming to see the famous Sioux Falls, they weren't looking for land, or to find husbands. In fact, they came to this frontier of the American nation looking to get rid of husbands. They were looking for the fastest and easiest path to get a divorce. Because in the 19th century, it was almost impossible to get one anywhere else. This wasn't a private process either. It played out in public, in the courtroom, in the press. It was like an old time TMZ saga. Historian April White says these women were really looking for personal solutions to personal problems, but their efforts helped change divorce laws for the entire country in ways that still matter today. April White joins us now to talk about her book, The Divorce Colony: How Women Revolutionized Marriage and Found Freedom on the American Frontier. There's no one right way to be a family, and every kind of family has something we can learn from. I'm Blair Hodges, and this is Family Proclamations. April White, welcome to Family Proclamations. APRIL WHITE: Thank you so much for having me.   RISING DIVORCE RATES (1:54)   BLAIR HODGES: We're talking about your book, The Divorce Colony: How Women Revolutionized Marriage and Found Freedom on the American Frontier. You're taking us back in time a little bit, this is the turn of the century. We're heading into the year 1900 here. In that last decade of the 1800s, there were some headlines that were popping up around the country that you point out in your book, and the headlines were alarmed. The people were alarmed. The question was, is marriage a failure? Why would they ask that question in the late 1800s? APRIL WHITE: In this moment, you're seeing rising divorce rates. The people who are particularly alarmed by this, and it's most often the clergy, can't imagine that divorce is a good thing. They only see this as an evil. They imagined that somehow marriage is falling apart. What's really happening is marriages are as good or as bad as they've ever been. There's just more opportunity now—economic, political, social, legal—there's more opportunity for spouses to go their separate ways if they are unhappy in their marriage. They're saying they're very concerned about marriage, but what they're really concerned about is divorce because they want to keep this building block of the country to gather these ideas of the family, is really central to that concern. BLAIR HODGES: You point out that they're using language of epidemic—this is some sort of illness that is spreading through society. The numbers back up the fact that divorce was increasing. You say that there was a national census in the 1880s that freaked people out. It showed that divorce had basically doubled in a really short amount of time. You mentioned the clergy were particularly alarmed with this. Did they think much about the context of it in terms of maybe people are unhappy in marriages? Maybe that's where we should begin, rather than should we be letting people get divorced? APRIL WHITE: Very few of them thought that way. You mentioned the census. It's basically the first time anyone has gone and counted marriages and divorces. What the census shows is yes, the divorce rate is increasing, but there's also not a lot to compare it to. These numbers seem really big. You knew a couple of people who got divorced, but now there are tens of thousands. Those numbers are also part of what inflames this conversation, whether they had any point of comparison or not. No, you will largely see people wanting to make it more difficult to divorce. Most of the Catholic sects in the in the United States think about it that way. The one exception to this that I was aware of was the Unitarian Church, which very much thought divorce was a necessary evil, and the focus should be on making marriage better, which would naturally lower divorce rates because fewer people would be seeking to leave their marriage.   AUTHORITY FOR DIVORCE (4:38)   BLAIR HODGES: You also talk about at this point in American history, there's an important shift that's already happened in how divorce even worked. The question was where was authority for divorce situated? You trace the change over from legislatures overseeing it to the courts. Maybe describe that transition a little bit, because that has a lot to do with people's ability to get divorced—where that power was. APRIL WHITE: In the early days of the United States, in order to get a legal divorce you needed to go before a state legislator for a private bill of divorce. This was the type of thing that could be very difficult to navigate for people who did not have the connections and the proximity to power this would require. For some practical reasons, which is the legislatures had other things to do, you see the country moving away from this state by state and bringing divorce into the courts. This has an unintentional consequence of leveling the playing field in a lot of ways between men and women in order for people to seek a legal divorce, and in some ways between the upper and lower classes—although there is still an economic divide there when it comes to dealing with the courts. It was not the intention when divorce was moved to the courts to make this more egalitarian. It was an unintended side effect. BLAIR HODGES: What did it look like before? Did the husband have to be the one to initiate the divorce? Could women initiate divorces? What did it look like? Would it also affect her ability to get remarried? APRIL WHITE: Either party could initiate divorces, and what we see throughout the history of divorce is there is the law, and then there are all the other factors around the law that affects who can use it. Even in the time period I'm talking about, since we've moved into the court it has been more egalitarian for men and women. That doesn't mean both men and women are seeking divorce at the same rate or with the same ease. Two things happen. One, for a woman to seek a divorce she needed to be in an unusual for the time independent economic position. She needed to have social support that would allow her to go through a divorce and still have a community on the other side. There were a lot of pressures on her, outside of the law, that made it difficult to seek a divorce. That's the other point, and the exact opposite pressure, which is we see in this census we're talking about that two out of every three people who seeks a divorce is a woman. There's a really particular reason for that, too. Men had an easier time seeking extra legal means to get a divorce. A man could walk away from his marriage. Chances are he had the economic resources that the woman didn't so he didn't have to worry about necessarily marrying again in order to be economically, socially, politically stable. He also didn't have to worry about the legitimacy of his children. He could claim those children or not claim those children. The woman did not have that choice. For women that piece of paper was exceptionally important because without it you could not legally remarry. The real important thing to remember here is that for women in this time period, marriage is the single biggest economic, political, social choice she is going to make in her entire life.   LEGALLY VALID REASONS FOR DIVORCE (8:06)   BLAIR HODGES: Another component here is the cause for divorce. We have no-fault divorce today, although strangely there are some people already trying to claw back that right. Talk about what people had to face in order to even get a divorce because no-fault divorce wasn't a thing yet. APRIL WHITE: It's a little hard to imagine, actually. Divorce, once we get into the courts, is an adversarial process. One spouse has to accuse the other of one of the violations that their state allows—each state was different in terms of what their divorce laws were. The Court needed to find you guilty of that offense. I may go into court and say, "I want to divorce my husband because he has deserted me." I need to prove to the court that has happened or the court is going to say, "Nope, sorry." This adversarial piece is really important because if I and my spouse want to divorce, we both want a divorce, we both want to go our separate ways. We cannot do that. In almost every state there was a law against collusion. That meant if you and I had agreed we wanted a divorce, we were already prohibited from doing that. Of course you see a lot of people working around these laws, but that was the letter of the law. BLAIR HODGES: They could have off the books conversations, like here's how we're going to play it. What were some other differences? You mentioned there was a hodgepodge of laws between states, which was another challenge. What kind of differences, in addition to different causes—I think New York was one that was really hardcore. It was really difficult. There were very specific things. You had to prove adultery or something. What kind of differences between states did people have to consider when they're thinking about getting divorced? APRIL WHITE: New York in this time period only allows divorce with proof of adultery. The only thing I can charge my spouse with was adultery and I have to walk into court and in some way convince the judge. There are plenty of cases in which the judge is not convinced and you remain married to the person you just tried to divorce. BLAIR HODGES: They didn't have cell phones where they could catch people or look at old text messages. [laughter] APRIL WHITE: I've got to tell you, after the time period I write about in the book you actually see this growth of this industry of actresses you can hire to come in and lie on the stand, or to pose for a picture in a hotel room so that a couple who mutually wants to get divorced can. People went to great lengths to separate when the law did not allow them to. That's what the divorce colony in Sioux Falls is. What happens is, in the United States every state has its own divorce laws. There are two components to that. One is the residency requirement. How long do you need to live in the state in order to fall under the jurisdiction of the court and sue for a divorce? The other are the causes. What causes can I claim to get this divorce? New York, South Carolina, very difficult. Other states, in theory more liberal, but how those laws are applied are a little difficult. To the previous point I was making, it's not all about the law, so it also depends on how supportive your community is within that state. That's what ends up making what they call the migratory divorce, or foreign divorce, attractive for those who could afford it. In the time period I'm writing about, starting in 1891, you see wealthy, white women typically, traveling out to Sioux Falls, South Dakota to get divorces. I know that sounds incredibly weird. South Dakota has only just become a state. Sioux Falls has only been a city for not even two decades at this point. It's ten thousand people. BLAIR HODGES: It's the Wild West in some ways. It's the frontier. APRIL WHITE: It really is, particularly for these women who are coming from upper class New York, who have had a very different experience. But the train lines run there now. It's the end of the line. It is a place where you can go and live in 1891 for just three months to fall under the jurisdiction of the court and before you can sue for divorce. I said "just" there but traveling someplace and living there for three months and then more as your case winds its way through the courts, is an expensive and difficult endeavor. That's what people would do to get around these different residency and grounds issues.   WELCOME TO SIOUX FALLS (12:43)   BLAIR HODGES: Your book's written almost like a novel. It really paints such wonderful pictures of the time. Give us a sense of women coming from a place like New York into South Dakota. What would they see as they're getting off the train? What was it like there at the time? APRIL WHITE: Thank you for saying that, because I really did want to bring you as close as you could get to these women and understand what lengths they had gone through in order to seek separation from their spouse. It's a multiple day train ride from New York, and to Chicago that was probably relatively normal at the time. But a woman traveling alone on a train west of Chicago was a pretty rare sight, and one that certainly sparked a lot of gossip. You finally make your way to Sioux Falls—and I have to say Sioux Falls, even at the time, was actually a very beautiful city. This is because they had a local architect who built some very impressive buildings there, and also some local stone, Sioux quartzite, which made this very young city feel more permanent and more of something familiar than it might have otherwise. BLAIR HODGES: It's kind of hip in a way. [laughter] APRIL WHITE: I'm not sure they thought about it that way, but I think we would. [laughter] When you got off the train, what struck me is the two things you could see most clearly on the skyline of this very young city was the courthouse. The courthouse where you were going to stand in a public trial and be questioned about your marriage. You could see the top of St. Augustus Cathedral, and that was home to a man named Bishop Hare, and he was the most outspoken opponent of divorce in Sioux Falls, and eventually a really well-known voice in the country. Those were the two opposing forces of Sioux Falls you could see just as you got off the train. BLAIR HODGES: April, by the way, Bishop Hare seems straight out of Central Casting, too. [laughter] APRIL WHITE: Absolutely. He was quite the character. Someone who was very well respected in the state, had been a missionary there for decades, who truly believed he was preaching in the best interest of his congregants and his city, but in doing so was denying people access to something they really, truly needed. BLAIR HODGES: He was politically savvy too. He'd been paying attention to how laws in the state were influencing people that were coming into the state. He wanted Sioux Falls to be where his flock was, this wonderful place where people could grow families and be prosperous and help expand America. There was definitely this Manifest Destiny feeling there. Then he sees these outsiders coming in, and what he sees is taking advantage. Talk a little bit more about the divorce laws as they played out in South Dakota that differentiated South Dakota from other states. This became the pilgrimage site for a lot of these wealthier women. Why? What were the laws that were so advantageous there? APRIL WHITE: We had this short residency requirement, and it's easy now when you hear that to think, "Wow, South Dakota—super progressive in the 1880s-1890s." No, no, that was not what was going on. We had seen this actually always on the western edge of the United States because when you had white settlers coming into a place for the first time, they wanted to build their community. They wanted to attract people and they wanted people to become a part of the fabric of that community very quickly. These low residency requirements were about bringing people into civic life, not about allowing them to get a divorce. So again, unintended consequences here. Bishop Hare had been a big part of building South Dakota. He had been a missionary in the Dakota territories, very well respected, had spent a lot of time working with the Bureau of Indian Affairs, so had some politicking in him. He had also spent a lot of time back east raising money from well-to-do people, largely in New York—among them the Astor family, basically known as the landlords of New York at the time. Incredibly wealthy people. The idea of shaping laws and influencing people was not foreign to Bishop Hare, when you had what were known as divorce colonists coming out to Sioux Falls and saying, "Hey, there is a law on the books which I would like to use." Yes, it did in theory raise the ire of people who said, "Oh, well this is never what it was intended for. It's okay if my neighbor, a true resident of Sioux Falls, wants to get a divorce. But we did not intend to be a place where other people came." Now, that's not entirely true. They are actually against divorce in general but it is easier for them to say, "We're okay with it ourselves. This is not the spirit of the law." That's where you see the tension. You have these divorce colonists who are typically of a higher class, have more money than the people in Sioux Falls, who are coming out there, they believe, to take advantage of these laws. You have a lot of social tension in the town in addition to this legal tension around the laws. BLAIR HODGES: How about the economy? Were there enough people coming out to provide a windfall to the place? Were there are people that were like, "Actually, this is kind of nice because people are going to come stay in hotels, or they might buy stuff when they're out here." Was that an incentive? APRIL WHITE: It absolutely was. You see that when people first start coming to Sioux Falls. History never moves in a straight line. What we see is first in the history of the divorce colony as people start to arrive, there is this idea that maybe this is a good thing. We want more people in Sioux Falls. We want more money in Sioux Falls. One of the things that anecdotally seems to have grown up around these divorce colonists was a robust arts scene in Sioux Falls, and the latest fashions that were demanded by these people coming from the east. In the very early days you see some entrepreneurial spirit around the divorce colony, but then we have these bigger name women start to come out mid-1891. The national spotlight follows them. Reporters come to town. They're on the front pages on a daily basis. Very quickly the sentiment in Sioux Falls turns to this is a stain on our community. We don't want people to be looking at us like we're a place for divorce. You still have some supporters in the lawyers, in the hoteliers, and restauranteurs, but at least publicly, at least in front of the newspapers you have a lot of derision towards the divorce colony as soon as the rest of the country is looking at the city negatively.   GAINING FREEDOM (19:40)   BLAIR HODGES: Before we dig into the particular people, I have one more broad question and that comes from something you wrote. You say, "The women who traveled to Sioux Falls were not activists. What was for them an act of personal empowerment and self-determination became an intensely political act anyway." That stood out to me. That was one of my surprised moments. These weren't necessarily women who were trying to make some larger societal political point about divorce or women's rights. They were seeking help in their own circumstances, basically, for the most part. APRIL WHITE: Each of these women goes out to Sioux Falls for a very personal reason. The only thing each of them is fighting for out there is their own freedom. No one is out there to make a statement. In fact, they would all prefer not to be on the front pages. If they could have done this quietly they would have. What you see is each person going to the extreme to gain their own freedom, but in doing so in the numbers they did, with the attention they did, we start to see the shift in the understanding of divorce. That was one of the things to me that was so interesting about this story. You have these women who have very little traditional power at this moment in history. They are not in any of the rooms where divorce and divorce law are going to be debated. They're not in the legislatures. They're not in the judiciary. They're not in the White House. They're not in religious circles. They're not in those conversations. Yet, they are driving those conversations. I really was fascinated by that alternate path to power. BLAIR HODGES: There was also an element of entertainment about it. As you said, these were public events that were covered in the press. They didn't have true crime podcasts and Dateline and stuff like this to watch back then and it seemed like this kind of played that role of people being able to be voyeuristic a little bit into what were supposed to be private matters. APRIL WHITE: Oh absolutely. This is your TMZ. This is your grocery store tabloid. This is the celebrity gossip of this time period. People love it. Even those in Sioux Falls who claim to hate the divorce colonists want to know every single thing they do in town. It is the attention that is paid to the divorce colonists that really ultimately ends up shifting the conversation. The time period of the book is roughly twenty years, from about 1890 to about 1910. For twenty years you have these people who oppose divorce saying this is going to topple the family and therefore topple the country. Yet every day you see this on the front pages and nothing has fallen yet. The press really plays a big part in how things shift during this time.   MAGGIE DE STUERS AND HER DIPLOMAT (22:51)   BLAIR HODGES: That's April White. She's senior writer and editor at Atlas Obscura and author of the book The Divorce Colony: How Women Revolutionized Marriage and Found Freedom on the American Frontier. That gives us a broad overview here. Your book lays out the stakes for us, and then you're going to get biographical. You're going to introduce us to particular women and their stories to let us know how things played out on an individual level. The first person that you talk about, and I'm probably going to pronounce the name wrong, is Maggie De Stuers. How do you pronounce that? APRIL WHITE: That's how I pronounce it. I can't tell you how she did, but that's my take. [laughter] BLAIR HODGES: Great. Give us a sense of who Maggie is and why you led off with her story. APRIL WHITE: So Maggie De Stuers arrives in Sioux Falls in the middle of 1891. She tries to do so quietly. That is just not going to work for her because she is a niece of the Astor family, and the Astor family is this incredibly wealthy New York family who is on the front pages all the time. Maggie had been married to a Dutch diplomat, and about a year earlier she had disappeared. She had fled from their home in Paris and for a year no one had known where she was. When it becomes known that she is in Sioux Falls, it is on the front pages of papers in Chicago, in New York, in Boston. This was front page news. BLAIR HODGES: Would it be sort of like Paris Hilton appearing someplace? APRIL WHITE: Yes, she's been missing for a year and suddenly she shows up in a small town in South Dakota. That's exactly right. It drags all this attention to Sioux Falls. That's in part why I led off with her. The other reason I led off with her though is in addition to sparking the media attention in Sioux Falls, she sparks Bishop Hare's ire towards the divorce colony. He was always going to be opposed to divorce, but Bishop Hare had a relationship with the Astors. In fact, St. Augustus Cathedral was named for Augusta Astor, who was Maggie's aunt. So the idea that Maggie is there publicly seeking a divorce—let's put aside the fact she would have loved to have privately sought one and was not allowed to—but the fact that she is there publicly seeking a divorce and sitting in his church on Sundays is a personal affront to Bishop Hare, and in many ways sparks him on what will become the effort of the rest of his lifetime, which is to abolish the divorce colony. BLAIR HODGES: You talk about how she was there because she got married young, she was younger than the person she married, it seemed to be one of these diplomatic or relationship legacy type marriages. They didn't meet on an app and connect because of their enneagrams were similar, or whatever. They seem to be a marriage of family connections and he was older than her. He seemed like a really boring guy. It just wasn't the right thing for her basically. APRIL WHITE: They seem pretty ill suited, at least as they grew older. Maggie would accuse him of treating her poorly, of threatening her, of yelling at her. To your point, one of the interesting things about the different women I picked for this book to focus on is they all do marry for different reasons. Maggie, when she marries in the 1870s, it's really fashionable to marry a European title. So there was a lot of strategy in why she would have married this man. She was supposed to be happy with this life, which involves flitting around between European capitals. But she wanted something else. So she has a moment where she fears that her husband is trying to institutionalize her in order to gain control of her fortune. BLAIR HODGES: Which also wasn't unheard of. This is a thing that they do to control women. APRIL WHITE: Institutionalizing women to control women at this time period was unfortunately quite common. Maggie was in an unusual position where she was far wealthier than her husband was because of her family connections. That's what ultimately led her to flee, although it meant leaving behind her children. She has already gone to great lengths to leave this marriage when she shows up in Sioux Falls. BLAIR HODGES: When she shows up she's not alone. She's got a secretary with her, this gentleman who is supposedly helping her in her travels. She's going to connect with lawyers onsite to help her with her proceedings. We meet some other people in the city. We meet Judge Aikens, who is going to be presiding over the divorce court. We meet Fannie Tinker, who seems to be a cool journalist figure that's going to be there telling the tale. We meet these people there and at this point you say how, again, this was an adversarial procedure so spouses could contest this. Her husband the Baron contested it. What it would take is being publicly accused of being a horrible person. He sent this affidavit over that was filled with scandalous charges. APRIL WHITE: He did. For a while it was thought that maybe the Baron was going to come out to South Dakota from Paris where he was living at the time to contest this in person. To the great dismay of the crowds in South Dakota this does not happen, but to Maggie's relief. You still have a public trial. You have a public trial in which the Baron's deposition is read out loud where Maggie is on the stand in a packed courtroom being asked to relive what she considers to be the worst possible moments of her marriage. You really see there both the lengths to which she had to go, but the determination she had to do this. She'd never stop pursuing this, even once she realized what it would take. Including calling her a bad and uncaring mother, which was one of the worst things you could level at a woman at this particular time period. BLAIR HODGES: If I remember correctly he was also saying that she was having an affair, right? That this was a ruse for her to get with somebody else. APRIL WHITE: Yes. He said that she had left him for another man and had been traveling with this man during the period of time she had been missing. BLAIR HODGES: I don't know. Is it a spoiler to say who that was? [laughter] If you want to keep it a secret, I will. But it's so interesting. APRIL WHITE: Let's say we do find out, and the wedding is even more of a scandal than the divorce. BLAIR HODGES: Yes. I'll let people figure it out in the book but suffice it to say she does get her divorce. Why? Why did the judge side with her? APRIL WHITE: You largely see in Sioux Falls—and I talk about Sioux Falls but of course the same laws apply throughout South Dakota—that in Sioux Falls most people get their divorce. The state had a large number of reasons for grounds for divorce. A lot of people did not contest these things and come out and try to oppose it. Almost everyone who goes before the court gets their divorce. She is able to make the case that she has satisfied the grounds that she has put forth before the court.   MARY NEVINS BLAINE TAKES ON THE POLITICIAN (29:59)   BLAIR HODGES: Let's move to Mary Nevins Blaine. Mary was interesting because it's harder to assume that she married for money. You can't really assume that. She was actually older than the man she married. She was nineteen. Her partner Jamie Blaine was just seventeen when they got married. She was a young actress and Jamie's dad was a politician with national aspirations. This just has the ingredients for a really great story. You've got this young actress marrying the young son of this aspiring politician and the family is not happy about the marriage. APRIL WHITE: Yes. These teenagers elope just a couple of weeks after they meet and marry secretly, to the great dismay of both of their families. Both the Blaine family, as you mentioned, James Gillespie Blaine is the standard bearer of the Republican Party at this time. He's a perpetual presidential candidate, very well known in the country. Mary's family is also like, "We don't know what you're doing with this younger son of the Blaine family." Jamie had not to this point proven himself to be rather reliable and would go on to continue to not be particularly reliable. It was a real scandal, both for the families and again for the whole country who got to watch this elopement play out on the front pages. BLAIR HODGES: That could hurt Jamie's dad's political career so his family would be concerned about how it looks, how it reflects on his dad and his political options. Then for her family, they would be concerned about her options going forward. Could a divorced woman return to acting? Would she get remarried? She, first of all, would need to win the divorce and then would be faced with difficult options after that. The stakes are really high. What do you think was the ultimate reason for them divorcing? Because it seemed like they at least liked each other. Whereas in the previous case, she married a Baron because that was kind of the cool thing to do. But these guys actually seem to like each other, at least at first. APRIL WHITE: Mary definitely married for love. What she didn't love so much was Jamie's family. Jamie was, as I eluded, a sort of wayward, he seems to have had a problem with alcohol. He seems to have had a problem with his temper. He had not accomplished the same things that his siblings had. His parents, particularly his mother, kept him very close and really tried to keep him under their thumb, possibly for very good reasons. But Mary really chafed at this, particularly at Jamie's mother who had never come to like her daughter-in-law. Jamie's father, for a period of time, James did embrace Mary but his mother never did. What Mary would charge in court was that her mother-in-law had instigated this breakup and had driven them apart. Classic mother-in-law situation. [laughter] What happens is when the judge points that out we get a whole big problem. BLAIR HODGES: What happens there? What is that problem? APRIL WHITE: Things had happened, not quietly, but routinely, I would say. The Blaine family had decided not to cause a stir around this divorce. James Gillespie Blaine had decided it was better for his political career to just let this happen. However, the judge, once he hands down his judgment in favor of Mary, goes off on a bit of a tirade against Jamie's mother. He doesn't need to do this. This doesn't need to be part of the court proceedings. He makes it clear that he feels Jamie's mother was the cause of this. The press is very excited about this. James Blaine has throughout his life been very protective of his wife, and he's also hoping to be the presidential candidate for the Republican Party in 1892. This is the moment he decides he needs to go on the offense. Even though Mary already has her divorce at this point, James writes an open letter that's, again, printed on the front pages of newspapers across the country, making it clear that it is Mary's fault and threatens to release her love letters and really is doing everything he can to take down this young twenty-something actress. Which doesn't seem like a particularly good look for the country's top diplomat and a potential presidential candidate, but there you go. BLAIR HODGES: That was what was so surprising is the lengths he was willing to go because what you're showing here is that the battle over public opinion still mattered. Divorce was an issue, right? Public opinion and public thought about how divorce should work really mattered. In this case, divorce was granted, people could move on and still oppose divorce or whatever, but James Blaine, that's when he decided to dig in, as you said. I think there was some protectiveness about his spouse. I would assume there were advisors around him probably saying, "Hey, let's back off a little bit. This might not be the best idea." Yet he pursued. How did Mary respond to that? Now she's being maligned in the press. He's threatening to publish letters and he's insinuating there are these bad letters. Basically saying, "I got dirt on you, and you better back off, or else." What's she going to do? APRIL WHITE: I like her because she seems like such a smart cookie. She is incredibly composed for someone who is taking on one of the best-known figures in the country at this point. She also releases a letter to the press and basically says, "I am a twenty-something actress, it surprises me that you would malign me. I am simply seeking what is best for me and your grandson. However, if you insist on releasing my letters, I will release your son's letters. Game on." She does it in a way that is incredibly effective. I don't think anyone expected this young woman to be able to take on the country's top diplomat. BLAIR HODGES: What exactly did she say that carried the day for her that was so savvy? APRIL WHITE: I don't think anyone expected her to fight back at all. I think the fact that she had the wherewithal not to hide, not to bend to this. I can't speak to her motivation on this, but my thought would be the country already thought poorly of her. She had already been waging this public relations battle and she was a likable character. She had also gotten a divorce. She was now a single mother actress. She didn't have a lot to lose in way of her national reputation. I think that may have emboldened her to take this step. I don't think anyone expected her to confront him, including James Blaine. I think they thought this was the end of the story. Jamie, her ex-husband, had not acquitted himself well. Some people were inclined to believe the accusations against her mother-in-law. There were a lot of ways in which the more space Mary had to tell her story, the worse it looked for the Blaine family. BLAIR HODGES: At this time we're seeing some federal attention on this. People are trying to pass constitutional amendments to regulate marriage and divorce. That just wasn't going anywhere. They couldn't get enough consensus to really nail down any kind of national law about how divorce could look. We look at someone like Bishop Hare, who's a clergy member, he's opposed to divorce for religious reasons. We might expect him to fight hard for those kinds of laws. We might also be surprised at some of the other allies of that cause. I'm thinking, for example, of Emma Cranmer, who was a women's suffragist, and women's rights advocate, and she was on Bishop Hare's side in feeling unsettled about where divorce law might go. APRIL WHITE: One of the other reasons I want to tell Mary's story, in addition to it just being a fascinating tale, was because I got to look at some of these political issues that were coming up at the time. One of the things you realize right away is you had people who oppose divorce, and you had people who were quiet about divorce. You didn't have a whole lot of people out there saying, "Yes, divorce is something we need people to have access to." In that category of opposed divorce, you get what seems today to be some unlikely players. Among them, the suffragettes. Not all of them, but a lot of them. Part of this is because there was, particularly in Emma's case, a large religious component to the suffragist movement, and in Emma's case, the way she thought about the world. But also because there was this fear that the issue of divorce would distract from the issue of the vote. You already had these fears that giving women the vote was going to in some way disrupt family life, was in some way going to take women out of the home and put them into the public space. To also be fighting for divorce was to in some ways, they feared, legitimize that concern. You had a lot of people who simply said, "We can't divide the movement. We can't distract from what we're trying to do here." You really don't see a lot of public support among the suffragettes for this effort.   BLANCHE MOLINEUX, THE MURDERER'S WIFE (39:29)   BLAIR HODGES: You do see some local changes. In Sioux Falls, there is a change in the law where the residency requirement is made longer, which is going to make it more difficult so people who seek a divorce are going to have to stay longer. It increases the burden they would have to pay. You see a decline in divorces that happen, but it doesn't take even a decade before they start loosening that up again. That takes us to Blanche Molineux, another name that I may be pronouncing correctly or not. She shows up on the scene now that things are loosened up again, and she breaks maybe one of the biggest taboos which is that she openly declares that she's going there specifically to use the lax laws that are there. That was supposed to be an open secret and she just says it. APRIL WHITE: We see a lot of change between 1893, which is when South Dakota increases its residency requirement from three months to six months, and when Blanche arrives in the early 1900s. What's happened at this point is, once South Dakota extended its residency requirements, North Dakota was suddenly the easiest place to get a divorce. Not a lot of people wanted to hang out in Fargo, but still North Dakota decided it didn't like the attention. At the end of the nineteenth century, they extend their residency requirement to a year, so all of a sudden Sioux Falls at six months is again the laxest divorce laws in the country. For a little bit, to my earlier point, you see people coming out to Sioux Falls and there's not a lot of fuss so things are kind of okay. But Blanche has a couple of strikes against her before she even arrives in Sioux Falls. That is that she is already incredibly well known as the "murderer's wife." She had been married to a man who had been accused of poisoning a rival, also believed to have poisoned a romantic rival in addition—one of Blanche's former lovers—and he had been convicted of poisoning, very long story, he had been convicted of a poisoning, and he had been sentenced to death row. BLAIR HODGES: This could be its own real true crime podcast, by the way. APRIL WHITE: It is, it is. Then for evidentiary reasons, his conviction was overturned. He had a second trial and he was acquitted. Now, if you'll remember, there is still only one reason to get a divorce in New York: for adultery. Blanche does not believe that Roland has committed adultery. She cannot make this claim. She believes that he has committed murder. BLAIR HODGES: It seems like he has, too, right? APRIL WHITE: I think it seems like he has too. But that is not a reason for a divorce. BLAIR HODGES: That's what's so funny. They're like, "Oh, sorry, you didn't have an affair. You just murdered people." [laughter] APRIL WHITE: She leaves immediately for Sioux Falls and again brings all that attention back that Maggie had brought with her a decade earlier. Yes, she is outspoken about why she's there. A lot of people worry that's going to cause her legal problems. In some ways it does, it actually causes her more social problems, though. She has broken some of the unwritten rules around how this works and the circumstances under which we're going to accept a woman's decision to do this. BLAIR HODGES: You have to at least pretend you're going to stay there, for example. You're coming out to at least pretend you want to live there. APRIL WHITE: That was one of the questions you see in all of the divorce hearings in Sioux Falls, which is, how long have you been living here and do you intend to be a resident? You were a resident, so you could say, "Yes, I have been here for more than ninety days. I am a resident of the state." Most of them got on a train immediately after getting their divorce, if not within a couple of weeks. To my knowledge, no one who had come from out of state to get a divorce stayed in Sioux Falls for any extended period of time after getting their decree. Except for Blanche. She ends up staying in the end, which causes all kinds of problems of its own. BLAIR HODGES: She had announced that wasn't her intention either. Why did she end up staying? She's granted the divorce. APRIL WHITE: She falls in love and she remarries. BLAIR HODGES: Her lawyer. APRIL WHITE: Yes, her lawyer. He is a respected citizen of Sioux Falls, so there is a lot of concern about if she should be accepted into this society as well. Ultimately, she really isn't. She is still an outcast in this community, but she is the one person who does what they had been saying all along they wanted the divorce colonists to do. If only they weren't taking advantage of the law. But that was a lie. BLAIR HODGES: What kind of things did she miss out on? Was she just not really invited to social events? How was she treated? Because she did end up staying for Wallace, her lawyer. She's married to him. But what did the social consequences look like for her? APRIL WHITE: You see that for instance, Wallace Scott is a member of a bunch of civic society and social groups who have this open debate as to whether Blanche should be at a dance they're throwing, or whether she should be invited to various events. You see her on the outskirts of this community pretty much throughout her life there.   SCOTUS AND ANDREWS V. ANDREWS (44:45)   BLAIR HODGES: There was also a strange hitch that happened during this trial with a Supreme Court ruling. As we're thinking about how divorce laws are shifting and how they're being applied throughout the United States, this is a pretty pivotal time for that. Right during the middle of her trial, they throw things into question. There's a case, Andrews v. Andrews. It's in Massachusetts, and the Supreme Court basically says—if I understood this correctly—that Massachusetts wouldn't have to recognize divorce that was carried out in a different state, which would cause a problem for people that went to the divorce colony because it was basically like, "Oh, sorry, that doesn't count. We're not going to honor that in Massachusetts." APRIL WHITE: We've been talking about how difficult this was, and something really important we haven't mentioned yet is you could go through all this, you can go and live in Sioux Falls for six months, nine months, a year, you can pay all this money, you can take this hit to your reputation, and still your divorce decree is actually only tentatively legal. It may not be recognized when you go back to your home state. We see a bunch of cases about this over a period of time. Most of the people who go to Sioux Falls are not worried about this because in order for your divorce to be questioned, your ex-spouse needs to oppose it. They need to bring it up in court in the other state. If you are mutually getting divorced, or even a grudgingly mutual divorce, your decree is never going to come up to court for question. However, if your spouse has some reason to not want to be divorced, as happens in the Andrews' case, it will go up before the court and they can decide whether this is legal or not. There's a lot of consequences to deciding that a divorce is not going to be recognized. You may have remarried. Now you're a bigamist. You may have had children and now they're illegitimate. There's a lot of chaos that can be sowed. Charles Andrews, the case you're referring to, Charles came out to Sioux Falls in the early period of the divorce colony, right around the time Maggie and Mary are there. Like everyone else, he goes out for a divorce, he stays for the period of time he has been asked to, he gets a divorce, he goes back to Massachusetts, he meets a woman, he marries her, he has two children. His father dies, this becomes important. His father dies, and then not long later, Charles dies at a young age. Suddenly his first wife thinks, "Oh, wait a second. There is quite the estate here now because he has his father's money. I should challenge to be the administrator of his estate, to be his legal heir." She does. She takes it all the way up to the Supreme Court, and they find that South Dakota did not have the necessary jurisdiction and therefore the divorce is invalid. His second wife is not his second wife, his children are not his legitimate heirs, and his first wife, Kate, is heir to the fortune. Chaos.   FLORA BIGELOW DODGE, THE KING, AND THE PRESIDENT (47:45)   BLAIR HODGES: You're double married. That's our "what about men?" moment as well for people that were wondering if there were any men that were there. You mentioned a few—Charles Andrews, Edward Pollack. Again, this is where we see laws can just cause havoc. More people were saying we need some sort of uniform law. Why don't we tackle this federally, so we don't have all of this chaos? There just wasn't the political ability to get that done, even though divorce was impacting some of the most powerful people in the country and in the world, as your final profile shows. I'm talking about Flora Bigelow Dodge. When we get to her story, we're going see Teddy Roosevelt and the King of England all of a sudden get involved here. Give us a sense of what's happening here. APRIL WHITE: To your to your "what about men?" point, it's a really important one because I talk a lot about the women of the divorce colony. It wasn't only women who went to Sioux Falls. As we talked about earlier, women had more of an incentive to go great distances to get a divorce. They also caused more of the consternation. I'm not saying that people who opposed divorce were thrilled when men got divorces, but it didn't lead to the same panic that women taking this step did. BLAIR HODGES: Golly, I wonder why. [laughter] APRIL WHITE: We've not seen that since, certainly. What I like about Flora's story is it feels really modern to me. Flora marries young, grows apart from her husband. So far as I can tell from the historical record, neither hated the other. None had done an unimaginable wrong. They were just unhappy. BLAIR HODGES: Marriage for personal fulfillment rather than for all these other reasons. It's a change in what marriage was. APRIL WHITE: Absolutely. We really see that over the course of this book, the ways in which what we thought marriage should be changes. Flora is simply a well-known New York socialite and author. She is well liked. When she decides to get a divorce, everyone sort of thinks, "Well, that makes sense. Her husband's not all that spectacular. She's way cooler." She has lots of connections and her family does, both in in New York and on the East Coast and in England. You realize the extent to which it's not unusual that divorce is affecting these very prominent people, because divorce is affecting everyone. This is over the course of the twenty years I'm talking about, become more of a common place both activity, but just something we understand to be a part of society. BLAIR HODGES: Especially for white folks. Your book is attuned to the racial dynamics of this because this is a very privileged situation. APRIL WHITE: Absolutely. When it comes to talking about Black husbands and wives of this era, it's only very recently that Black people have been allowed to marry in a lot of places. It's a very different dynamic and the economics of divorce and the opportunities for women play a huge issue. Yes, it's a very different story for people who are not wealthy and white. BLAIR HODGES: Sorry to interrupt. To pick up where you left off, you're basically talking about that shift in what marriage was culturally, and we're starting to see someone like Flora who is separating for fulfillment, but she had connections to powerful people. That's how the President of the United States, and ultimately even the King of England, enter the story as well. APRIL WHITE: One of the things I wanted to talk about through Flora was the social change. Part of that is because Flora very much decides she wants something that she believes no one has gotten before, and that is what she called a dignified and legal Dakota divorce. The legal piece, we discussed already how that's a little challenging because no one quite knows what the rules are. But the dignified piece, Flora decides she is going to make friends in Sioux Falls. She is going to make herself a part of that community. She is going to show those people what she has to offer. She performs concerts at the prison. She conducts the city census. She helps raise money for a new furnace at the church. She's really going to enmesh herself in this community, and if it means that she needs to stay there forever in order to have a legal and dignified divorce, she is prepared to. Seeing the ways in which everyone needed to confront this issue, the ways in which Roosevelt had to confront this issue simply because people of his acquaintance were divorcing, and how do you handle that? The ways in which divorce was still a real anathema to some, which is how the King of England comes in. He's basically legitimizing Flora after her new marriage when her in-laws don't like her very much. We really see the ways in which society is dealing with this through Flora's story. BLAIR HODGES: The president is publicly a bit traditionalist. I think he needs to perhaps maintain a facade of supporting "the family," but behind the scenes is also much more sympathetic to the idea of divorce. He wants a uniform model law. He's the president—again, can't get it done. How do things develop for the rest of the century, taking us up to the present where we still don't have necessarily a federal law that says exactly how things should work? If, for example, where does no-fault divorce come into things? APRIL WHITE: We raised the idea earlier of this question of could we have a constitutional amendment that gave the federal government control of marriage and divorce? Could we get all the states to sign on to a uniform divorce law? And there's a bunch of reasons why that doesn't work out so well for anybody. One of them, unfortunately, is the idea that if the federal government had control of marriage and divorce, the southern states fear at this time that they will allow interracial marriage. There were even bigger concerns than divorce out there for some, but what we start seeing is an acceptance of reality. The idea of very disparate state laws is causing a lot of havoc. You don't know what's accepted where. You have these people crossing state lines to gain access to a right they wouldn't have in their states. You basically have people circumventing the laws of the states they live in. Governments slowly start to realize that's not useful to them. If their population is using extra legal means or leaving the state to seek freedom from their marriages, then that state government no longer exercises any control over marriage and divorce. They want to have control over marriage and divorce. You start seeing states recognizing this is going to happen and if they want to say in how it happens, they are going to have to allow for it. That's how we start seeing this shift, eventually, to no-fault. Slowly start seeing this shift to like, "Oh, this is going to happen. How do we shape that in a way we want to?" BLAIR HODGES: It wasn't even until 1970 that no-fault divorce became legal, and that was in California. That's pretty late in the game. I don't know, but I assume every state has no-fault divorce. APRIL WHITE: Every state has a version of no-fault. Those are slightly different, but similar enough that migratory divorce is not a particular issue anymore.   THINKING ABOUT DIVORCE TODAY (55:13)   BLAIR HODGES: I didn't get a sense either from the book about your own personal stakes in it. Were you doing any sort of work on your own personal background and being interested in this topic? APRIL WHITE: No. I've never been married. This is a whole new issue for me, writing about marriage and divorce. I will say that one of the really fascinating things to me personally as I was researching this was realizing just how recent it was that I could make a decision not to be married. You see these women in the book, those who go to great lengths to divorce, almost all remarry because that is really the only choice they can make for a stable life. The idea that I can have a career, sign contracts, have a bank account, even raise a family if I want to—that I can do all those things is very specific to this moment and this place and the culture I grew up in. BLAIR HODGES: There's this great quote from the introduction where you say, "To be free to choose who we love and how to live is to be free both to marry and to divorce." You're sort of arguing that marriage itself is enhanced or strengthened by the fact that it is more chosen. Divorce and the freedom that that allows can actually enhance marriage and make marriage itself more worthwhile and more healthy even. APRIL WHITE: We spent a lot of time as a country thinking about this when we were talking about same-sex marriage, and ultimately when Obergefell came out of the Supreme Court, this idea that choosing who you are married to is incredibly important, but you can't choose that if you can't also divorce. I like thinking about access to divorce in that same arc of loving and Obergefell. In the same way we say, "Oh, yes. You should be allowed to make the intimate choices of your life without the interference of the government." BLAIR HODGES: It was great to see those attitudes arise early on, even at the turn of the century. You mentioned earlier Unitarians, who were talking about divorce, and a Cornell University professor who basically said the rising divorce rate suggests a rise in expectations of what marriage ought to be. In other words, we're increasing our standards. This is a signal that people want more out of marriage, and people want marriage itself to be better, and when it's not they need the ability to end that to try again or to not try again. All throughout, we did see people with that attitude, whether it culturally prevailed or not, that underlying idea of freedom to come together, or freedom to separate, and how that's a good thing. Divorce can actually signal higher expectations rather than the collapse of "the family." APRIL WHITE: So much about the rising divorce rate was about women having more, not enough, but more agency to make choices, and more agency to pursue happiness and stability and the things they wanted out of life. We see this sense that people should want more out of their life than necessarily what they had been told in earlier generations was possible.   BOOKS DO CULTURAL WORK (58:17)   BLAIR HODGES: Let's talk about cultural work for just a second. Books are reflective of the times and places they're published. The fact a book exists suggests there's an audience and a need for it. I think books can do different kinds of cultural work. Some books do cultural work that talks about how we got to where we are and maybe celebrates how we got to where we are. Some books do that but also try to push toward better things, like trying to highlight a problem that we could do better at addressing. I wondered what kind of cultural work you think your book is doing—if it's more of a celebration of how far we've come? Or if there's more cultural work to do and what that work might look like. APRIL WHITE: When I first stumbled upon the divorce colonies story it was shocking to me it had never been explored deeply before. I gave that a lot of thought. I think one of those reasons is what you're alluding to—which is how we think about history and how we think about what's important. For me, in this moment, it was obvious we needed to be asking questions about the ways in which women had agency or didn't have agency, the ways in which they could shape and influence power or have power, and the ways in which they couldn't. That was not something that was understood in earlier versions of how we thought about divorce. That's the reason this was a footnote to that. What I'm trying to do with this book is in part just say there's a lot of history we have not explored through the lens of how we understand the world today. If we go back and ask questions in this broader, more open-minded lens we have today where we understand that the people who helped and did the digging, and had the local knowledge in archeological digs, were actually just as important to the discoveries we've made in archaeology as the celebrated Englishman who showed up in Egypt. The more we understand the important players and that everyone brought something to our history, I think changes the way we think about our history. I really like books. What I tried to do here was to go back and say, what did we miss because we were looking at the world through the specific lens of the thirties, or the fifties, or the seventies? What can we understand now because we've been given more tools and have more questions to ask?   REGRETS, CHALLENGES, & SURPRISES! (61:17)   BLAIR HODGES: It's helpful to get that historical perspective because it also opens up possibilities for the future, because we can see how things played out in the past and how there were different possibilities and different people with different concerns. I also like to use history that way as forward thinking, history for the future. History as a way to expand our imagination about what possibilities are out there. That's why I wanted to do this book for Family Proclamations. I'm trying to feature things from different time periods and look at history and look at sociology and look at all these different ways, because I want people to expand that imagination. Your book really does a good job helping us do that. That's April White. We're talking about the book, The Divorce Colony: How Women Revolutionized Marriage and Found Freedom on the American Frontier. She's a senior writer and editor at Atlas Obscura, and she has previously worked as an editor at Smithsonian Magazine and has been all over the place publishing really great work. The last thing I want to ask is a little segment called regrets, challenges, and surprises, April. This is a chance for you to think through doing this book. A book is a big project, it's a big investment of time. I've found that a lot of people change during that process, or discover new things. Was there anything as you were doing the book that challenged you, that challenge some of your previous thinking? Maybe some of your biases were challenged. Or something that surprised you that you totally didn't expect, or maybe something you regret, or you would change about the book now that it's out in the world. APRIL WHITE: I would definitely say one of the challenges was thinking about the idea of independence. When I tell this story to people, as I was through the book process, everyone got really excited about how independent these women were to seek out divorces. Then they got quite disappointed to hear they remarried almost immediately. I was probably inclined to that point of view initially, having given it very little thought, and then realized how important the idea that independence is doing the thing you wish to do. It wasn't about striking off on their own in the world, if that's not a thing they wished to do, or they could do. It was about making your way in the world the best you could. It wasn't a challenge to their independence that they remarried. Many of them remarried because they loved the person they were marrying. Others did so because it would allow them the life they wanted to live. Independence didn't mean striking out on your own. Independence meant making your own choices. That was definitely something I did not arrive at in the earliest stages of my research. I will say I was surprised. We mentioned many of these women came from similar socio-economic backgrounds, wealthy and white. I was still surprised how different their stories were, how different their stories were as to why they married. How different their stories were as to why they were divorcing. How different that path could be if they had a supportive family member in their life or not. If they had income or not. How many different challenges these women faced, even though they were coming from similar social circles, even sometimes had been the person who had told the next person who came how to do this. I really enjoyed "meeting" each of these women, as so many of them who ended up on the cutting room floor, or in the footnotes because I couldn't bear to part with their stories. I really enjoyed being able to hear those stories, largely because I wasn't sure I'd be able to. Tracing women through history is not the easiest thing to do. To be able to meet so many of those women was wonderful. In terms of regrets, aside from some misspellings, nothing yet, but the book has only been out a little under a year. To my earlier point about the ways in which how we think about history changes, I am absolutely certain when I look at this book in a decade I'm going to realize there were so many questions I didn't ask and so many things I didn't interrogate that I should have. Maybe we'll do an edited version a decade from now where I correct some of those things. BLAIR HODGES: That's how history works. Thank you so much, April. This has been a great conversation. Again, I recommend people check out the book The Divorce Colony by April White. The subtitle is How Women Revolutionized Marriage and Found Freedom on the American Frontier. April, thanks for coming to Family Proclamations and talking about the book today. APRIL WHITE: Thank you. I really enjoyed this. BLAIR HODGES: There's much more to come on Family Proclamations. If you're enjoying the show, why not take a second to rate and review it. Go to Apple podcasts and let me know your thoughts. Please just take a second to recommend the show to a friend. The more the merrier. Thanks to Mates of State for providing our theme song. Family Proclamations is part of the Dialogue Podcast Network. I'm Blair Hodges, and I'll see you next time.

Angela Tucker is a Black woman who was adopted by white parents as a very young child. Angela says transracial adoptees like her grow up wrestling with complicated feelings of gratitude and love, but also rejection, loss, and confusion about their heritage.  Angela Tucker is author of “You Should Be Grateful:" Stories of Race, Identity, and Transracial Adoption. Her family story was featured in the documentary Closure. She has over 15 years of experience working within adoption and foster care agencies, mentoring over 200 adoptees as founder of the Adoptee Mentoring Society. In addition to producing the podcast The Adoptee Next Door, she consulted with NBC's This Is Us.   Transcript ANGELA TUCKER: As a kid, as a teenager, I only made sense in the city of Bellingham, Washington, if my parents were right nearby. If I'm walking around holding hands with my mom, people would go up to her and say, "Wow, what a great thing you've done." They recognize she has adopted me—"Oh, okay. You're a safe Black person because you're with this woman who did this great thing." But when I wasn't with my parents, and I'm just a Black girl out in the city, there is confusion, like, "How did you get here? Why are you here? Who are you?" BLAIR HODGES: Angela Tucker is a Black woman who was adopted by white parents as a very young child. This is called “transracial adoption,” and Angela says adoptees like her grow up wrestling with complicated feelings of gratitude and love, but also rejection, loss, and confusion. In her new book, Angela invites us to take the perspective of the adopted child and to imagine what it would be like to wonder where you came from, to experience racial confusion, to long for lost connections. She founded the Adoptee Mentoring Society to work with other adoptees and to foster more honest conversations about adoption. She joins us in this episode to talk about her new book: “You Should Be Grateful:" Stories of Race, Identity, and Transracial Adoption. There's no one right way to be a family and every kind of family has something we can learn from. I'm Blair Hodges, and this is Family Proclamations. HOW DO YOU FEEL ABOUT ADOPTION TODAY (2:03) BLAIR HODGES: Angela Tucker joins us. She's author of "You Should Be Grateful": Stories of Race, Identity, and Transracial Adoption. Angela, welcome to Family Proclamations. ANGELA TUCKER: Thank you for having me. I'm glad to be here. BLAIR HODGES: Let's start with introductions. I borrowed this first question from your book where you describe mentoring transracial adoptees: Please share your name, your gender pronouns, and how you feel about adoption today. ANGELA TUCKER: My name is Angela Tucker. I go by she/her pronouns. How I feel about adoption today is a huge question. BLAIR HODGES: Well, I got it from you. [laughter] ANGELA TUCKER: Wow. Adoption is so complicated. I think in general, society thinks of adoption as really a beautiful thing. That typically comes from the perspective of adoptive parents. My whole work is trying to center the adoptees' perspective on adoption, which isn't necessarily the complete opposite, but it's just a little bit more nuanced than just a fairy-tale-Annie-type story. BLAIR HODGES: This is a question I see you've asked a lot of your counseling groups. You lead sessions with people who are adopted, and you open with this to signal that their feelings might change over time. I think sometimes people get a story about their life and they're just prepared to share that story. When you're sitting down with kids and asking them this question, "How do you feel about it today," their answers may vary. So as a person who has been adopted, where are you at with it today coming into this interview? ANGELA TUCKER: The question—[laughs] I have never had it turned around on me. But yes, I do ask it of all the people that I mentor, and the reason is just because it's so common that folks put their thoughts about our adoption on us. So I am attempting to give my mentees, whether they're young tweens or teens, or even adults, the freedom to understand it can change from day to day. For me, I do a lot of consulting with prospective adopters. And it's frustrating, I would say—this is current, as of yesterday's work—just frustrating to work with folks who really, really want a baby, they want a child, they want to become a parent, and they've found adoption as the way to do that. It's frustrating because that's not what adoption is for. This equation—which, I can understand how it seems like it would make sense—makes things tricky because it makes it hard for the prospective adopters to really have a great understanding about keeping the biological family in your life. Because what they really want is their own child to mold and grow as if it's their own child. That's just not what adoption is. So that's the irksome conundrum I find myself in while I'm doing consulting with families. BLAIR HODGES: Let's talk a little bit about your background. You're a Black person who was adopted by white parents. You talk about them as being progressive and Earth-conscious and attuned to social justice issues. It was interesting to learn about their background and then how that affected you as a person who was adopted into a white family in a very white context. ANGELA TUCKER: Yes. My parents were certifiable hippies of the 70s. [laughter] They adopted seven of us, all from foster care. Their view really was more of the “zero-population growth” group I talk about, how they bought into that idea that we didn't need to be procreating at the rate we were and so they wanted to adopt. I didn't have those ownership-like feelings I notice with a lot of my clients. They were really wishing all of us could have relationships with our birth parents, but we couldn't for one reason or another.   AN ADOPTEE MANIFESTO (5:58)   BLAIR HODGES: We'll talk about that. That makes a big difference, what an adoptee's relationship is with their birth parents, whether there can even be one or not. Your intro to the book begins with something you wrote. It's called An Adoptee Manifesto. I wondered if you could read that for us here. ANGELA TUCKER: Sure, yes. BLAIR HODGES: This kind of gives us a sense of where you're coming from and what you're fighting for. ANGELA TUCKER: "An Adoptee Manifesto. We can love more than one set of parents. Relationships with our birth parents, foster parents, and our adoptive parents are not mutually exclusive. We have the right to own our original birth certificate. Curiosity about our roots is innate. We need access to our family medical history. The pre-verbal memories we have with our first family are real. Post-natal culture shock exists. It's okay to feel a mixture of gratitude and loss. We are not alone. We have each other." BLAIR HODGES: It's a beautiful manifesto. We'll touch on points of it as we go. I wondered when this originated. When did you write the actual manifesto? Was it part of the book or something you'd done beforehand? ANGELA TUCKER: I wrote just a series of statements—it was always on an airplane coming back from doing a keynote speech somewhere. Each of these lines were things I had to find myself telling myself on the airplane. I would go give a keynote speech and I might be barraged with audience members who would ask questions like, "Well, why do you really need to know your medical history? You've got great parents, and they took such great care of you, and they took you to doctors and stuff." At that particular speech, I would be defending why I needed to know my medical history. Every single statement was me on an airplane, ruminating over that one thing, like, well, why do I need to know that? Is it my right? Over time I collated all of those together and at a certain point wrote them all down in one document, and instead of being the flight home from a speech, the flight to a speech, I read all of them in one fell swoop and found a sense of power. Then I started sharing it with other adoptees I mentor, and they were like, "Wow. It's so simple!” Things like, "we can love all of our parents," but to say it out loud, and to say it's not mutually exclusive feels really empowering. After I had collated all these together and started sharing them with others, I just thought, why don't I create it into a beautiful manifesto? I had someone design it, the lettering, the font, and put it up on my wall. Then I started using it as a tool with other adoptive parents who were a little skeptical to say, "What would happen if you put this on your wall for your adopted child to see?" That started creating sense of empowerment for the kids, and so that was really the iteration of how it came to be.   A TRICKY MINEFIELD – 9:19   BLAIR HODGES: We'll hit on some pieces of the manifesto throughout our discussion, but let's also talk about how tricky the discussion itself can be. In your introduction you write that “being honest about adoption is a tricky minefield to navigate, because regardless of your own stance, somebody inevitably seems to get hurt.” What kind of mines are you trying to avoid in the minefield? ANGELA TUCKER: It's so many people's emotions. So many people's good intentions. So many assumptions that this is the best thing for us. I feel like there's the minefield of the prospective adopters, who maybe just want to help, or they'll say that. For me, I'm trying to articulate how, specifically for white parents who say, "We will adopt a child of any color," I want to speak in a kind way, but to show them perhaps that isn't the most responsible thing to do, given their place, or given people's desires for Black and Brown families to start adopting at the same rate as white, entitled middle-class families seem to do. Then I'm also working around, like in my story, my birth mother's deep feelings of shame she has around the time that she placed me for adoption. She doesn't really remember very much about that time. For me to even bring it up—and working on this book was part of that—inevitably triggers her into a space that's really dark and sad. But when I'm talking with her about it, I am sometimes trying to advocate for her, to say, "You really should have had more support." But in even saying that, it reminds her of what she didn't have, and what she couldn't do, which was keep me. For social workers I also feel like it's a minefield because many of them are just doing the best they can with what they have and the knowledge they know. But obviously, it's not good enough if we have one in four adoptees who are in therapy seeking suicide. Something isn't right there either. I think the minefield, if I could sum it up, is that people's good intentions are all over adoptions. It's rare that I meet folks who really want to harm people. Like that's not people's goal. To be critical of it is definitely weighing everyone's perspective all at the same time, it feels like.   “YOU SHOULD BE GRATEFUL” (11:57)   BLAIR HODGES: Right, and I think the title itself speaks to that—the idea that you should be grateful, a statement that adoptees often hear and, as you point out in the book, some adoptees kind of tell themselves even when they don't really feel it. ANGELA TUCKER: It's gaslighting and it's not gaslighting at the same time. People would say this to me all the time, but they didn't even know my birth parents. I didn't know my birth parents. I didn't know anything about what my life would have been like. But there's that assumption that I got a better life. Certainly, I got a different life. I have really great parents and grew up in a city that, even though it was predominantly white, was a pretty great place to grow up in the Pacific Northwest. But the “should” part—In the book I write the word "should," to me, feels like a combination of judgment and failure at the same time before I've even done anything, and that is irksome, and I also understand where it's coming from. BLAIR HODGES: Is that because you can feel some gratitude? You clearly care for your adoptive parents so much, just like so many kids can be grateful for their parents, and so the phrase is complicated. I think part of the problem is, it seems to really hem everything in. It's very limiting. Instead of saying, "What are you grateful for?" Or "What is there to be grateful for?" It's, "Well, you should be grateful. Here is the story. This is all you should really focus on." It's not curious at all. ANGELA TUCKER: Right. I talk in the book a lot about the things I'm really grateful for, which this idea that I am grateful for the family I have, yet I am not grateful to have to have been adopted. It's an ever so slight difference, but it makes all the difference to me. I don't think any of us wish to be adopted, nor do birth parents want to be birth parents that— So much else happens, and yes, we can still have gratitude for the family we find ourselves within.   ADOPTEE CENTRISM (14:07)   BLAIR HODGES: I haven't had any close friends who were adoptees. I don't have any direct relatives that are adoptees. I think grappling with it came through popular culture and media, and most recently through NBC's This is Us, which follows the story of adoptees, one of whom is a transracial adoptee. That character has become, in my life, an important role model of fatherhood, and to see the story play out of the complications of adoption. For people who haven't seen the series, it's a couple who have two kids and adopt Randall, their third child, and Randall is Black. Especially toward the end of the series you get to see more of the of the racial dynamics play out. I think you consulted on the show, right? ANGELA TUCKER: I consulted on the last season, so season five for Randall's character. BLAIR HODGES: There was so much there and there was so much in that show and in your book that really put my eyes on what the adoptees themselves thought. That's really important. You call it “adoptee centrism.” As you said, a lot of the stories take the perspective of parents and a whole family, like parents wanted a child, they either couldn't have one or for other reasons adopted—that's the story, rather than what's happening to the person being adopted. Talk a little bit more about Adoptee Centrism. ANGELA TUCKER: It's funny how when I talk about adoption, and when I was consulting with the writers of This is Us for Randall, there is this idea of like, "Wow, I've never thought of it that way.” And then, "Oh, how obvious that is” at the same time! In adoption, I often talk about how we are wedged between someone's great joy, which is the adoptive parents often, and someone's extreme pain, which is the birth parents oftentimes. The fact that media hasn't spent much time on our perspective of what that feels like to be in between both, that we often hear about—probably the most critique from media is this "savior attitude" that adoptive parents might have, you hear about "White Saviorism," but the space of wishing we could be with our birth family, perhaps understanding why we can't—that's the story I'm trying to tell and promote. Adoptee centrism hasn't been mainstreamed because there seems to be a big threat, especially to adoptive parents, when adoptees speak out. I am grateful my parents don't seem to have that. They're very open to my viewpoint on all of this. One thing I talk about in my book is how many adult adoptees say, "I want to find my birth parents, but I'm going to wait until my adoptive parents die before I start." That's because they're trying to show love for their adoptive parents, and they don't want them to feel put off or like they're not thankful for all they did. So many stories I know, right when their adoptive parents pass away, these adoptees go try to search, and those are really sad stories often because birth parents sometimes have passed away too by that point.   HISTORY OF TRANSRACIAL ADOPTION IN THE US (17:39)   BLAIR HODGES: I think taking the perspective of adoptees is really helpful and your book has a lot of voices in there, a lot of different people you talked to, to help give people a sense of adoptees' perspectives. You also give a history of transracial adoption in particular. There's a startling moment in your first chapter I wanted to bring up here. You describe a meet-and-greet that happened after your documentary Closure was screened. This is a documentary about your experience. A Black woman approached you and told you that you were her worst fears realized and said you're not a true Black person. This chapter puts her comment into historical context about what she could have meant by that. Why would someone say something like that, that you're her worst fears realized and there's something questionable about your Blackness? ANGELA TUCKER: That was a really hard moment, but the woman who told me this was a member of the National Association of Black Social Workers. In 1972, that group called transracial adoption "cultural genocide," because they felt like white people weren't going to adequately imbue the skills we need to traverse America and its racism. The group wasn't saying white parents couldn't parent us, but that we would have to do a lot of code switching and essentially become way familiar with whiteness, perhaps at a really terrible cost. In my speech I was essentially saying that in a positive way. I was talking about how comfortable I felt in both white and Black spaces as a result of growing up transracially adopted, even though I did talk about finding my Blackness and being really proud of who I was, didn't come until I was in my college years and got away from that predominantly white city. But that was exactly what this woman wanted to work against. She in her career was trying to avoid adoptees having to feel that split, and so with my speech I basically confirmed it's still happening. I didn't know all of that when she told me I was her worst fear realized and so I was really shocked—more than shocked I mean, to have a Black woman say that to me was really tough. But as I reflected on it against that backdrop, I had an understanding. It's similar to how hard I'm working to ensure adoptees are no longer in closed adoptions. And if I went to a speech in twenty years, and someone came through a closed adoption, I don't know that I would go right up to them and say that, but I would be frustrated about my life's work. BLAIR HODGES: Right. “Closed adoption” meaning there's no connection between adoptees and their birth parents and there's really no way to find them. You're basically not allowed to, whether the records are hidden, or whatever. That's closed adoption. I want to talk a little bit more about the history. The first recorded transracial adoption in the United States that we know of you say happened in 1948. That's not all that long ago. Then in the 1950s there's a rise of a paternalistic kind of racism. White people were saying, "Oh, we need to uplift Black people. We can do this through adoption." Or, "Black people are less fit as parents and so we should bring Black children into white families," and so on. That's the context the National Association of Black Social Workers was protesting against and saying there's racial genocide in the 70s, which to me made total sense historically, to see why they would have those problems. But then in the 1980s, which is around the time you were adopted, there was the rise of a colorblind, feel-good, post-racial kind of vibe. It's sort of like, "We don't care what color they are; we'll welcome any child into our family!" Which on the surface seems great, right? It seems not racist, but in ignoring the experience of race in America, it ends up overlooking really important aspects of what it means to be Black and what it means to be white. You say a colorblind, feel-good adoption is actually kind of problematic. ANGELA TUCKER: Yes. So problematic. I remember actually wearing a t-shirt that says, "Love sees no color." I think that was a common adage back in the early nineties maybe.   COLOR EVASION (22:26)   BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, that was my youth. "I don't see color" was the thing. ANGELA TUCKER: I like the upgraded term for colorblindness, which is “color evasiveness,” because it doesn't let white people off the hook to say like, "I just don't see it." Because actually, you do, and you're choosing not to see a certain color, certain races. But in doing that we're only upholding whiteness as the status quo. To say, "I love you no matter what. You're beautiful no matter what, but we're going to put you in this predominantly white space," means we really want you to assimilate to be just like them and we're not going to celebrate any aspect of what makes you who you are. That idea is really covert. It comes across when people like myself wanted to have hair that flowed in the wind like my mom's. I didn't want to have my afro. That could be interpreted as just individuation, just trying new things and hairstyles, or we could see it through the race of colorblindness. Of course I want to fit in with the culture around me. I know so many families who would just choose to see it as the former, as just self-exploration, and put us in an all-Black place. We likely wouldn't be so keen to have our hair look like Eurocentric flow in the wind. We still have it a little bit because that's what is in popular culture. You just have to work really hard to embrace and to see race. We really want parents to see our color because once they do there's so much historically and in our culture we can seriously celebrate. But also, there's that piece of, if you want to avoid talking about race, then it must mean you don't love my birth family, is how it feels way deep down. BLAIR HODGES: Right. You also talked about how growing up in a white household, it might be like the way you talk, the way you dress, the kind of things you enjoy. If you're more surrounded by white folks and not as invested in Black culture, that can be reflected in how you talk and how you act—I don't remember if the book uses the word “Oreo” or not, but it's this kind of derogatory way of saying “Black on the outside, white on the inside.” ANGELA TUCKER: I do talk about “Oreo,” when I'm working with a group of transracial adoptees at a transracial adoption camp, that this group of boys talk about this word "Oreo" and how they are called that, and what that means to them. In the book, you can see their struggle with accepting that reality and believing it, and then also wanting to push back against it, because they understand there are aspects of themselves that don't fit with the societal view of Blackness. I try to teach that Blackness is not a monolith, but that's something I didn't learn until later on. I didn't really, truly believe there could be Black nerds—Black folks like me who love to read. I really did buy into the narrative that Black folks are only athletes. It was just so narrow. But how do you know if you aren't immersed in the culture? So it still is a prevalent term. I like to point people to Susan Harris O'Connor's research where she talks about the five different identities of transracial adoptees and how tricky they are. That our genetic identity might not match up with our feeling identity. Like I know I'm a Black woman, but I may I have a feeling I really can identify with whiteness. Of course I can, if that's all I was raised in. That has changed in my adulthood, thankfully, but it would make sense. I try to give transracial adoptees a little more latitude and some language around the expansiveness of our identities. It's nice, because I think it's not just limited to transracial adoption anymore, that there are so many different groups of people grappling with what it means to belong. That's really a surprise I've found with my book coming out, how many people aren't related to transracial adoption but are like, "I feel myself in your book." BLAIR HODGES: Because they sense that identity tension, the kind of different tensions a lot of different people feel. Your book explores how that plays out in the context of adoption, but I do think there's connection there for anyone who's tried to find a place, or tried to fit in, or had questions about their identity. I think LGBTQ issues fit in here, especially for folks who are trans who are dealing with gender expectations as they grow up. There's a lot of different touchstones here for a lot of readers. ANGELA TUCKER: Yeah, just pushing back against the status quo and our world is expanding on so many binaries we've had. I think that is exactly the transracial adoptee experience.   PROXIMAL PRIVILEGE (27:56)   BLAIR HODGES: Right. Your chapter, "White Privilege by Osmosis," talks about these exact issues, about not being seen as Black enough to some people, being seen as too Black for others. But also—this was interesting to me—the “proximal privilege,” I think is the words you use. The kind of privilege you could receive by being in a white family. ANGELA TUCKER: Yes. As a kid, as a teenager, I only made sense in the city of Bellingham, Washington, if my parents were right nearby. So if I'm walking around holding hands with my mom at a mall, people automatically would go up to her and say, "Wow, what a great thing you've done!" They recognize she has adopted me, and then I, therefore, am given this privilege of being in this space without having to explain myself very much. Just like "Oh, okay, you're a safe Black person, because you're with this woman who did this great thing." But when I wasn't with my parents and I'm just a Black girl out in the city, there is caution and curiosity, and kind of confusion, people are like, "How did you get here? Why are you here? Who are you" kind of thing. BLAIR HODGES: They don't just think it, either! I was shocked at how common commentary could come at you, like commentary at the store, or commentary at a playground, and how often families deal with these unsolicited comments that maybe seem well-intentioned, but I think they're really born of a sort of discomfort. People feel uncomfortable and they just need to say something. ANGELA TUCKER: Yes. So often just out on the playground, like, "Where did you get them? How much did they cost? Where did they come from?" BLAIR HODGES: Or overpraising, like over-attention, right? Like, "So beautiful, look at you." You're like, "I'm a kid. I'm here with my mom…" ANGELA TUCKER: Just the stunning-ness that a Black child could be well-behaved, or kind, or having fun on the playground, or any of that is like, "Oh my goodness." BLAIR HODGES: "She's so well spoken." What does that mean?! ANGELA TUCKER: "Very articulate." I'm always "very articulate." [laughter] That gets back to the adoptee centrism, because yes, a lot of these points just seem like people can't even stop themselves but to gush in those ways, which are racist, but well-intentioned. To be in the middle of that as a kid, it makes you wonder, "Is there something weird about me that only a special person could have adopted me? Or is there something strange that I can speak? Am I speaking wrong? What makes me so absolutely articulate that it's just mind boggling?" Where are we supposed to go with those questions without appearing like we're not grateful for what we've been given? That's a lot of my work and mentorship, is giving space for exploring the comments people make that really do make us question our place. BLAIR HODGES: Your book is helpful with this. I encourage people to read it to see some of the comments they themselves may have made, because we just need to become more familiar. I think a lot of times it is coming from a place of ignorance rather than maliciousness, but we've got to learn in order to not do it. ANGELA TUCKER: Absolutely. I mean, the title, "You Should Be Grateful"—it's funny how often people have come up to me and been like, "Oh my gosh, I hear that all the time! It's the worst." But nobody is willing to say, "Oh, my word, I've said that all the time!" Both have to be true. I think about myself and times in my head where I've had that thought too, and within my context, if you boil it down even more, it's about poverty, and how we view—like, my birth mother couldn't have possibly loved me or been a good parent since she was poor. Let's get a little bit deeper into that, is what I'm trying to also ask for, because it's really harmful for adoptees to grow up thinking—whatever the case may be, but for me grow up thinking—because my birth mother is poor she didn't love me. That's the message you get unless you really face it and name it. And that is not true!   SYSTEMIC ISSUES (32:27)   BLAIR HODGES: Well, and another one is, “She was poor because she has some sort of fundamental character flaws.” It doesn't look at systemic injustices. It doesn't look at how generational wealth has been denied to so many Black folks in the United States, it doesn't look to systemic issues. I think there's also a risk that Black transracial adoptive kids might accept some of the stereotypes about Black communities, of being like, "Oh, maybe I should be grateful,” because of stereotypes about Black people being lazy, or Black fathers being absent, these sort of things that we know are problematic, but they can be internalized by some of these adoptees. ANGELA TUCKER: If we think about why Black fathers are absent, let's get into the penal system and how many Black men are incarcerated, and how many of those men have children, and how many of those men have children they would have loved to have parented if not being imprisoned for a marijuana possession or something that isn't even illegal now. BLAIR HODGES: All while their communities are over-policed compared to white communities. There was more policing there, there are more arrests. Criminality itself isn't inherent to race, but the way we build policing means there are inequities in how people are imprisoned or prosecuted or sentenced. Again, systemic stuff. ANGELA TUCKER: Right. This is something so many people who are at that point of saying, "I want to adopt a child. I want a baby really badly," have a really hard time thinking about. The systemic issues. If I say to someone who is in that place—and perhaps they've been struggling with getting pregnant for years and this is just all they want—if I were to say, “Why do you think a Black or Brown family wouldn't be able to adopt this child instead of you?” That would be so hurtful to them because they're like, "What are you saying? I'm going to give this kid the best life possible." What I'm trying to get to is systemic issues. To say, "What makes it such that you are able to adopt this child and a Black and Brown family isn't?" It's a hard conversation to have at that time given the emotionality of it all. That's a trend I've seen, and it's really hard to talk about at that moment, but for instance if they adopt a Black boy, when he turns five or six and he's experiencing racism on the playground or even from the school faculty, then those same parents come to me and are like, "Oh my goodness, this is terrible. This isn't fair." They can't see it until, in my view, they get what they want, which is the child. And then once the legals are all completed, then there's this valve that opens in their brain, allowing for the possibility to talk about the systemic issues.   PROFESSIONAL WORK WITH THE ADOPTION SYSTEM (35:24)   BLAIR HODGES: You've had a front row seat to this, not just as an adoptee, but also through your professional work. You began professionally working with adoptive agencies, helping to facilitate adoptions, including transracial adoptions. But that didn't seem to last very long for you. ANGELA TUCKER: [laughter] I mean, I was twenty-one years old, fresh out of undergrad, when I began placing children and doing transracial adoptions. It was a great learning experience for me. One of the things I was curious about was how the “home study” process works. Home study can be like a six-month process that if you want to adopt you have to go through all these interviews and background checks. And I wanted to know what that was like. So I started conducting those and writing these big reports for families, and that was very enlightening, learning also about the money. It was perplexing to me how I would be making $32,000 a year in this role, and individual families would be paying $39,000 for an adoption to wait on a list. And I had like fifty families. So I knew there was a lot of money coming in, and where's it all going? Then I would be working with my colleagues who were supporting women who are pregnant. And for some reason, we couldn't spend very much money to support their needs. So yeah, that was really a tricky space to be in as an adoptee, but it taught me a lot. BLAIR HODGES: You seem pretty pragmatic in your approach because you recognize issues with the adoption system and systemic issues with regard to race in the United States. But you've also targeted your focus to work directly with adoptees themselves. You've started The Adoptee Lounge, for example, which is a group you run to help discuss with transracial adoptees what their experiences are like, to help young people process this together. You've landed in a place where you've been a professional in the adoption world. Then you've become more of an activist. You've also become a counselor. Do you feel at home more in that role? How did you land where you are now with this advocacy, writing books, and mentoring individual people? Does it ever feel a little futile because the bigger system continues to plod on? ANGELA TUCKER: Totally. All those things. I certainly could not see myself working to continue helping people adopt children. I knew I couldn't do that. I shifted to working in post-adoption services, which is so necessary but feels frustrating because I'm no longer working at the source, although I do make attempts. It's pretty hard to push back at every step within the child welfare industry. The adoption industry more so than foster care. I think there's a need within foster care. It's more sometimes the newborn/infant adoption space, but I do some work in foster care and that feels much more aligned with my wellbeing, when we have clarity that a child really cannot be with their biological family. There's been abuse or harm, and so advocating for individuals to step up to support them feels better because it's less about ownership and more about stewardship and the support of a child. But landing in the adoptee space does feel a bit futile because I don't want the system to keep on churning out more adoptees. And at the same time, I don't see it stopping anytime soon and I do think when I'm working with adoptees who are in their seventies and eighties and they are grappling with these same things, I think, "All right, there is so much healing we can do in helping adoptees understand all aspects of themselves." It feels very grounding for me. It feels less adversarial. But I also am keeping my foot in that activism space. I think about the Indian Child Welfare Act, which is in front of the Supreme Court right now. There are so many parallels to it and the National Association of Black Social Workers and their statement. That's a really scary law that could get reversed. So I do spend some time in those spaces, as well as educating adoption agencies. But working with adoptees is a beautiful space for me to be in, and for sustainability long term, it's important.   THE GHOST KINGDOM (40:15)   BLAIR HODGES: That's Angela Tucker. We're talking about the book “You Should Be Grateful:” Stories of Race, Identity, and Transracial Adoption. You can also check out her story in a documentary called Closure I mentioned earlier. She also has a podcast, The Adoptee Next Door. She also consulted with NBC's This Is Us and has over fifteen years of experience working within adoption and foster care agencies and has mentored over two hundred adoptees. Angela, there's this idea you bring up in the book, the "Ghost Kingdom," and this is something you got from a psychologist who coined this term. This is the imaginary worlds adoptees construct as they're trying to make sense of a past they don't have very many solid memories of—this Ghost Kingdom, this world an adoptee can build. Give us a sense of what that is. ANGELA TUCKER: The Ghost Kingdom is an imaginary, fantastical realm where, for me, I decided my birth dad was Magic Johnson when I was young, because he's a basketball player, I'm a basketball player. He has a humongous smile, I have this big smile. In the absence of knowing any facts about who my birth dad is, then it must be him. My birth mom was Halle Berry because she's stunningly beautiful. I don't think I could just say that about myself. But who wouldn't want to be Halle Berry? She has a similar skin tone to me. It's just a little goofy, but it's also helpful in trying to fill in the blanks. I think it's not too different than non-adopted people who might have chosen to go to one college instead of another and they think about what life would have been like if they chose to go to that college instead, like, "Where would I be today? What would I have studied? Where would I live?" That's the kind of place where there's nothing wrong with it. I do hope adoptees don't have to spend much time in their Ghost Kingdom because we can replace it with the truth. For me, once I found my birth parents, they are so much better than Magic Johnson and Halle Berry, like they are my blood and it was, oh, unbelievable to know them. That's kind of what the Ghost Kingdom is. It's not just adoptees. Birth parents have a Ghost Kingdom, especially if they don't know where their child went, and that's thinking about who their children became and where they are living and what they are doing. BLAIR HODGES: You talk about the grief of ambiguous loss. There's a Welsh word—I don't know how to pronounce it. Hiraeth. Do you know how to pronounce it? ANGELA TUCKER: I learned how to pronounce it when I was doing the audiobook recording. I'm still not very good at it. But it's “here-ayeth." BLAIR HODGES: Okay, yeah. It's this sense of homesick, nostalgia, and longing for something that is irretrievably lost, something that can't come back, something that's just gone, and maybe was never fully solid. It's this sort of ambiguous nostalgia. And as you mentioned, you hope the Ghost Kingdoms don't need to be built as much because you're advocating for more open adoption versus closed adoption, meaning kids can learn more about their birth parents earlier, they can know more. There could possibly be contact. Because when there's not any of that, all kids have is their imagination, and their imagination can take them anywhere really. In good ways and bad ways. ANGELA TUCKER: Yes, and I think some adoptive parents may not recognize the hole that's filling, if a child is having a huge imagination and is wanting to watch Annie over and over and over and over again. The reason is we're essentially searching for ourselves, and so let's just make it possible. I advocate that we can always have open adoptions for every single adoption, even those where a birth parent is deceased, those where a birth parent is truly unsafe, or they're in jail. That every single adoption can be open because it has more to do with what the adoptive parents have within their control, which is, if you know your child, you can say, like, "Gosh, I wonder where your traits come from. Your birth parents must be lovers of art, or great singers." You know? You can really take what you see in the child and expound upon it in relation to birth family, even if you don't know them. That is what creates a really wonderful space for adoptees to feel free to explore and not gaslit and not like they have to have a sheer loyalty to the adoptive parents. So that is what I advocate when physical contact can't be had. BLAIR HODGES: This was where This Is Us was so powerful was seeing Rebecca's [the mother's] fear that Randall's [the adopted son's] parents would replace her at some point, this fear he would connect with them and lose her, or a kind of possible jealousy, or he could reconnect and maybe be hurt by a birth parent. There are so many feelings for the parent going through this. You're really asking parents to make room for these other families and these other connections, which can be scary for everybody involved. But I feel you make a powerful case, that all things being equal, it's a better approach because people, by and large, are going to have that longing regardless of what you do, ANGELA TUCKER: They're going to figure out how to get it some way, even if it's like as I shared earlier, the fifty-year-old who's going to wait until their adoptive parents die till they're going to find their birth parents. Finding our roots, like I wrote in the manifesto, is innate. I think it's scary only because we don't have a lot of examples of it. Perhaps it was scary at some point for a parent to think they could love four children equally if they had four kids. Maybe people at some point were like, "Wow, can that really be done?" Now it's not scary. You're going to have another kid? Great, people say. How come we can't understand that for adoptees, we can love all these parents we have. We're not going to feel confused about who's who or who might not be safe, or how to put boundaries in our lives to keep that safety. No, actually, if you as our adoptive parents have taught us about boundaries, just in general, then allow us to use that here too.   FINDING ANGELA'S BIRTH PARENTS (46:46)   BLAIR HODGES: There's something in the book you bring up. The “Birth Study.” This is a document you held to almost as scripture, this sort of story of your origins. This is a study done by social workers during the process of your adoption that talked about your birth parents. It gave clues about who they were. It wasn't until later when your boyfriend, now your partner, pointed out your possible biological father's name was included here and this is what helped open the gate to you reconnecting. ANGELA TUCKER: This study is a three-page document. I house it in a box in my house with things like my passport, my marriage license, it's that important to me. It is filled with redactions. I didn't notice because in the era of closed adoptions, we can't know our birth parent's last name, for example, or I couldn't know her address. It would share my birth mother's height and weight and skin complexion, but nothing identifying. It wasn't until my husband, boyfriend at the time, saw this name I had overlooked. It was an uncommon name. “Oterious” is my birth father's name. That allowed us to then Google and search and find this man who didn't know he had a daughter. BLAIR HODGES: I hope people take the time to see in the documentary, or read the book, to see this story. You had dreamed so long about meeting your mom that it was sort of like, "Oh yeah, there's a dad too! Okay, I'll check that out." [laughter] But you still had that drive for your mom, and as you describe in the book, it was devastating in some ways, actually. I think it's easy to romanticize and figure like, "Oh, this is going to be some grand reunion." But you describe the first time you met her in person again, she basically denied it like, "Oh no. No relation here. Goodbye." ANGELA TUCKER: Painful. Another reason why it's so important that we bring in systemic issues when teaching about adoption, because the thing that got me through that year where she denied me, "I don't know who you are, please leave," we were in Tennessee to find her. Then we flew back to Washington state where we live. But what got me through that year was understanding how deep shame must be for someone who was not given any support to think about what happened to her daughter, and to then think about why wasn't she given support, and to start understanding issues around poverty and how the adoption industry treats that, versus how it treats adoptive parents who have resources and means. I think it's partly a coping mechanism to kind of intellectualize. BLAIR HODGES: Yes, you say that in the book. It was so interesting to see you psychoanalyze yourself a little bit and say after your mom devastated you, you went through this investigation into the background, thinking about the systemic issues and ways you were processing grief intellectually. ANGELA TUCKER: Exactly. I had to be mad at something, and I could not fathom being mad at my birth mother for this unexpected visitor twenty-six years later after giving birth at a time that must have been— I was like, yeah, that is shocking. I can't be mad, but I am mad. Who am I mad at? I turned to the system and all the people that failed her, but then I didn't just think about her, and I'm thinking about the bigger system and all the people who are in leadership positions and what is happening with every single adoption. I was able to channel that grief intellectually and move on. But my gracious, when she called back a year later, that was indescribable! She called back and said, "Yes, I am your birth mother. Come back and let's meet."   WISHING FOR BETTER – (50:56)   BLAIR HODGES: It is such a beautiful story. Not all stories get to have this kind of outcome, especially in the time of closed adoptions, how many people never even had this opportunity. It's beautiful to see. You also talk a little bit about survivor's guilt, because you met some siblings you had. Some siblings you'd never known and you were kind of comparing your life to theirs. You brought a sister out to visit you in Washington, and you would go out to Tennessee, and your survivor's guilt hung around for you, seeing the different lives you might have had. ANGELA TUCKER: It's hard to see that many of my birth siblings weren't raised by my birth mother either, but they weren't adopted. There's one sibling who was adopted who we are still looking for and can't find her. But the others, their lives are so much different than mine. If I could rewrite the book, I might not use that word "guilt," because I think guilt assumes a crime. You're guilty of doing something wrong. In this case, I did not do anything wrong, nor did my birth siblings. I would probably work a little harder to find the right language to describe this phenomenon. BLAIR HODGES: Maybe it's just wishing better for them too? You're seeing some of the privileges you got, because of where you were raised, and who raised you, comparatively. I like that, though, eliminating the word guilt because there's not culpability. But there is still an unsettled feeling and sort of a—you wish better for them. ANGELA TUCKER: And I wish better for myself. Although they weren't raised by my birth mother, they knew her. BLAIR HODGES: Yes, and you're connecting with your siblings now, forging new relationships. I can only imagine how complicated that could feel. ANGELA TUCKER: I think in my birth siblings' perspective, there was a sense of wishing they had some of what I have when they came to my hometown and saw some of the places where I grew up and met some of my friends and teachers and coaches and stuff. At the same time, there was a wishing on my end for what they had. Even though my birth mother didn't raise them, they were raised by my birth grandmother and got to see my birth mom on occasion and knew her name and knew the story. For me, there was a longing for that, that they knew their roots and I didn't. BLAIR HODGES: It's so tempting to weigh that against each other. What's ultimately preferable? ANGELA TUCKER: I think that's what is done in adoption. We do weigh that, and what wins is me getting three meals a day and access to all the extracurricular activities and great medical care. What loses is what my birth siblings had, which was a little more instability. But to me, knowing what it's like growing up without roots, without knowing where you came from, or who gave birth to you, that, to me, means as much. As well as the racial element. They grew up with people who looked like them. I didn't get to see anyone who looked like me for years. So far what has won out is what the adoptive parents are able to give and I'm trying to press back against that a little. BLAIR HODGES: I also appreciated how you talked about your birth mother, how she might have been feeling. You spent more time, it seems, after you met her thinking about reasons why she might not have wanted to reconnect—or maybe just had conflicted feelings about it, maybe I should say—and empathizing more now that you've met her and have come to know her more as a person, that story could fill in more for you about what she might have been up to and why. ANGELA TUCKER: A bit. It's very hard for her to articulate all of this, especially with me having white parents. When I asked her how many positive relationships she'd had with white people growing up, she's like, "I could count it on one hand." For me to think like, "Okay, and here come my parents who want to show her love, but clearly she has to be projecting upon them what she has experienced from so many the other white people in the Deep South." It's really cool now to see their relationship. My parents went on a road trip to the South and sent me pictures of hanging out with my birth mom in Biloxi, Mississippi, and taking her out to eat, and they just had fun. I love that. It's taken a decade, but my birth mother really trusts them now. That relationship is so healing for me to see. BLAIR HODGES: I was really moved by something you said about your mom. She didn't express to you her reservations about you meeting your birth mom. She just showed support for you, and was there for you, although she did have worries. You suggest maybe if she did share with you, it might have dissuaded you from pursuing things. It might have prevented you from having this amazing reconnection, and to swallow her own vulnerability—or not swallow, but keep it inside, so you could have more freedom to pursue what you needed. That's pretty amazing. ANGELA TUCKER: It's beautiful. I wish I could just categorize it as parenting. I would like for it to be in that same category of how parents sacrifice for their kids in many ways and all these times. But I think this one does feel a little more unique. I don't think my mom just swallowed her, what she—I now know—articulates at the time as a fear of being replaced. She had a little fear. She didn't tell me. I don't think she just swallowed it. I think she just talked to other people about it but didn't talk to me about it because she knew I wouldn't want to hurt her. I wouldn't want to put her in that place. It's incredible that she gave me the freedom to not have that burden and move forward. She worked through that fear on her own and I'm so grateful for it. I absolutely believe that's the reason I have this relationship now.   THE SONDERSPHERE (57:26)   BLAIR HODGES: Let's talk about the Sondersphere. This is an interesting term you bring up in the book. Because you're an advocate for more open adoptions, even though adoptive parents might fear competition or whatever, you suggest the ways we imagine our connections to each other can help quiet our fears like that, and offer a more stable experience for adoptees. I'll invite you to read a section from the book here on page 166. This is a section that talks about this Sondersphere, if you would. I'd appreciate that. ANGELA TUCKER: "I call it the Sondersphere, a word I made up based on a term coined by John Koenig in his Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows. He defines the word 'sonder' as the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own, populated with their own ambitions, friends, routines, worries, and inherited craziness, an epic story that continues invisibly around you like an anthill, sprawling deep underground, with elaborate passageways to thousands of other lives that you'll never know existed. The Sondersphere is around where every person in an adoptees' life has a place. Where birth parents and adoptive parents and biological aunties and foster parents and adoptive cousins all exist together. They don't necessarily share a home, like some awkward reality TV show, but instead share an orbit around the adoptee. The Sondersphere is a real-life antidote to the adoptees' Ghost Kingdom, a place where their questions can be answered in real time, where their identity can bounce around and try things on for size, where they always belong, because all the parts of their story are visible and accessible to them." BLAIR HODGES: The Sondersphere. This is a wonderful way to conceive of it. I want to hear more from you about what this idea has done for you in your own pursuit as you've reconnected with your family members, and as you work with transracial adoptees in your professional life. ANGELA TUCKER: Currently, openness is the preferred terminology and method, but when you're working in an adoption agency, what openness looks like is giving the adoptive parents a document they fill out that says "We will contact birth parents four times a year." Or, "We'll send a letter with some photos to the adoption agency quarterly and then the agency can pass it along." That constitutes openness. Sometimes those contracts are written for the next eighteen years of a kid's life. I am suggesting that is unreasonable for anyone to make relationship decisions for the next eighteen years. Instead, this Sondersphere accounts for the ebbs and flows that are natural in a relationship. Currently if an adoptive family has this openness contract, sometimes they'll call me up and say, "The birth mom disappeared for eight months. We have not heard a thing from her. Everything's off. What are we supposed to do?" In the Sondersphere I'm trying to reframe that to say, all of us go through times where we might need a little break, or we might go off the grid for one reason or another. BLAIR HODGES: It could even be health issues or something. Who knows? ANGELA TUCKER: Who knows what it is? But what I do know is it's human. Can we allow for just the humanity? Especially in an extremely emotional and vulnerable relationship like this one. But the humanity is not just accepted; we embrace it just like we would with any uncle we have who goes in and out of our lives. My hope is it can just give a more human portrayal of everyone involved, and that is only going to be helpful for all of humanity if we can finally see all of ourselves as not one-dimensional. I think this is for birth parents, too. I hear birth parents, when they are talking about openness, they'll say things like, "My kid's adoptive parents are perfect. They have this white picket fence, they have a grand piano, they have two Labrador Retrievers, and life is perfect." For them, too, I'm like, "No, no. The adoptive parents have quarrels, they struggle, they have fights, they love your kid, but no, everything is not perfect.” That's currently the system we've designed.   LEGAL ISSUES (1:02:13)   BLAIR HODGES: I really appreciate the attention you give to being more supportive of birth moms in general, that the amount of resources we put into foster and adoption, there might be a reckoning we could do to see if there are more social supports we could give to mothers and to fathers or to couples or single individuals who are having children, to support them in having children and keeping them and raising them if possible. The kind of systemic interventions that could help, instead of so many resources going on the other side of things in adoption and fostering. ANGELA TUCKER: It's pretty wild. People sometimes ask, "How did your birth dad not know about you?" They were like, "I can understand how your birth mom might have hid the pregnancy and stuff, but how did his rights get legally terminated?" I share how that process works, which is, for my birth father and many men, an attorney will put an ad in a paper, and that ad needs to run for a couple months. This varies by county, but an ad might say like, "Did you know So-and-So? Were you at this place on this date? If so, call us." My birth dad never picked up the paper, much less the classified section where the font is size eight, and nobody reads that. Once that ad runs, that's essentially giving them an opportunity to step forward even though they may never see it, and then John Doe's rights are terminated. They terminate every single man in America's rights to parent me. BLAIR HODGES: What's your wish list for legal issues? If there's one or two big things you would change legally, what would those be, for the system itself? ANGELA TUCKER: One of them is the Multi-Ethnic Placement Act, which is really troublesome. It basically says that any adoption agency that receives federal money cannot mandate that prospective adopters take courses around cultural competency, that it can only be an extra—like, if you want to learn about this stuff then great, but you don't have to. That has got to change because I do feel like cultural competency is as important as feeding a child. That would be great to start. The other part of the Multi-Ethnic Placement Act requires agencies to work harder to recruit Black and Brown families to become adoptive parents. It's not a measurable part of the law, and so even the agencies who know about this law will just say, "How are we supposed to do that? We tried." I'd love to see some measurable items added to that to show how agencies can change things to start attracting more Black and Brown parents. BLAIR HODGES: It sounds like we need some more creativity there. You're a transracial adoptee yourself, you love your parents, you have an amazing story. But you've also experienced turmoil and tension and cultural issues because of transracial adoption. Like we said at the beginning, it's a bit of a minefield in recognizing the strengths and gifts of parents who transracially adopt and the strengths and gifts of transracial adoptees themselves, but also some of the downsides. Cultural competency training would be a good start, but also, as you said, making adoption more equalized, and seeing a greater diversity of adoptive families seems like a pretty good place to start. ANGELA TUCKER: Yes.   REGRETS, CHALLENGES, & SURPRISES! (1:05:50)   BLAIR HODGES: That's Angela Tucker, author of “You Should Be Grateful:” Stories of Race, Identity, and Transracial Adoption. Alright, Angela, we always like to close Family Proclamations with a question about regrets, challenges, and surprises. You mentioned a regret a little bit earlier about not using the word "guilt," survivor's guilt, that's an interesting regret. If you have any other ones, you can bring them up now. Or if you can think of anything that challenged you in writing this book, any obstacles you faced, or anything that surprised you, some new discovery, or new way of seeing the issue. This is a “choose your own adventure,” you can speak to all three of those, or you can pick one of them. It's up to you. ANGELA TUCKER: Let me talk about a challenge. When I began writing the book, I was asking my birth mom questions about her time when she was pregnant when she kept it a secret. How did you keep it a secret? Did anybody know? When did you find out? How did you get to the hospital? Did somebody drive you there? Where did you go after you gave birth to me? Did you have a home? I was asking her all these questions. Her answer was basically like, I don't know. I don't remember. I'm not sure. I don't know. I don't know. I was like, okay, I just need to work with that. It's twofold. It's one, emotional for me, but then two, to write this book, how do I do that? At some point I toyed with the idea of writing a fictionized version. I said to my birth mother, let's just say there's this character named Deborah, which is my birth mother's name, who finds herself pregnant and needs to get to the hospital, but nobody knows. How would she do that in this book? And she just started telling me stuff about herself. She still couldn't remember a lot, but when I fictionalized it, it was different. It wasn't just, "I can't even go there." That was profound. It was the separation Deborah needed to get a little closer. It made me sad because I thought, “Somebody give her a therapist.” If I could be her therapist right now, I think we could unlock so much of her trauma and shame. Anyways, it was a tactic I just threw out there. I'm grateful I didn't have to fictionalize, but I did learn a lot. I didn't put all that I learned from her in that moment in the book, just to keep her integrity, but that was a major surprise through the writing process. BLAIR HODGES: Overall did you find it hard to talk so personally? The book's really personal. It also has some great theory, it's got some great connections with other folks, but it's also personal. Was that challenging for you? It seems like you've been used to talking about your story. Maybe that comes along with being an adoptee, where people already feel like they should have access to your story. ANGELA TUCKER: There's that for sure. I enjoyed writing. I really loved that process. It was quiet and thoughtful and pensive. I didn't have the naysayers and things I do when I speak about my story online or in other formats where people can right away be like, "What are you talking about," and they come at me. I loved it. The part where I found myself feeling emotional was when I was reading the audiobook, surprisingly enough. I had moments where I was just like, what happened? I wrote these words, but I had to take some breaks. That was a surprise. BLAIR HODGES: I've just got one more for you, and this connects to perhaps another episode. You talk about how you and your partner chose not to parent, at least as of the time of writing of the book. And we'll have other episodes that talk about single adults and married folks who choose not to have kids. Do you think that's connected to your experience of adoption? Do you feel like that's related to a lot of different things? ANGELA TUCKER: I certainly think it's connected. Being child-free by choice is something I'm proud of. But I know so many often get questions: "Why would you do that? You and your husband have the resources and the love and all of these things." I love being an auntie to so many. I love being a mentor. I think my and Brian's, our kind of ethos has a lot to do with the poem I quoted at the beginning of the book by Khalil Gibran called On Children, where we don't believe parenting needs to look like ownership of a child, but we can be in people's lives in a way that helps them thrive. We do that. We have people who live in our home with us who we aren't related to, but we can support in certain ways, and they can view us using whatever term they want. That feels really in alignment with the past. We love doing that. BLAIR HODGES: That's cool. Well, as I said, people can check out other episodes that will talk about that angle. Angela, I really appreciate you taking the time to talk about your book, “You Should Be Grateful.” It's a phenomenal book, a helpful and eye-opening book. ANGELA TUCKER: Thank you. BLAIR HODGES: Thanks for listening. There's much more to come on Family Proclamations. If you're enjoying the show, why not take a second to rate and review it? Go to Apple Podcasts and let me know your thoughts. And please take a second to recommend the show to a friend. The more the merrier. Thanks to Mates of State for providing our theme song. Family Proclamations is part of the Dialogue Podcast Network. I'm Blair Hodges, and I'll see you next time.   Note: Transcripts have been edited for readability.

When Jessi Hempel came out of the closet she had no idea her whole church-going family had been hiding in there with her. And things got complicated fast when the closet door kept swinging open.  Jessi Hempel is author of The Family Outing: A Memoir. She is also host of the award-winning podcast Hello Monday, and a senior editor-at-large at LinkedIn. Her features and cover stories have appeared in Wired, Fortune, and TIME. She has appeared on CNN, PBS, MSNBC, Fox, and CNBC, addressing the culture and business of technology. Hempel is a graduate of Brown University and received a master's in journalism from UC Berkeley. She lives in Brooklyn with her wife and children. REFERENCES Jessi Hempel, "My Brother's Pregnancy and the Making of a New American Family," TIME (Sept. 12, 2016).   Transcript   JESSI HEMPEL: I started reading the section about homosexuality and I was like, "Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear!" Then I thought, "Oh my goodness, they're gonna come home and see me reading it and they're gonna know." Now I'm, you know, fourteen or fifteen years old. I was so nervous they would discover what I was researching, that I was reading for personal gain, that I was trying to figure something out. So, I immediately turned to the section on menopause because I think, "Well then they'll just think I'm reading for curiosity because there's no way I'm going through menopause." BLAIR HODGES: Jessi Hempel wasn't going through menopause. She was figuring out she was gay in the late 80s in a family where that wasn't particularly safe. She could keep it hidden for a while, but she knew that someday it wouldn't be a secret anymore, and she was afraid. So, Jessi managed to stretch the secret out. Then one day, her sister discovers something on their father's computer that will turn the whole family on its head. There was more than one secret closet in this family, and the closet doors would swing open again and again. In this episode, Jessi joins us to talk about her incredible memoir, The Family Outing. There's no one right way to be a family, and every kind of family has something we can learn from. I'm Blair Hodges, and this is Family Proclamations.   THE FAMILY LEAST LIKELY TO KEEP IN TOUCH (1:38)   BLAIR HODGES: Jessi Hempel, welcome to Family Proclamations. JESSI HEMPEL: Well, thank you so much for having me, Blair. I love what you're doing with the show. BLAIR HODGES: I'm excited to talk to you about this book, The Family Outing. You're a professional writer, you didn't just write a book because of your amazing experiences. You also have technical skills with this, so people might not think twice about the fact that you've published a book. But I do think this particular book is sort of surprising if we look at your other professional stuff. Like your career focuses on tech reporting, and this is a really personal memoir. Talk about what it was like to kind of transition to a different mode of writing to get this book done. JESSI HEMPEL: You're very correct, Blair. For the first 25 years of my life as a writer—and that's a lot of years, by the way, I had been writing for a long time—I thought that if I ever wrote a book it would be about technology, artificial intelligence, or the rise of social networks, or any of the myriad things I geeked out on related to business and tech. I had spent my entire career until that point writing for magazines like Business Week, and Fortune, and Wired about the kinds of things that kept me up at night, which were and are things having to do with things like the evolution of new technology. And that was my identity. And I start there, Blair, because I think what happened to me actually happened to a lot of people. In March of 2020—and I should start by saying, if you just say “March of 2020” most people get this dour look on their face, right? Yeah, we can all think about where we might have been. And for me, I was living in Brooklyn, New York. And I was this technology writer, and I was a fairly new parent, my wife and I had a baby, he had just turned a year old, and I had a real strong sense of my identity, right? I traveled all the time, I was out in the world, career focused. And then overnight all of that changed. My job was thankfully safe, but there was a question as to whether it would continue. And suddenly, there was no traveling. In fact, there was no office to go to. There was no daycare, which meant that I was home with my child all day. And New York was a particularly scary place to be. My wife and I finally got to a point where we said we gotta get out of here. Bear with me, because this does have to do with the book. I know, Blair, right here that you're like, this not the question that I asked. [laughter] BLAIR HODGES: I'm following, I'm following! JESSI HEMPEL: Okay! So, my wife and I put the baby and the dog in the back of the Subaru—because those are the lesbians that we are—and we hit the gas and started driving south. Her parents lived in Tupelo, Mississippi, and we drove all the way to their house, which was 18 hours. And when we got there, we thought we'd stay for 10 days, and—you know where the story is going—we stayed for months. Those first couple of weeks that I was living in my wife's childhood bedroom, you know, I did the things that we did at the very beginning of the pandemic. Like I got Zoom-crazy, right? I did Zoom happy hours and Zoom yoga and I Zoomed with friends I hadn't talked to in a while. And then very quickly, I just grew so tired of Zoom and really tired of talking to anyone. I was depressed. I was super down. And while I was so down, I discovered that there were just a few people I wanted to talk to. And I wanted to talk to them every single day. And that was my brother, my sister, and my mom, and my dad. And I thought that was pretty wild because if you had known us in our youth you would have voted us the family least likely to keep in touch with each other. We were just a hot mess, right? But here we were in the middle of this global emergency, and these were the people I was reaching for. And we were quarantining in five different houses in four different states. And we were texting and in touch with each other every day. So all that was going on, Blair. Back in New York, I had this very commercial literary agent who kept calling me and saying, "Jessi, now is a great time to write a book." And I would say, "Have you seen my life? There is nothing great about this moment. I'm kind of busy trying to keep my head above water. It's not a good time.” And she kept saying, “No, no, this is a great time. There are not a lot of writers bringing books to market.” She was right about that. “And so if there was ever a moment when you had a real dream, like the dream project, this is the moment you could get that project done.” And so I said, "Okay, I'll think about it." And I came back to her, and I said, "Well, how about I write a tech book about the business of tech?" and she said, "Boring." She said, "Go back and bring me the book that you would be most afraid to write." So I thought about it. Then I came back to her. And I said, "Well, what if I interviewed everybody in my family and wrote the story of how we all came out? Because here's the thing, I think the reason why we like each other so much right now, and why we depend on each other so much emotionally, and why we are close, is because things were so hard and broken. And we all did this internal work of coming out. And that work—not only did it help us each to realize ourselves, but it helped us to realize something about each other.” And she said, "Perfect, we'll call it The Family Outing." And literally, from there I was writing the book.   FRAMING THE STORY (6:44)   BLAIR HODGES: And it was in the course of starting those interviews that you started to wrap your head around the story of your family, because the easy story to tell, which you say in the introduction is, we had this family, there was all this dysfunction, and then we all came out of the closet, and now we're all okay. And that's an interesting story in and of itself, but you weren't entirely satisfied with it. Why wasn't it satisfying when thought about framing your book and the story you wanted to tell? JESSI HEMPEL: I love that sort of overview of it, because that is how I kind of have been telling it my whole life and it was a great cocktail party story. Like, "Hey, I've got the gayest family. My family can out-gay your family. Listen to how gay we are. We all came out of the closet.” And I should say when I say that, Blair, I came out of the closet first. I came out at 19. Just straight up gay. I would even call myself a little bit of a boring gay. I'm very in the box, like, you know, fairly heteronormative in presentation, like, just discovered Ani DiFranco at 19 and was like, "Yeah, there we go." [laughter] Shortly after, my dad came out as gay, which forced him to leave his marriage. My sister came out as bisexual, my brother came out as transgender, and later went on to carry a child. And that whole process caused us to do a great deal of self-reflection. And my mother came out as a survivor of a series of crimes so heinous, I could really only learn about them in little bits over time. And all of this change happened over the course of three and a half, four years, a very short period of time. And while it was happening, I've got to say, it was terrible. It was terrible. And it was hard. And terrible and hard—once you get to the other side of them—forge character, right? And so what I was interested in was, I wanted to figure out not just what my version of the story was, but what every member of my family thought happened. I wanted to see if I could get to one common narrative that we all agreed upon, like, "Hey, here's what happened." So I kind of pitched the story to everybody. I was like, "Hey, you know what we could do is, I could interview you, we could do a whole lot of interviews, you could tell me your side of the story. I could figure out where they line up. And then I could just come up with one common narrative." And everybody agreed to it, which, God bless them that they all agreed to it because, especially for my parents, it was a huge leap of faith. They were essentially agreeing to allow me to air all my family's dirty laundry, and to live through that. BLAIR HODGES: Because for interviews they have to be involved with it, right? Like not just your parents telling you, but they have to dig— JESSI HEMPEL: Right. I mean, there was so much digging, and subsequently so much healing in the writing of the story. And I should say, by the way we're talking about it you would think this is like an encyclopedia about my family. But I also endeavored to write a beach read. I wanted to write something that would move so fast you would sit down and start to read it, and if it was a book that spoke to you—and I will say books are very personal, not every book speaks to every person—but if those books spoke to you, that you would sit down, open it, and want to finish it right away and just fly through it. But you know, when I started to try to get all of our stories to line up, the only thing I really learned, Blair, is that even when five people endeavor in good faith to tell one story, memory is really crappy. And people remember things differently and nobody could get the details right.   JESSI'S FATHER (10:17)   BLAIR HODGES: Part of your project, then, was to get a narrative thread that worked, but also that would be satisfactory and representative of the perspectives of your family. You were juggling a lot of different stories here. One of the most interesting for me was about your father. He was a young man in the 1970s. He was the son of a very religiously devout minister. And he's thinking about maybe entering the ministry himself. But things aren't really clicking, his mission work gets cut short, he finds himself in this meeting with a psychiatrist and a psychoanalyst, and he's listing off all these ways he feels lost in his life. And then he just tosses out, "Oh, also, I think I might be gay." Tell us a little bit more about your dad in this moment and what that must have been like for him to be a gay young man in the seventies from this devout family. JESSI HEMPEL: I mean, I think so much about this. Because if you had met my dad as a 10-year-old child, you would probably have identified him—especially in our contemporary culture, maybe not back then—but even from his youngest years, he was somebody who people probably identified as, "Oh, that kid's probably gonna grow up to be gay." He just had a manner about him. And I think that really scared his parents. My grandfather was a German Methodist minister who even felt like the Methodist Church wasn't quite strict enough. So he would bring his family for extra churching on Wednesdays to the Baptist church down the street. He really took his relationship with God seriously, and was somewhat panicked you know, he had three children, he had two daughters, and then he had this son, and in their family, I mean, everything was about the son. They just really wanted the son to accurately represent the family and take on the tradition, which was a religious tradition, whatever that was. And there was my dad, this young gay kid, and they became so worried about him being—I mean, they never used the word “gay.” Let me be really clear, Blair. But you know, even in middle school, they had a couple of experiences where—and this isn't in the book, but just from my dad talking to me, you know, his parents found him like trying on his big sisters' petticoats. And they just were concerned enough that they figured out how to get him into a rigorous Christian boys boarding school. And all that time, my dad knew in his heart that he was gay, or that he liked boys. I don't think he had a word for it. BLAIR HODGES: I think that's a really important point, too, that it wouldn't have been thought of in terms of an identity, but rather as sinful inclinations, or temptations he was supposed to fight. So it wouldn't have been, “Oh no, my son's gay.” It's, “Oh no, he's going to struggle with these temptations. How are we going to Christianize them out of him? How are we gonna fix that pathology?” One of those solutions then was to get married, like, "This'll fix it." JESSI HEMPEL: Super interesting, right? My father didn't really know what he wanted to do with his life. He's a very bright guy. He graduated top of his class at his Christian boarding school. He went off to Middlebury College and he got a scholarship. His family had no money. He finished Middlebury College a semester early and he had no career path, no idea what he wanted to do. He was kind of like, as bright as he was intellectually, he was kind of a dud socially. Couldn't figure out dating, couldn't figure out anything, and so his parents really kind of pushed him into the mission. And that seemed like a thing to do. His older sister had become a missionary. And by the way, it was a great lifestyle for her. It worked really, really well for her. She has continued this lifestyle for her entire life. I mean, she eventually got married and had children. But this lifestyle did not work for my dad. And here's where I have to give the Methodist Church some credit. It seems from what I could figure out—and again, I wasn't able to talk to any of these people personally—but just from reading diaries of my father and picking up stories and reading my grandfather's notes. You know, my grandfather pushed the Methodist ministry to invite my father into the mission. I think that they knew he didn't want to be a missionary, and they knew that he was a really lost kid, and that he needed some guidance. And so they finally said to him, "Look, we're just going to let you out of this commitment and we're also going to pay for counseling for you. So go get yourself settled somewhere. And we the church are then going to pick up therapy for you." And that's really cool. The other side of that was that when my father finally got himself settled somewhere, he went off to live with his sister for a couple months, he got a Christian therapist who listened to him and assured him when he mentioned that maybe he could be possibly, I mean, there's a potential that he could be gay—you know, mumbled the word, didn't even say it loudly—they said, "No, no, no, no,” you know, “a lot of young adolescent men feel this way during one stage of growth and adolescence, and you just need to get married. Just get married, that'll take care of it."   JESSI'S MOTHER (15:11)   BLAIR HODGES: And so then he does. He meets your mom. And your mother—you found out in the course of writing the book, and throughout your life, your mom had experienced some trauma around the time she met your dad. She was going through some things. So your dad's sort of trying to find his way, deciding to get married and this and that, and your mom was trying to figure out her future family life at this time, too. She was working at this department store. And she had a coworker there that she kind of had a crush on, who was actually revealed to be a friend, and maybe even an accomplice of a serial killer in Michigan. I didn't expect this in The Family Outing. Talk about that for a sec.   JESSI HEMPEL: In the late 60s, in Ypsilanti, Michigan, there was a man who preyed upon women in my mom's community. And it was still the early sixties you know, this was before the heyday of serial killers in our culture, back when that was still sort of a new idea. But women started disappearing, probably when my mom was in about ninth or tenth grade. And, you know, there would be women that my mom knew. It would be like the assistant art teacher at the high school, or the church deacon's secretary, and they'd be people that were about my mom's age and that looked a lot like my mom. And the town became increasingly fearful as these disappearances and subsequent murders happened at a cadence of like once a year, and then once every six months, and then moved into a cadence of happening quite frequently. And all of the men in town became volunteer neighborhood watch folks, including my grandfather, and all the young girls were put on curfews. And this was the backdrop against which my mom attempted to live her adolescence. I think it's probably true when anybody experiences something as persistently scary as that, you become immune to the fear, and you just have to live your life. And my mom did that. She worked at a department store downtown, and she developed a crush on a guy. And there was actually a moment when that guy scared the bejesus out of her in a way that suddenly— BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, he corners her in a back room. JESSI HEMPEL: And he throttles her throat, and he threatens her! And she was looking at him and she was trying to get him to stop. And then she realized, "Oh, my goodness, I actually don't know anything about this man." And then he lets go. And he's like, "I'm only joking. But, like, what would you do if I were the killer?" And my mom goes home with this information. She's trying to process it. And she doesn't even have time to process it because that's when this man and his best friend are arrested for the murders. And he later gets off in exchange for testifying against his best friend. BLAIR HODGES: Right, which is kind of sketchy because he could have been more involved. But he's the one who talked to the cops, basically. JESSI HEMPEL: That's exactly right. And most people in Ypsilanti, Michigan who were alive at that time and paying attention believe that he was, if not in on the murders, he certainly knew about the murders. And so my mom lived with this. And this shaped her. Her parents loved her very much. But in our popular culture in, you know, the late sixties and early seventies, I think what love looked like in white middle class American families was, “Hey, we're not going to talk about this. We're just going to try to put this behind us. We're going to focus on something else.” And so my grandparents encouraged my mom, “Hey, let's not talk about this.” Then the guy was arrested, he was taken away. There was never any further discussion about it. My mom continues to work at this department store, her life goes back to some semblance of something like normal, whatever normal is. And a year later, maybe a year and a half later, she meets this effeminate son of a minister who wants to get married right away. And he's safe and lovely. And it's no surprise to me that they found each other in that moment.   FAMILY UNHAPPINESS (19:07)   BLAIR HODGES: And so they do. They get married, and they have three kids—you and two younger siblings. It seems like your classic American family at this point. You've got two churchgoing parents, you got Dad as the breadwinner, Mom is the primary caregiver to the kids. And in fact, Dad's actually sometimes a bit too distant because of his work obligations. And that's how their relationship actually starts to fray. JESSI HEMPEL: They're trying so hard, right? And they're trying to check off the list of things you check off in order to qualify for the Olin Mills picture in like the eighties that would go on the Christmas card, and they're doing a great job at it on the surface. And here I think it's important to remember that at the beginning, my parents really were in love, and I think when one tells these kinds of stories and the end of the stories is that a marriage dissolves, we forget that before there was bad, there was a lot of history in the good that is worth considering. It wasn't like my parents lied to themselves in any overt way when they fell for each other. They actually did fall for each other in a moment. But, you know, as life went on, my father—it becomes harder and harder for him to bury this truth about himself. So he just becomes more and more distant. He just checks out. And my mother then is in a marriage that on the surface looks like everybody else's, and she thinks she should feel happy. But truthfully, she's so lonely because she's trying to raise these three children kind of all on her own. And then her own flashbacks and memories start to come up and she becomes extremely depressed. And I think about this long period—ultimately my adolescence, right? For me, it was age ten to twenty or so—as the closeted period in my family's life. And we were all pretty miserable and pretty unhappy and often emotionally violent to each other, and my parents in particular to us, and sometimes even physically violent. And that is the product of living in the closet. That is what it means to have to hide yourself. You become your worst version of yourself.   JESSI'S CHILDHOOD SECRET (21:11)   BLAIR HODGES: Seeing you grow up in the book, I love this. I loved reading about little Jessi. You start getting called “Jessica” in the third grade. This Jessica seems so precocious, and that she really needs to be seen in some ways. But also, she says she couldn't be seen. Here's something you write: "When I was a child, I believed there were things I couldn't reveal about myself, things that made me despicable, unlovable." So on the one hand, you wanted to connect, you wanted to be seen. And on the other hand, you had what you felt like was this dark secret about yourself. Talk about what that was like for you. JESSI HEMPEL: Well, you know, I was gay, and by that, I mean, I also didn't have a word for it. But I knew by the time I was in early elementary school that my desire was programmed differently than other people's desire. And that this was something I needed to hide. I don't even know exactly how I knew that. But I knew that. And that if anybody ever found out, that would be bad for me. I think one thing about the eighties and into the early nineties was that this was a time when maybe you could be gay, but you just didn't talk about it. And none of the people we knew on television came out on television. You know, Ellen DeGeneres didn't come out of the closet on TV until 1996. BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, I was in high school. JESSI HEMPEL: You probably remember it. Do you remember it, Blair? BLAIR HODGES: I do! I do. And at the time, I was in a place where I thought something was very wrong with that. I was unsettled by it. But I think I didn't know much about what it meant. And the thing is that growing up, we would say all the slurs, we would say “queer” and stuff like this without really even thinking about what it meant. I did get the sense that I was expected to become a man, I always had heteronormative cultural expectations, but I didn't know that I knew any gay people. So Ellen was one of the first people where I was like, oh, there's gay people. Okay, there's one in real life. JESSI HEMPEL: Completely. And that was so profoundly important. It started a cultural change that grew into the movement that we have today, right? But, you know, before all that happened, I was like, "Queer" was the word we use to describe things that were strange and not cool in high school. And I used it all the time before it became the word that was my identity. But I knew I also had these crushes on girls starting in middle school and into high school that I could kind of get away with because I think this kind of friendship is more sanctioned between women than it is between men. BLAIR HODGES: Can we read about one of these? There's an excerpt on page 80 I thought would really speak to that. Just to the end of the page there. JESSI HEMPEL: Okay. Yeah, awesome. "In sixth grade, I love Becky Orr. She's my best friend. She has long brown curly hair that she parts in the middle and pins back with two barrettes, and a face like a Cabbage Patch Kid doll, round with dimples on her cheeks. We spend our time doing things that border on little kid, like running through the sprinkler and watching the Mickey Mouse Club. Then we go to our respective homes and talk on the phone. “When we're not talking, I'm thinking about talking to her. I can find a way to weave Becky into any conversation. For instance, if Dad mentions going to the beach next summer, I might say, 'You know who loves the beach?' 'Who?' he'll say, even though he knows the answer: Becky Orr. “Being a closeted gay girl in the 1980s involves hiding out in the open. It's constantly declaring your feelings to the object of your affection and getting away with it because girls are allowed to love each other. Loving is entirely condoned. Lusting is something of which we don't speak. “I don't have a name for this way that I'm drawn to Becky, I always longed to be closer to my best friends, but I don't even know what I'm longing for. To feel more? To merge into them more? To crawl inside their heads? This merging desire feels most possible when a friend is most vulnerable, such as when she is falling in love with someone else. In this way, I learn to lie to myself. When Becky calls to tell me David kissed her at the St. John's Dance, I feel the universe cleave into sections, see her spinning backward from me. She'll like David better than me, differently than me. But just now, it's me for whom she reaches to share this new experience and I want to hold onto her attention. 'I'm so excited for you, Becky,' I say, 'Tell me everything.' It's always this way for me with a best friend. For a brief period, I will inhabit them, and then I'll lose them." BLAIR HODGES: We get to see more of that as you tell more of your story. A couple of years after this, you still haven't really got a word for it, you haven't really nailed it down for yourself. But a couple years later, you're babysitting for some neighbors a few houses down. And there's a book they have there. And I recognize the title of this. It's called Our Bodies, Ourselves, this book is on the shelf there and you're curious. So you pick it up and you start to read it. And this book really brings some things home. JESSI HEMPEL: It really does. And I just remember, Blair, I was so nervous they would discover I was researching, that I was reading for personal gain, that I was trying to figure something out, I started reading the section about homosexuality. And I was like, "Oh, dear, oh, dear. Oh, dear! Wow, that really..." And then I thought, "Oh, my goodness, they're gonna come home and see me reading it. And they're gonna know." Now I'm, you know, fifteen years old, fourteen years old. So I immediately turn to the section on menopause because I think well, then they'll just think I'm reading for curiosity, because there's no way I'm going through menopause! [laughter] BLAIR HODGES: But you knew then, right? You say you knew. In fact, read the end of that chapter there. JESSI HEMPEL: "From this point on, I know the thing about myself I have been trying not to know. I understand that it cannot be changed, that it is innate, like my eye color. “I'm gay. “One day I will need to accept this, and I believe it will end the good part of my life. It will end my ability to get along with the people I know and love. I am gay. I will spend my adult years in a dirty city living with men I do not like. I won't have kids. But hopefully also, I'll know women that look like the women in this book. Would that be so bad? “Maybe, I think, I can stave this off until after high school. Maybe I can buy myself a few more years of the good life in which I think I can be like everyone else. Maybe no one else has to know."   KICKED OUT OF THE CLOSET (27:42)   BLAIR HODGES: And as you're dealing with all that, your relationship with your mother is deteriorating. People who read the book will see how that plays out. You're struggling, things in your family feel disconnected, and things are going to come to a head eventually here. Chapter 14, I think, was probably one of the most painful chapters to read. This is when your sister makes a discovery on your dad's computer. JESSI HEMPEL: My dad was outed. We like to say that he was kicked out of the closet more than he came out of the closet. I was just out of college. My sister, who's four years younger than me, had just finished her first year of college and she was home for the summer. And things were not great between my parents by this point. Years and years of not taking care of their relationship had led to a situation where, you know, Mom watched TV all evening long and Dad disappeared into the den and they didn't really talk to each other. And Dad would get on his computer. So my sister is in her bedroom. And she is IM'ing—one of those early chat programs, with her boyfriend. They're sort of newly in love. And then her computer dies. It runs out of batteries. It's an early laptop. And so she gets frustrated with it. And she goes into the den to use the family computer to pick up the conversation. And when she goes on the computer, somebody she doesn't know pings her back. And she quickly discovers this person she doesn't know seems to be a man involved with my father. And she puts it together very quickly that this person messaging her is some man that my dad is having an affair with. And then everything blows up, Blair. In that particular moment, my dad and my mom were hosting visiting relatives— BLAIR HODGES: I know. It was such a bad moment!— JESSI HEMPEL: I mean, is there ever a good moment, though? Could you ever plan, could you ever be like, you know, "On July 20th—" [laughter] BLAIR HODGES: No, but maybe on a quiet weekend, though, with no visitors! JESSI HEMPEL: That would've been better, but no. [laughter] They were just waiting for my aunt and uncle to arrive. They were driving home from, I think, shopping for furniture, and my sister calls my dad—we had one of those early car phones, it was sort of a bit before cell phones, and they were like these big bricks, and you didn't really want to use them because it was super expensive, but for emergencies, right? So my sister calls and wants to talk to my dad, my mom picks up and my sister basically intimates to my mom, she says, "Tell Dad that So-and-So says hi." And in that moment my dad knows exactly what has happened. And he panics, and he just thinks, “I can undo this, I can fix this, I can fix this.” So he races home, he tries to get time with my sister, but my sister's not having it. And she leaves. She goes to her boyfriend's house, he lives in Vermont. She basically says, you know, “You tell Mom, or I will.” And so my dad has to tell my mom, you know, “Hey, I've been doing these,” you know—his understanding of what's happening at this point too is really important. Because I think it is like the process of coming out of the closet is not a light switch that you flip on and off. It's a gradual awakening or awareness. And so his thought at this point is that he has been afflicted by something, rather like he might be afflicted by some form of cancer that's surely curable if you get the right treatments. And so his first sort of revelation to my mom is like, "I've been afflicted by these unhealthy desires, and I've acted upon them and broken the covenant of our marriage. And I'm going to fix this. And we can fix this. And I'm so sorry that I'm sick." Luckily, for everybody involved, that's not where his emotional work ended. But that's where it started. BLAIR HODGES: And Mom wanted to hang in there for a minute, like they really thought they could figure this out. She became invested in making this work, and it sort of starts getting drawn out, and you're seeing your parents try to make what is appearing increasingly to be a sham, they're trying so hard to make it work, and your dad is experiencing what you call the "Rainbow Phase." He's kind of finally started to embrace his gay self, but he's also trying to not be gay. He's also trying to maintain this mixed-orientation marriage at the same time, which is so strange. JESSI HEMPEL: I mean, imagine it, though, because he loves my mom, and he loves this family we have created. He also has a pretty intact relationship with his religion and with God at this point. And stepping outside of the framework of those things is completely unknown to him. This is also the summer of his fiftieth birthday. He turns fifty about two weeks after all of this happens. So imagine if you live the first fifty years of your life with one identity and then you are called to ask to rethink it. It seems impossible. You think you know who you are. How could you also be this other person? BLAIR HODGES: Do you think there was some excitement in it, too? Like the Rainbow Phase part of it? JESSI HEMPEL: Coming out is great, okay? Blair, let me tell you, coming out involves coming into a community of people who have been waiting for you, many of whom have also experienced rejection and hurt and hardship from their families of origin. And when you finally get brave enough to figure out how to bring a dish of macaroni to the potluck at the LGBT center, what you discover is a whole lot of people who are like, I want to be your friend. You want to go to the theater with me? You want to join my biking club? He joined a church for a little while that was composed of people who had left their churches because they couldn't be a part of it. He walked into opportunities for belonging. And I think it's such an important distinction, Blair, because when you are the spouse being left in that situation, you don't walk into belonging. You have to rethink everything, you have to reconstitute your identity, and there's no flag waving for you. BLAIR HODGES: No. Your mother had such difficulty and talked about a suicide attempt even. She came to the point where that was on the table for her. What was it like writing about that? And how did she feel about that being part of the book? JESSI HEMPEL: It was really hard to figure out how to write about it. She was pretty unhappy at first with that being part of the book. She felt, you know, she is a mental health practitioner. And she worried that— BLAIR HODGES: Yeah. That's a community she fell into, like, figuring out mental health and becoming a therapist and all that, so to speak, she needed a place to fall. But we're talking about what happened before that. Sorry, just wanted to interject that— JESSI HEMPEL: Right. But in her moment of crisis, and you asked specifically about how she felt about me writing about it, she was scared that if she revealed exactly how vulnerable she was, people would think less of her. And so that was her fear in the book. And yet, she was really honest with me about what that moment of crisis felt like. And I was able to really reflect both how she thought and felt about that moment of crisis, but also how it affected my brother who was still in high school, and my sister who was at college. When an event like that happens in a family system, it happens differently to everyone, and hopefully the book sort of captures that.   SIBLING RIVALRY (34:53)   BLAIR HODGES: Oh, it sure does. I think this is one of the main strengths of your book, because it shows how coming out can be such an involved and connected and networked process, that it's not an isolated thing. And people that experience it, there are shockwaves—there's joy, there's grief, there's so many different emotions. And it's not an isolated individual experience. It has repercussions for everybody around. We certainly get to witness that with you, and your siblings, and your mom, and how it impacted your dad, and how it impacted their religious faith and their connection to different religious communities, and how it connected your mom to communities of therapy and research and how to be in therapeutic relationship with others. I think that's such a central strength of The Family Outing, that we get to witness how that felt. With that in mind, let's take a second to talk about your siblings. So Katja is the middle child. And then the youngest is Evan. Evan was assigned female at birth. And Katja comes out as bisexual. It was interesting, your reaction to that. Because you had come out as gay. And when your sister came out as bi, you seem sort of like, "Oh, okay." Maybe talk a little bit about the bi erasure that kind of happens, right? Bi people often talk about bi erasure, that they're sort of dismissed, or that it's sort of looked sideways at, like, "Oh, okay, interesting…" JESSI HEMPEL: I'm so glad you brought that up. You know, my wife identifies as bisexual, and people can be somewhat callous of that being like, "Well, you and Jessi have been together for twelve years. Why do we have to call you bisexual?" BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, I hear this with people that are married, too. I know a woman who's married to a guy, she gets the exact same question a lot, and she came out as bi later in life, and they're like, "But you're already married, and you have kids and stuff. Like, what's the point?" So that bi erasure is real. JESSI HEMPEL: One hundred percent. The other piece there that I really wanted to figure out how to highlight is that this book is about coming out, but it's also about how to receive people who come out to you. I wanted to call attention to the fact that, you know, I came out first. I thought I knew a thing or two about what it was to be queer and who got to be queer. And I actually, unfortunately, I thought I kind of owned it in my family. And I was not great to my sister or my brother when they came out. In both situations my first response was to belittle the experience, to say some version of, "Well, I mean, you know, okay, fine." Like with my sister, "Oh, you just want to be like the rest of us. Sure, you're bisexual, like you were the popular girl in school, you always had a boyfriend, like, I know, this is a passing fad." And with my brother, you know, a couple years later, I did the exact same thing. He said, "My pronouns are going to be he and him, the name I choose is Evan. Please call me that when I come to visit you." And my first response was like, "But you just wore that beautiful dress at Christmas. I'm sure this is a passing thing. Like, what's that about?" I think, you know, having some compassion for myself and for anyone in that situation, what's true is that when the people we love most, who are closest to us, family members in particular, but also good friends, reveal something about themselves that is so outside of what we think we know about them, it threatens our own identity. And sometimes our immediate first reaction is to get so wrapped up in the threat to our own identity that we can't receive what they have to tell us. BLAIR HODGES: We might even think like, how could they not have told me? There's perhaps also a trust thing, too, not honoring the reasons why people come out when they do. I also think this sort of a cultural experience might become less common, right, the more acceptable it is, the more people are coming out. Some people don't even need to come out. They're growing up in a family or culture system where like, that's just the thing. But as long as there are people coming out, the ways that they're received, especially by the people that love them the most, matters the most, and you're vulnerable in the way you talk about your own missteps and things you wish you could have done differently. You straightforwardly tell us those reactions. Like when Evan comes out and says he's trans, like you just described it, you're kind of like, “Okay…” and coming to grips with that yourself and being able to talk about it, again, I think it speaks to the strength of your book. I want to remind people, the book is called The Family Outing, and we're talking to Jessi Hempel. She's host of an award-winning podcast called Hello Monday, and also a senior editor at large at LinkedIn. Her writing usually focuses on work and meaning in the digital age. And you might have seen her on CNN, PBS, MSNBC, or CNBC, talking about culture and business of technology. She graduated from Brown University, got a Master of Journalism from UC—Berkeley, lots of education, lots of experience, a lot of writing. And you've got this whole family background behind all that, too.   SEEKING A CURE FOR THE EMOTIONAL FLU (39:30)   BLAIR HODGES: One of my favorite scenes, by the way, was when you were talking about being on CNN at one point, and you just went blank in the mind at this point. I can't believe it. You talk about the dead air. And that was kind of a crisis point for you, right? What were you doing there?   JESSI HEMPEL: In my late twenties I was always very career-forward. And in my early adulthood, I just really wanted to be a business writer. I started writing and I got a job at Businessweek, and I became a TV commentator. And I learned, Blair, that you don't actually need to know very much about whatever they're asking you on TV to be pretty good at this job. All you have to do for the most part is master the art of the bridge. So whatever question you ask, no matter how hard it is, or how little I know about it, what I can say is, "Blair, it's so interesting, you would ask that, but what people really want to know about is—" whatever I want to talk about, and then I started talking, and the TV viewers never even really put it together if I'm confident enough. And this was my trick for actually talking about a lot of things I really didn't know much about in my twenties on television. BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, I would always call it “the pivot.” [laughter] JESSI HEMPEL: The pivot. But also during this period, I really hadn't dealt with a lot of the trauma that had happened in my family. And what would happen is that just every once in a while it would catch up with me. And I had a name for this, I think the modern-day version of it would be something like a panic attack, but I called it the emotional flu. And I would literally just check out for some period of time and be completely unable to manage. The way out of this, by the way, was therapy—a really great therapist that I saw weekly for nine years. But we're before that here. And this happened to me, this set of panic attacks that landed me in a place where I suddenly checked out, didn't show up for work for a day and didn't prepare for anything. And then I needed to go in to CNN, I was booked on CNN. So I put my makeup on and went into the studio, the car came and picked me up and brought me in, and they put me in the chair. And I kind of was like, I was so fragile. But I thought the question they were going to ask me was, “what did we do when we learned that the Olympics are,” wherever they were, I think I believed at the time that they were going to be in London. I was ready to talk about that. I had, like, one thing to say. And then it turned out that the Olympics were in Paris, and they asked me the question, you know, what do you think? What does it mean for Paris that the Olympics are going to be there and, Blair, I said, nothing. Just looked at the screen, panicked. And there's nothing more terrifying than silence, like, dead air on television. BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, everybody probably panicked right then. JESSI HEMPEL: Yeah, they made a little note in the book that said, “Don't book her again.” [laughter] It was probably four years before I went on CNN again. But that also was the moment when I realized if I didn't turn my attention to this, it was going to take something really important from my future. And so it was the reason why I think I finally got into therapy. BLAIR HODGES: And that made a profound difference for you. We also see you just trying to find meaning and connection, too. You got kind of wrapped up in these sort of personal improvement groups, people might be familiar with these like, I don't know, I won't say cult, some people would, but there are these groups you get involved with, and you have to pay money to do these levels of trainings. And so you're also trying to find connections, it seemed like, beyond your family, to just have your feet on the ground and also feel empowered yourself. We see you searching a lot. And that's another vulnerable part of the book, is where you talk about sort of getting connected to some of these self-improvement groups. JESSI HEMPEL: Yeah, I mean, I think the most notable group like this is Landmark, people may be familiar with it. The group I did was sort of a radical offshoot of Landmark. And what's true about these groups is they can be really problematic in the way they build, but they also contain really great learning. And for me—and I hope I conveyed this in the book—it was a little bit of both. In the end, I got so wrapped up in these that I needed somebody to step in and help me get out. But I also learned a lot about the idea that I could be responsible for my own happiness, and that I could make things happen for myself in my life. I took so much self-agency from this experience. And I'm grateful for that. BLAIR HODGES: It was nice to see you talk about the importance of “found family,” the people you connected with. There's a group, an organization called COLAGE—Children of Lesbians and Gays Everywhere—that you were connected to in some ways, but also that group can be kind of challenging, too, because you didn't necessarily see your own experience there. JESSI HEMPEL: That group is a great group that still exists and is a pretty wonderful resource for any child whose parents have come out. I stumbled upon it in my early twenties. It was wonderful to be part of a community of other people whose parents were also queer. The thing I found confusing at that point was that in those years I wasn't proud of my parents. Their marriage was coming apart. They were a mess. They were not in good shape. And I would be part of this group where a lot of the children in this group came from families more like the family I have gone on to create, where both parents were queer at the origination of the children, and they'd sort of grown up with queer parents. And it was hard to figure out how to be truthful about my own family in the smaller community, when also the public narrative I felt compelled to uphold was that gay families are great. We've got everything figured out, we raise good kids, because there's so much vitriol directed toward families with same-sex parents that I felt compelled to be defensive of them in public. Does that make sense? BLAIR HODGES: It certainly does. Your parents end up separating and your father has relationships—he finally kind of embraces that side of himself and meets a man to share his life with. And your mom gets into therapy and begins helping others. And then you came around to having kids through your connection to your partner, Francis. It didn't seem like something you were super excited to do throughout your life. But then through this partnership, you decided, "Oh, this could work for us." Do you think that's in part because you didn't have a lot of models to look at? Like, there weren't a lot of lesbian women obviously having kids. You didn't get to see families that look like that. So did you sort of just grow up thinking, "Well, I'm just not going to have that. It's just not really a thing”? JESSI HEMPEL: Yes, and I think it wasn't so much because I was gay that I thought, "Oh, I don't want to have children." But because I didn't trust myself to be a good parent because I did not feel I had been parented well. And I worried I would parent a child like I had been parented. And so rather than even creating the possibility that that might happen, I just moved right to "I don't want kids. I'm a person who doesn't want kids." And it wasn't until I had been in my relationship with my partner, Francis, for many years, that I came around, and even when she told me, "Hey, I'm ready to have kids," I still was like, "Oh, no, I guess we have to break up because I would be a horrible parent." And she had to really press me and say, "Well, are you saying you don't want kids?" And it was like, "No, I'm not saying I want them or don't want them. I'm saying I would be bad at it." And it caused a sort of crisis of my sense of self. I ended up writing to the woman who had really helped me in high school, the assistant principal of my high school. She'd known me since my youth. And I wrote to her and just basically said, do you think I can do this? Is this a really bad idea? And she was the one who wrote to me and said, "You don't have to be your history. You can be a new version of yourself. You have learned what you need to learn in life, and you can be good at this."   EVAN'S STORY (47:38)   BLAIR HODGES: I was also really moved by your brother Evan's story. There's a conversation you had with Evan at one point where he pointed out that your parents' secrets and your secrets were a little bit different. Evan was talking about how your parents' generation and your generation experience secrets differently. He said they are fundamentally different because your secrets aren't secret from yourselves. Like with your parents, they kind of had to keep it—especially your father—had to keep that from himself. For you all, it was more about keeping that secret just from your family. You actually kind of knew and were more ready to embrace it than the family was. And perhaps that's a different thing to experience. JESSI HEMPEL: Yeah, I think that's right. And I think what my brother was really trying to push me to think about was how this might impact our kids. Because, you know, when my brother and I had this conversation, we were both new parents. He had two little kids at home, and we had just had our second baby. And we were talking about what this might mean for our kids and what we hope for our kids. And he was saying, "Well, look, we've made it this far. But they're gonna have to do the work of figuring out what their secrets mean to them, and what their truths are. We can't do that work for them." BLAIR HODGES: And for Evan, I also enjoyed reading about his experience being pregnant and having children as a trans man. It's not terribly common. There aren't a lot of people who have written about it or spoken about it publicly. There's still plenty of prejudice and misunderstanding about trans folks today. So it was nice to see in your book an example of a trans man who went through that and gave birth to kids and wanted to have this family and has this family. So that's a story... I mean, your book obviously wasn't the Book of Evan, so you didn't get into it a ton. But I loved learning the little bit I learned about him. JESSI HEMPEL: I so appreciate that. And you know, the whole book owes itself to a story I wrote about my brother's pregnancy for Time Magazine, about his decision to get pregnant, what that experience was like for him carrying the baby, what the rest of the world thought as he did it. So if you're curious about it, also, if you Google my brother's name and the word "Time," I guarantee you it will be the first five things that pop up.   REGRETS, CHALLENGES, AND SURPRISES (49:47)   BLAIR HODGES: Perfect. I'll put a link to the show notes too, so people can check that out, and that'll fit well with some other episodes in the show as well. All right. That's Jessi Hempel, and we're talking about the book, The Family Outing: A Memoir. I wanted to conclude, Jessi, with regrets, challenges, and surprises. This is the part of the show where you get to talk about any of these things, or all three—something you regret or that you would change about the book now that it's out, what you would say was maybe the most challenging thing about writing it, or something that was revealed to you—a surprise you discovered along the way. JESSI HEMPEL: I love this question. And you know, Blair, I feel very complete in this book. I feel like it was the best story I could tell. The surprise, and the challenge, was in publishing. I thought once I sold the book, you know, I had the good fortune of selling this book before I wrote it, and then I had to go write it. And I thought, well, the hard part will be writing it. And then it will go out into the world, and I'll get to talk about it and that will be great. And in fact, I loved every day of writing it. It was the biggest gift of my life. And then it was published, and I found the process of publication very disorienting. And it's only now, about a year after publication, that I feel like I have my footing again and have a relationship with the book again. BLAIR HODGES: What do you think that vertigo came from? What happened? JESSI HEMPEL: Well, you know, the publishing industry is made up of people who dearly love books. And that is the best thing about it. But it's pretty broken. And so you know, even for me, my book came out from HarperCollins. It had an editor who loved it and was consistently the editor the whole way through. And it had a marketing team who were just spot on. But they had so many books to represent, and my book got a little sliver of attention, and then the attention meter moved on. And when it didn't become a bestseller in the first seven days it was out, the resources to promote it immediately went down. And it was hard not to take that personally because it was my family's story that was selling or not selling. And I managed that, Blair, proactively in advance by doing two things. One is I decided before I began that I never wanted to know the sales numbers, because writing this book for me was not about sales numbers. And so I don't even have the login to the portal that would tell me how well it sold. If you asked me, I could guess but like my guess and your guess would be about equivalent. I don't know. And that felt important. But then the most important thing I told myself then, and that has proven out now, is getting to have conversations like this. Individual people who respond to the book. Because the book is helpful. That's the point. But it's taken me a year to pull back enough from the process to connect deeply to that. BLAIR HODGES: That's hard. As you said, there's a lot of different pieces, not just the writing of it, but pitching it, selling it, going through the editing process, going through the promotional process. It's something we don't talk about often. I don't really dig into this part of it a lot in the interviews, but I think it's a really important aspect of what it's like to be vulnerable like you were in writing this book and navigating the emotions that it all brings. JESSI HEMPEL: Well, thank you, Blair. This was such a joy of an interview. I don't take it for granted when people really spend time with work, and I just appreciate it. So thank you. BLAIR HODGES: Thank you. It was such an easy book to spend that time with and I really strongly recommend it. I hope everybody checks this book out: The Family Outing by Jessi Hempel, and checks out your podcast as well: Hello, Monday. I'm glad you took the time to join us, Jessi. This has been really fun. JESSI HEMPEL: Take good care, Blair, I look forward to talking again sometime. BLAIR HODGES: There's much more to come on Family Proclamations. If you're enjoying the show, why not take a second to rate and review it? Go to Apple Podcasts and let me know your thoughts. And please just take a second to recommend the show to a friend. The more the merrier. Thanks to Mates of State for providing our theme song. Family Proclamations is part of the Dialogue Podcast Network. I'm Blair Hodges, and I'll see you next time. [END]   NOTE: Transcripts have been lightly edited for readability.

One hundred years ago, a bright new age for children was dawning in America. Child labor laws were being passed, public education was spreading, and more. But Adam Benforado says America stopped short in its revolution of children's rights. Today, more than eleven million American children live in poverty. We deny young people any political power, while we fail to act on the issues that matter most to them: racism, inequality, and climate change. That's why Adam is calling for a new revolution for kids. He joins us to discuss his book, A Minor Revolution: How Prioritizing Kids Benefits Us All.   About the Guest Adam Benforado is a professor of law at the Drexel University Kline School of Law and the New York Times best-selling author of A Minor Revolution: How Prioritizing Kids Benefits Us All and Unfair: The New Science of Criminal Injustice. His research, teaching, and advocacy is focused on children's rights and criminal justice. A graduate of Yale College and Harvard Law School, he served as a clerk on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit and an attorney at Jenner & Block in Washington, D.C. He has published numerous scholarly articles. His popular writing has appeared in The New York Times, Washington Post, Scientific American, Slate, and The Atlantic. He lives in Philadelphia with his wife and children.   Transcript ADAM BENFORADO: If you're an architect, if you're a plumber, if you are a judge on an immigration court, I want you to think about what your job would look like if you put children first. The reason to do this is because this is good for all of us. It's not just good for kids. It's good for people who don't even like children at all. This is the best path forward as a society, because we all pay the costs of that inattention and those harms that come to kids. BLAIR HODGES: That's Adam Benforado and he's calling for a revolution in the way we all think about childhood. Which is gonna sound a little weird if you think kids today have it easier than ever. And it's true. I mean, they have some luxuries I couldn't even dream of as a kid—like I had to wait until Saturday morning to watch my favorite cartoons. Even then, I had to make the difficult choice between Muppet Babies or Ninja Turtles because they were on at the same time on a different channel. As a parent, Adam Benforado says he cheers for many improvements, but as a professor of law at Drexel University, he says the way children are treated by the courts in the US, economic limits they face, their lack of voting power, their poor access to health care, things like this make kids as vulnerable in America as they've been in 100 years. He wants that to change, not just because it would be better for kids. He says it would be better for everyone. But could the world's major challenges with health, climate change, and public safety really be easier to address by changing the way we treat kids? Adam Benforado says yes, that's why he wrote the book, A Minor Revolution: How Prioritizing Kids Benefits Us All, and he's here to talk about it right now. There's no one right way to be a family and every kind of family has something we can learn from. I'm Blair Hodges, and this is Family Proclamations.   LIFELONG INTEREST IN CHILDREN'S RIGHTS (2:15)   BLAIR HODGES: Adam Benforado, welcome to Family Proclamations. ADAM BENFORADO: Great to be with you. BLAIR HODGES: We're talking about your book, A Minor Revolution. And this is about children's rights. I wondered what got you interested in focusing on the legal rights of children. Your background is in law. So talk a little bit about why the rights of children became your focus. ADAM BENFORADO: So I think for me this is really a lifelong project. I think the seeds of this really come from my own childhood. I was really lucky to be born into a family with two really loving, supportive parents who spent a lot of time encouraging me and helping me be independent. But I think all around me, throughout my childhood, I saw a lot of abuse and, honestly, subjugation of children. And it really bothered me, starting when I was in elementary school, seeing the way kids were treated as, you know, not second-class citizens but as just, like, non-entities, I mean, not even like human beings. I think I was also aware of broader forces. I think I was really aware of the impact of wealth. I had a 1,200 square foot house and in my early elementary years I felt like the rich kid. And then I went to a kind of wealthy neighborhood in fourth grade where one of my friend's fathers got a limousine for the fourth-grade birthday party. And suddenly, I was like, “Oh my gosh! Actually my parents have like a beat-up VW Beetle.” And I'm like, “I'm not wealthy, like, I'm actually kind of worried about what my friends might think of my wealth, my family's wealth.” I think I was someone who really thought that I should vote when I was like in sixth grade. I didn't understand, you know, maybe I don't know as much as this other person. But I did know about the world. I have things I care about. Why shouldn't I have a say? I have a say in a whole bunch of other areas of my life. My parents listened when we were discussing things like what we should have for dinner, or whatever. I think it was those interactions and observations which informed my sense of and desire to write about some of the injustices I saw. And I think that carried me to law school, and certainly informed the questions I was interested in looking into, and certainly the way I taught. And in terms of coming to children's rights, the type of legal scholars usually sort of fall into these two camps of either being like general human rights—people who kind of focus over time on children's rights—or they are like practitioners who are working in the child welfare system, and then they come in with this particular angle. And it's funny because honestly, I was writing about all these different topics—like I started out writing about the role of corporations in society, and I teach criminal law. And in each of these subjects I look at things through the lens of children. So I'm very interested in, you know, how corporations manipulate kids to use them as weapons against their parents. I'm very interested in criminal law on juvenile justice issues— BLAIR HODGES: Are you talking about breakfast cereal commercials and toy commercials? [laughter] ADAM BENFORADO: Yes, yes. [laughter] BLAIR HODGES: Like how stores put all the candy and toys right by the checkout so you have to pass through there with your kids. ADAM BENFORADO: Oh, yeah. And that's something now, as a father—I think the cool thing about this project is, the seeds of this project started when I was a kid, but now I'm seeing it from a different perspective. I have two kids and, I tell you, right before I was writing this book, I had this experience with my daughter in Whole Foods. It's one of these times when we've got to go to the grocery store, there's no food, and my daughter looks up in front of the egg aisle, and there's this giant giraffe that costs $100, you know? And my daughter just breaks down, like lying on the ground, sobbing. And I'm like, “What are you doing?” BLAIR HODGES: It's pretty genius really. ADAM BENFORADO: And here's the kicker, one of the Amazon shoppers passing through comes up, looks at me, and goes, “Spoiled.” She shakes her head. And I was like, “Oh my god, this is a set up! This is just like this giant trap.” And what's brilliant about it is that no parents are gonna buy the hundred-dollar giraffe. You're coming in for eggs. But you know, what you might do to stop the embarrassment is buy the ten-dollar little plushie, stuffed animal, just to get out of that awkward social situation. BLAIR HODGES: That's right. I wonder, do you remember an example—you mentioned when you were in elementary school you saw children being treated not even as citizens at all. Do you remember anything in particular that stood out to you? You said you wanted to vote in sixth grade, as an example. Is there anything else like, “Wow, why are we kids being treated like this?” ADAM BENFORADO: Yeah, I mean, I thought about it in many circumstances. In elementary school, learning that my good friend's father spanked him and being like, my friend is really, he's a really smart, really nice person. We're no different. And he messes up in little, tiny ways. But everyone messes up. Adults mess up all the time and no one hits them. And then moving on from that to becoming a law professor and being like, wow, not suddenly being like, “Oh, this all makes sense.” But actually, wait a second, it's criminal law that you can't hit a prisoner. Like someone who's a murderer or rapist, it's prohibited under the Constitution from formally beating people as a punishment. And yet the legal minds, the geniuses, who are on our courts have said, “It's actually okay, it's constitutionally permissible. Kids are different.” And I think the answer to that today is because we don't see kids the way we see adults. We don't see them as full citizens. And I think there were a lot of moments like that. I think the bullying that I saw in junior high school, you know, again, that's what kids do. But what was so frustrating to me was the treating of this by adults, you know. The gym teacher, the math teacher, who saw the same terrible abuse. Like the kids who face this must carry those scars to this day. And doing nothing. There were all these instances where kids end up protected from things they don't need protecting from, where they can actually be empowered. And then actually, on the flip side, exposed to real harms that we could do something about, you know? There were adults who could easily have done things and didn't. And I think that all of those little observations, I kind of filed them back in my mind. And moments of censorship. So, you know, I remember a moment from Junior year—I got into this Governor's School down in Virginia, went away for a month, and it was like, the first time in my life that I was feeling like getting treated as an adult. Like it was all independent. They had college professors teaching this stuff. And you know what? I did all the reading, I read all the poetry. I did all the history. I did it all because I was like, “This is interesting, and I want to be engaged in these conversations.” And I felt this whole month, treated as an adult. And then at the final little party thing—and over the course of the term, there were people at Governor's School who were musicians, and I played in rock bands. So I formed this little band called “Beans and Franks” and we wrote some songs. And I'm about to go up to perform. The band gets to perform at the last thing, and the head of Governor's School comes up to me and is like, “Okay, I'm gonna need to review the lyrics.” And I was like, “What?” Like, I'm 17 years old, like, I've been listening to—Everyone here has heard everything already. Like, you've been treating me like an adult for a month. And now you want to review the lyrics? What? And I thought through like, there aren't even any offensive lyrics. But okay, I'll go through this song that I've written. And there was one line, which I think it was something like—again, it's embarrassing to even say, it was just stupid—It was like, “Smooth like a rubber, bounce it back to your mother.” [laughter] And he's like, “No, no. You cannot do that.” And honestly, as a 17-year-old boy I wrote a few songs with more offensive lyrics. [laughter] BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, you were like, “We were going easy on y'all here.” ADAM BENFORADO: Yes! I was like, “Hey, I've actually cleaned this up for the Governor's School performance.” And it was like, you can't perform this. I just was like, how do you expect me to be prepared to be a member of society? I'm going off to college in a year, and it soured everything else. It was like all the other stuff. You want to control me. You're happy when I'm getting A's in my classes and doing what you say. But as soon as I show some real independence, that's when you're like, “No, you're nothing. I'm the decider.” And it's interesting, I teach this course called The Rights of Children, and actually have my students think back to moments from their childhood. And what I have observed, which is so interesting, is how fresh these incidents are. Like a student, who was now 27 years old, writing about that moment at the eighth-grade dance, where she was going into a strict Catholic school, and they had always had the same dress code. The girls got to wear off the shoulder dresses and the new principal changed it but she organized a petition and had all the teachers sign it, and the principal wouldn't even meet with them. Wouldn't even meet. And she's carried that to law school. She's writing about it just as if it happened yesterday. And I think it's these things that all of us carry, we sort of often kind of later justify it as a rite of passage that everyone should go through as opposed to, “No, that's wrong. And I'm going to change that for the next generation. I want them to experience something different than what I experienced.” As opposed to, “Yeah, it's just part of the experience. You're brutalized and then you get to brutalize when you're an adult, and so it's fair.”   AMERICA'S CHILD WELFARE MOVEMENT 100 YEARS AGO (12:39)   BLAIR HODGES: To get to this point where dress codes and things are the main concern, you actually take us back in time to talk about some of the reforms that happened a century ago. Your book starts back in 1906. There's this Spokane Press article. Here's a quote from it. It says, “When your children are swinging in the hammock, or playing at the park, stop and give a thought to the pale-faced factory boys and girls of the metropolis.” They're painting this picture of child labor and distinguishing between more privileged kids and kids that are basically laborers at this time. What was happening at the turn of the century, what was the child's rights movement like back then? ADAM BENFORADO: So I wanted to open the book with this broader historical context in part because this was this miraculous moment a little over a hundred years ago where, coming out of the horrors of the Industrial Revolution, Americans—and these are really everyday Americans, across the country—came together and said we need to do something about the plight of children. And we need to do something, not simply because this is unfair to kids, but because we are setting ourselves up for failure as a nation. So when we fail to invest in the education of, you know, five to 15-year-olds, that's setting us up to fail in the decades ahead. So people came together—reformers who were often kind of lumped together as this child saver progressive movement, came together to demand changes: building of better public schools, mandatory public education, pushing for health and even things like drug safety measures, building playgrounds, investing in and creating an entirely new juvenile justice system based on rehabilitation rather than punishment. I chose to go back and just pick up kind of a random paper from 1906 to show just how much this energy was pushing into every area of life. So this is a little four-page paper from Washington State. And literally every page has like three different articles about child-focused reforms. And I think what was miraculous was just how much was done. By 1912 President Taft had created the first federal agency focused on the whole child, this Children's Bureau. And the idea, I think, coming out of this was, certainly in the decades ahead, we are going to see this bright new age for children across the country. And unfortunately, I think what we have seen over the course of the 20th century and then into the last couple of decades, is not simply kind of slowing to a trudge, but in some cases, even backtracking on some things. So you started with this example of child labor, this excerpt from this article. Well, what have we seen over just the last couple of months? Exposés in the New York Times about young people working in terrible labor conditions. Working the overnight shifts, just as those kids were laboring in 1906. And the reasons that are given to justify it are just the same as were given in 1906: “It's an economic necessity, coming out of the pandemic, we've had changes in the job market. We actually need to roll back job protections in our state. Businesses can't compete unless we let 15-year-olds continue to work.” BLAIR HODGES: Or like “families need the money, like this is actually good for families.” Instead of looking at how when people aren't being paid living wages, “Oh, let's make their children work.” ADAM BENFORADO: It's something that I think, you know, we see a little bit in fiction even. I'm halfway through a new book called Demon Copperhead—really great if any listeners are looking for a new summer read—but it traces actually kind of the effects of the child welfare system, but also the fact that kids are picking tobacco in our fields. One of the historical examples that's in this 1906 newspaper is the plight of kids rolling cigarettes in factories in New York City. Okay, well, they may not be doing that in New York City anymore. But down in North Carolina, kids today are picking tobacco in a hundred-degree heat. And they're getting nicotine poisoning, just like kids did a hundred years ago. And often it's the most vulnerable kids. It's migrant kids. It's kids whose parents are desperate for cash. And we're turning our back on them. In a way, unfortunately, I think this is a real indictment of the status quo. I think we're turning our backs more than people did 120 years ago. I think the child labor movement was going in the right direction. There was a lot of work that they ultimately, you know— Some of these child labor laws from a hundred years ago, there were exemptions for farm workers. But they were making a lot of progress. Here? Look at the last couple of months. We're backtracking. In a lot of areas we're repealing labor protections, virtually. BLAIR HODGES: We'll talk about some of the reasons you think that's happening as we go. Just to set the table as we get into some of the rights you're arguing for, I want to point out that your book is not making philosophical arguments, you're arguing about pragmatic benefits. ADAM BENFORADO: Yeah, I think that's one of the things that probably sets this book, and I think my approach, apart from some other rights scholars and rights advocates is I'm not simply arguing that this is a good thing to do for kids, right? It's not “natural rights.” I think that's usually where people start is like, even if there were no benefit to the rest of us, this is the good thing to do. That's how we tend to think about rights. And I absolutely believe that is true for children. But I think that's never going to get us where we want to be. I think we need to make the strong case for why actually putting children first benefits all of us. And that's because so many social problems are best addressed if you focus on interventions, rehab, in childhood. Ultimately, as a society, you always have to pay for things like crime, underemployment, poor health. The question is simply: Are you going to pay pennies on those preventative early interventions? Or are you going to pay many dollars on the backend when problems have already metastasized and hardened? It's a choice. Again, do you want to pay for school lunches for all kids? Or do you want to have kids who can't pay attention in school and don't graduate, and then you have a labor force who is underperforming and underemployed? You're gonna have to pay for that triple bypass. There's no free option. And so really, this is also I think, an answer to those critics who are worried that somehow this is a zero-sum game—that if you invest in kids, somehow you harm older Americans. No! When you invest in kids, you have healthier old people, you have old people who actually have more in their retirement account so they can take care of themselves. So what is the best pathway for us as a society? Invest in kids. I think that's the core takeaway for the book.   ISOLATED PARENTING (20:09)   BLAIR HODGES: Right. And I want people to see that, because this isn't a book for parents, per se, this is a book for all people. And the other point is, everyone's been a child, whether you end up having kids later on, we've all been children, we've all experienced that. And the way children are raised in our society affects everybody, not just parents. And so this isn't a book about parenting. ADAM BENFORADO: That's a great point. And I think, unfortunately, kids and kid's issues and children's rights in this country, have been framed only as a parent's issue. And that's part of that story, that historical story of like, what happened to those early child savers, those early progressives? And one of the answers is over the course of the 20th century, we lost this vision of investing in and empowering kids as a societal endeavor and it shifted to this idea that, “No, raising up kids is solely the work of individual parents.” BLAIR HODGES: It's “Don't Tread on Me” parenting. ADAM BENFORADO: Yeah. It's atomized. So what has happened over the course of the 20th century, this was coming from popular culture. But I think it was also coming from our elite institutions. The Supreme Court is coming out with really these groundbreaking opinions, saying parents are ultimately in possession of a fundamental right to decide the destinies of their children in all of the important matters, whether that's religion, whether that's schooling, whether that's medical care. And one of the consequences of that is this incredible weight which is placed on all parents' shoulders. Now, it's entirely up to you whether your kid sinks or swims. You actually have to be the ultimate decider on everything. You're the one who's asked to decide, now, is my kid going to learn about race history? Not the school. The school isn't going to teach them about these defining historical moments, because they're scared, they don't want the protests and the pushback. And the textbooks are being removed, these references of well, “We've got to leave out the Holocaust. Slavery, let's take that out. We'll leave this, take that. We're not taking a position. It's just up to individual parents to make these decisions.” So suddenly, parents, you have to be a historian. Well, suddenly, you actually have to decide on medical care, too. Don't just take the vaccine schedule from the doctor. No, you do your own research. Oh, you want to protect your kid from, you know, lead and asbestos? Well, you do the research. I will tell you as a parent, it is exhausting. It explains one of the reasons why parent burnout and unhappiness is so high in this country, as opposed to some of the studies that have been done comparatively, parents who have nothing, who face incredible odds in Africa, are much, much, much happier as parents. Why? Because it's a collective endeavor. They don't have to do everything. They're not alone in these struggles. And unfortunately, I think that's the rub of the whole parents' rights movement is, okay, you get to decide, but being a parent, raising kids is so hard. You face so much.   THE EARLY YEARS: A RIGHT TO ATTACHMENT (23:34)   BLAIR HODGES: And there's less and less social support. We'll talk about this in a later part of the interview about early childhood and the “Right to Investment.” But let's start with “The Right to Attachment.” So in the book you've laid out these particular rights for kids, and you kind of rolled them out according to developmental stages of where children are at. You're following the best research on childhood development. In the first years, the “right to attachment” is what you highlight in here. And one of the things some of these earlier child advocates had wrong was the idea that parents shouldn't baby their babies, that they shouldn't coddle them, they should maintain a kind of detachment from them. And then there was this fascinating monkey experiment listeners might have heard of, I think I heard about it as an undergraduate, where they had these monkeys and they had a mother that was like, just this wire cage that would give them milk. And then also a monkey that was like covered in fabric and it was comfortable. And then the baby monkeys would go to the milk mom and eat, but then they would always go back to the comfortable mom, and that's who they would bond with. So the argument became secure bonds, warm bonds, loving experiences, more nurturing-type experiences are important. And you had a big scientific shift here away from this detached parenting style to close parenting, and you're arguing for more of that for kids. ADAM BENFORADO: Yeah, and I argue, hey, this research has continued and now is incredibly robust on the value of early attachment with a primary caregiver. It's actually been supplemented by work even showing intergenerational effects, in the context of these monkeys. If you engage in that early deprivation, it actually can have intergenerational effects on the future monkey offspring. Now, I think we look at the state of the research and then we look at what society has done in response. Well, what society has done in response is work in incredible ways, severing the bonds and failing to support bonds that I think we could really seriously strengthen. What are some examples of that? Well, we're the only wealthy, advanced nation who does not have paid mandatory supported care leave for the parents and adoptive parents of young kids. And again, as I said, that sets us up for failure as a nation. But so many parents go back to work after just a couple of days at home with their kids. And that doesn't make economic sense. More often the argument is, you know, “Economically we can't have businesses giving people six months off.” And everywhere else in the world, they say, “We can't not do that. It's economically stupid not to do that. We're going to just pay more money on the backend if we do that.” Now, I think we obviously can make a lot of progress by really simple guarantees to new parents in terms of care leave. But I think we also have to think about some of the ways we really sever bonds carelessly. One of the biggest ones, I think, is our criminal justice system. Millions of kids have or have had a parent locked up during their childhoods, and that has horrible repercussions downline. Often it's not locked up in prison, it's actually pretrial in jail. What happens to a mom accused of, you know, some theft or a drug crime, when she's waiting trial? Well, trials in the United States take a long time. Bail might be $1,000 or $2,000. For a poor parent, they may not have that. So what happens as a result of that? A single mom is taken out—those three kids are put into foster care. We all pay for that. We pay for locking up the mom pretrial. We pay for those kids going into the foster system. And we pay the lifelong costs of our non-functional child welfare system as well. So we do it there. We do it at the border. Obviously, there was a lot of controversy over the last few years about child separation policies. But we also do it with our child welfare system when it comes to poverty. So how do we deal with parental poverty? Do we help parents? No, what we do is, we take kids away from their parents. A police officer is called, a child welfare worker is called, goes into a house and finds no food in the refrigerator— BLAIR HODGES: An empty fridge, yeah. ADAM BENFORADO: Finds roaches, finds peeling lead paint. What do we do? Do we get that mother into good, stable housing? Do we give her money for food? Do we feed the kids at school? No, what we do is we say, “You're a bad mom, you failed. You're an abomination.” And we take the kids away and often put them in worse circumstances. And if we were guided by that research, that robust set of research on the value of attachment, we would make very, very different choices. We would say, “You know what? This isn't about the mom, ultimately.” And I say this to audiences when I talk, look, sometimes folks are filled with anger at parents who have, in their view, failed to meet their responsibilities. That's an area where I think I'm going to disagree with all the people in which I see these as situational constraints on parents, but let's actually set that to the side. If you want to hate that mom, and think that she's a bad person, go ahead and do that. Let's focus on the kids though. Because we need to do what's best for those kids. Right? And I will tell you, taking kids away from parents who love them, and are poor, is setting us up for failure as a nation. And I think that if we can get into that mindset whenever there's anger at the parents like, “Why should we pay for public school breakfasts and lunches? It's these parents, these deadbeat parents that we're incentivizing.” It's like, hey, there's a kid who is not eating lunch. Focus on the kid. Leave the parents aside. You want to vilify the parents? Okay. I think that's the wrong approach. But let's at least agree that the kid should eat a healthy meal every day.   EARLY CHILDHOOD: THE RIGHT TO INVESTMENT (29:46)   BLAIR HODGES: This is where it connects to the next chapter on early childhood, “The Right to Investment,” and you're arguing that children deserve a right to investment in good schools, in their quality of health care, in the housing they have available to them, in mentorship. You introduce us in this chapter to Harold, this is a Black man from Philadelphia, and what his story suggests about the right to investment. He's an interesting example because he's someone the system did sort of invest in. But as you know, they would put him in particular programs, help him get schooling and things, but as a Black man, he witnessed this and saw himself sort of, as he kind of won the lottery. ADAM BENFORADO: Yeah, he describes himself as a unicorn. BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, a ton of other Black kids didn't get these kinds of investments. And so he's like, wait a minute, the system is doing this on an individual level, a kind of band-aid solution, but not changing the overall system. Harold had mixed feelings about how he was invested in. ADAM BENFORADO: I think this was one of the most powerful interviews I did. It was just eye opening, in some ways for both of us in this conversation. But he remarked early on about this defining moment in his childhood where his parents, they'd just gotten kicked out of their house, and they were basically are homeless. And they're in downtown Philadelphia, where I currently live, standing on a street corner. He's six years old. He's just trying to figure out like, what are they going to do? Like, where are they gonna sleep, get food, all this stuff. They're on a street corner. And he said he just saw a white guy with his briefcase and like, everything about it was just so perfect. There's the Rolex and everything, that perfect suit and all this stuff. And he said, this was the first moment when he was like, “How is it that we're in the same city on the same day, and my family has nothing? And this person has everything? How is that?” I think there was this innocence and also profound insight in that moment of like, wait a sec, all of us walk by this all the time. We're the country with the most billionaires in the world. And we also have, like, one in six or seven kids living below the poverty line. Like that's like 11 million kids. We have, like 700 billionaires. And our Fortune 500 Companies made something like $16 trillion in revenue. We have like 11 million kids living in poverty. And again, that's not simply a moral abomination. That's setting us up for economic and social failure in the years ahead. And I think, as you point out, one of the really fascinating things about Harold's account of his life is that he was being held up as he moved through childhood as a success story, right? So the local news wanted to do a profile, and it's like, this is great. The kid from the ghetto has made it out against the odds. And he was like, “You are telling a story about your own failure, because there was me, but then there were all of my classmates, who you neglected.” He struggled with this, honestly. It's like, “Why me?” BLAIR HODGES: It's a survivor's guilt. ADAM BENFORADO: Yeah, it was. It was very much a sense of like, “Wait, why me, though?” Like, why is it that we only invest in the diamonds in the rough? And we even see this, I think, in some academic work on inequality, is this idea of like, we need to figure out the diamonds in the rough. And I think my argument, certainly Harold's insight is, no, we need to help all children, not just the ones who end up at Harvard, or Wharton, or who end up being inventors. All of these kids could benefit from our investment. But we see that both in early childhood and we see that at the end, even some of the debates about—you know, we can talk about this later—but student loan forgiveness and all that. We need to invest in kids also who do not go to college. And I think even liberals get really worked up about like, “Hey, we need to pay for college.” Well, some people aren't going to go to college. And we really heavily subsidize, even without any actions by Biden, we really heavily subsidize people going to college. We do virtually nothing for kids who aren't. And that sets us up, again, for failure as a nation.   LATE CHILDHOOD: A RIGHT TO COMMUNITY (34:15)   BLAIR HODGES: It's a rising tide lifts all boats kind of approach, right? So again, in this chapter, “Right to Investment,” you're looking at ways early education can be better invested in, health care opportunities, housing, as I mentioned. So those are just some of the areas you talk about in “Right to Investment.” Let's look at the next chapter on late childhood. And this is where you talk about “A Right to Community.” We've touched on this a little bit already. This is where you really emphasize the parental rights movement and what that's done. You introduce us to an extreme example here of how dedication to parental rights can lead to trauma and abuse. This is an Amish family who basically gifted their children to this predatory abuser. And as parents, they could just make these kinds of decisions that put their children at extreme risk. You talk about how this is similar to, or connected to homeschooling—not that you're condemning homeschooling. But you're connecting it to these other issues where parents have control over their children's relationships, over how their education is, how their healthcare and medical care is. And parents get the final say in a lot of these things. Tell us about how that connects to this “Right to Community.” ADAM BENFORADO: I chose this example, ready to acknowledge it's an extreme example, of literally gifting your daughters to a predator and thinking that was actually a completely legitimate thing to do. And I argue that comes from our culture, which really treats children as property. And in some ways—again I like to trace history here, if you go back to ancient Roman republic, coming across into the early modern period in England, and then being brought over to the colonies, this consistent idea of kids belonging to their parents, and their labor belongs to their parents, and their bodies belong to their parents, and then tracing the effects of that. BLAIR HODGES: I was shocked by the custody thing. You point out that the word “custody” is used for prisoners who are in custody, property as in custody, and custody of children. It's a property thing. ADAM BENFORADO: Yeah. And I think it's something that works out just fine for a lot of kids whose parents make good decisions and you know, it's fine, they often love you very much, they try to make good decisions. The problem is if you don't have those good parents under the law in the United States, you honestly can be completely isolated from all of the advances in medical care, from all of the knowledge we have accrued over thousands of years, from all of the valuable social connections. Your parents really can keep you locked on their compound with no access to education, with no access to medicine, with no access to human contact, legally, in the United States. And so the extreme example is to say, wait a second, those kids don't simply have rights as human beings, but we all will pay the consequences when those kids grow up with those depravations. We will pay the moral consequences; we will pay the economic and social consequences of that. I argue we need to stop thinking about kids as belonging to their parents and more think about ways we can cultivate this sense of belonging. And that's not to say that parents don't have a role as, not gatekeepers, but sort of facilitators of these exchanges. I certainly do that a lot with my kids, talking to them about the information that they're receiving, protecting them from certain things, and certainly facilitating access to relationships and medical care. But I think the idea that this is all on parents' shoulders is really bad for kids who face these depravations. And it's bad for all of us. I think when kids don't learn about the history of this country, I think that's bad for all of us.   PARENTAL RIGHTS AND CHILDREN'S VOICES (38:25)   BLAIR HODGES: You talk about how this cuts across into medical care—when it comes to COVID, for example, vaccines. Some parents want to have the right to refuse vaccines for their children. And how that can be a health risk, or the right to refuse medical care for children is a big issue. ADAM BENFORADO: I mean, I think one of the things that really surprises even some criminal law students is some of the legal regimes which have been instituted across the United States which actually protect parents who choose prayer over adopting the most basic medical care to treat preventable conditions. And the fact that actually, you know, in a number of states—I look at Idaho in particular. I mean, there are kids who are dying of things that we have known how to treat for decades, because their parents don't believe in it. And again, we could have conversations about, you know, what if a 16-year-old kid wants to refuse medical care for a genuinely held religious belief? But that's not really the question. I mean, this is really when a 12-year-old is desperate to go to the doctor because she has a ruptured esophagus and her parents say no. Or a kid who has a broken arm and the bone's poking out and the family doesn't take them to the emergency room to treat these easily addressed medical conditions. And again, I think we have a reason to intervene for those kids, but I think we have a reason to intervene on behalf of all of us. It's not good for any of us when kids are suffering and carry the weight of these treatable childhood conditions later in life. BLAIR HODGES: It's tricky, this chapter, because I think parental rights, as you point out, are sacrosanct across the political spectrum. This is an issue that conservatives and liberals and everybody in between is kind of united on, this idea that parents should make the choice and sort of be in charge of all these things. ADAM BENFORADO: It's really interesting. I think the Republican party has decided that parents' rights may be their pathway back to the White House and capturing State Houses. There was certainly success with both in Virginia and in Florida with politicizing parents' rights, and the response of a number of leading progressives, including political folks has been, “Okay, we need a matching liberal parents' rights movement.” So if Republicans are saying parents have a right to know every single school book and read every sentence of every lesson plan and to protect their kids from learning about gay people or whatever, then liberals step up like, “No, I have a right to allow my kid to read this book. I have a right as a parent to have my kid learn in school that gay people exist or have a bathroom that anyone can use.” And personally, I'm like, wait a second, progressives. As a parent, I share the concern when I learned about censorship in my school library, and I get upset too. But let's talk about kids' rights. Like I want to talk about it and frame it around, hey, high school students, maybe they should have a say about what they're learning about the history of race in the United States. I want to stop using kids as props, like you know when DeSantis comes out and signs a bill. That's the only time we actually see kids. And guess what? I want to hear from them. And I think that's the path forward for liberals is, like, let's actually involve kids in these questions. You brought up one of the examples of the vaccines. And again, I think parents have a lot to weigh in here. What is frustrating though, the story I give is of this teenager who this is in the earlier days of the pandemic, who wants to get vaccinated because she just wants to be with her friends. She wants to be allowed to engage with this public life. And she's like, “Hey Mom, this is what I want.” And her mom's just like, “No.” It's like a 16-year-old kid who wants medical care. That, to me, it's like crazy that the kid has no voice in that situation. And the same thing of like, why is it that a 17-year-old should have no say in the books they're reading in English class? That's not preparing them to be successful citizens. And none of this is to say that parents shouldn't have rights. I think parents absolutely should have rights. It's just the kid should have rights too. And I think the conversation would be a lot more enriched; I think we'd make better decisions on a lot of these things about a lot of these things. It's not to say that there aren't dangerous things or there's not inappropriate material. I think there are inappropriate things. I think there are things that are really harmful to kids, and upsetting. I certainly was upset by some of the books and things that I read. But I think an approach that says the only people who have a valid opinion here are adults, is just the wrong approach.   BLAIR HODGES: So that's what you're trying to get readers to do is like think about how younger folks can be involved in this decision making and their voices can be heard.   ADAM BENFORADO: Right, be part of the community.   EARLY ADOLESCENCE: THE RIGHT TO BE A KID (43:45)   BLAIR HODGES: Let's talk about the next chapter: “The Right to Be a Kid.” This is framed around early adolescence. And this really zooms in on the criminal justice system, a passion of yours, and the ways childhood can be erased there. You include the story of a man who was convicted of murder when he was a teenager, and how he was tried as an adult even though he was a teenager, despite what we know about brain development, about the ability of him to make decisions, or what it was like to be an adolescent and make that kind of decision. What did that story do for you in this chapter? ADAM BENFORADO: My last book, Unfair, was about injustice in our criminal justice system and it focused on different biases and things that come into every stage of the normal criminal case. I was very familiar with wrongful convictions and sort of the injustice that can come from that. And this conversation I had with this now middle-aged man, I talked to him when he was in his forties, reflecting back. I think it really reveals a different type of injustice. So this man, Ghani, is very forthright about the fact that he did the crime. He killed another boy when he was an adolescent. And yet I think the justice story doesn't stop there. What was so profoundly unjust about this was failing to understand what brought this young man to commit this atrocious act. And he readily acknowledges the harm that came from that and the failure to understand that people change. That, yeah, the person who is fifteen is not the same person as the person who is 45. And the harshness of giving up on someone and condemning someone for what they do, anything that they do, when they're fifteen. This young man was given, in Pennsylvania, life without the possibility of parole. He was basically condemned—“You are going to live in a box until you die”—at age fifteen or sixteen. We are a country that prohibits cruel and unusual punishment. It's right there in the eighth amendment. And yet, we said to this young man—who basically was a prisoner of a drug gang locked in a crack house, dealing crack through the mail slot—“We've given up and we're gonna put you in a box, nine-by-seven box, until you die decades in the future.” And it was only because the Supreme Court changed the legal landscape that he was eventually released, when the Supreme Court said actually someone who commits a crime before age eighteen cannot get a mandatory sentence of life without the possibility of parole. He was released decades later. And what I want us to realize in this chapter is that children have a right to remain a kid, to enjoy that halo of childhood, even when they make terrible mistakes. And that's hard for us. But I think if you look at the data from what comes out of psychology and neuroscience, you start to see what adolescence is. It's a necessary step. But it's a challenging one. It's one where our brains are developed in certain ways, but not in others. And so we can make mistakes. And what we need to do as a society is try to allow for those mistakes, that's part of growing up, in ways that are less devastating, to prevent young men from joining drug gangs and killing people, but also that mitigate the harm of treating one mistake—again, a very bad mistake—as a reason to condemn an individual for the rest of their life. And I go back to some of the mistakes I made, that luckily did not have life or death consequences.   CHILDHOOD AND RACISM (47:44)   BLAIR HODGES: Same. But you and me are both white guys, too. You talk about how that makes a difference—how racist this system often is, people being prosecuted as adults. ADAM BENFORADO: I mean, I think about one of the smartest guys I know, I met him my first day at Harvard Law School, he grew up in Pennsylvania. And we were talking early in the first semester of law school about an experience he had. And, again, he was just the most charming, brilliant guy, went to Harvard undergrad. And he was coming home, I think it was Pottstown, one day from football practice, and he had all his football gear in a bag over his shoulder. And I think he'd already gotten in early at Harvard. He's running home because he's late. And he's the nicest guy. He's probably running home to get home early for, you know, dinner or something. Cops pull up, chase him down, throw him up against the chain link, because there's been a burglary. And in that moment, that could have been it. That could have been it. That experience never, ever happened to me as a kid, and the simple answer is, I have white skin. Did I run with bags? Was I wearing hoodies? Yes, all of those things were true of me. We could go back to my poor fashion choices as a teenager. All those things are true, but that never happened to me. And that aligns with the research that shows how young Black kids do not enjoy that halo of childhood. They are “adultified” very early on, and that has consequences where, you know, misbehaving at school. White kids— BLAIR HODGES: Are more likely to be suspended. More likely to have repercussions. ADAM BENFORADO: Yeah, and then if it's a more serious thing, intervention of the police. And once you're into the police system, you get a lot harsher treatment. And this is true of girls too, right? So we see, actually, it can be a real problem with girls who have been sexually trafficked. A white girl is treated as a victim. Black girls? Well, you're a prostitute. And that means how the police treat you, that means how even courts will treat you, and I think we need to really think hard about ways we can ensure all children are treated as kids. BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, you talk about like these juvenile courts where kids are involved in the process. ADAM BENFORADO: To me, that's one of the ways that we can move forward, is getting back to that early 20th century idea that, hey, kids are different, and we should really focus on rehabilitation and on diverting kids to a different system that's focused on kids are changeable, they make mistakes, they may need to have changes in their lives. And we can do that because kids are really malleable in this period. And I think that's one of the reasons I throw my support behind diversion programs and some of the cool new ideas to try to make interventions on kids whose lives are starting to go down paths that can lead to very serious consequences.   LATE ADOLESCENCE: THE RIGHT TO BE HEARD (50:43)   BLAIR HODGES: In your “Right to Be Heard” chapter you talk about actual court systems where juveniles get to be part of the process, judging their peers. It's a real jury of their peers. ADAM BENFORADO: In this next chapter the focus here—If the previous chapter was on ways that I think we “adultify” kids in circumstances and treat them as adults in circumstances where they're ill-prepared for that and we really need to protect them, this is a chapter about other ways in which we infantilize kids when they actually really have the ability to do a lot more than we give them credit. And again, I am driven by the psychology neuroscience literature here. I think there's this really interesting thing. We tend to think about the brain as this balloon that kind of just gets bigger and bigger and bigger over the course of development. But what we now know is different areas of the brain mature at different rates. And that, actually, areas of the brain that focus more on the  old cognition moments develop much faster than those that are involved in that kind of control of impulses— BLAIR HODGES: Assessing risk— ADAM BENFORADO: Yes, risk, and dealing with peer pressure. Yeah, those are later developing things really into people's 20s. There's a really strong argument that we actually need to figure out ways to empower kids much earlier. So I focus, yes, on the ability of kids to serve as jurors, but I also focus on extending the right to vote to young people and allowing young people to run for office, serve on school boards. And I think this is supported, certainly, by the mind sciences research. But I also think it's likely to lead to much better outcomes for us as a society. Sometimes when I talk to audiences about this, I have someone raise their hand and it's like, “Oh, well, this is going to distort the system, you're taking power away from adults.” And I'm like, the current system is biased. We are making decisions which are too old-focus and too conservative. One of the things we know from the psychology of literature, is that sometimes as people get older, they make much more conservative decisions on things, they're too risk averse. And while risk aversion can be beneficial, under certain circumstances, it actually can be the most dangerous thing you can do, particularly when things are rapidly changing and you have new problems. I often get the pushback when I talk about this, “Well, okay, maybe that's true that kids actually do have the capacity to deal with these things, but they don't have the life experience.” And I'm like, “What do you think are the most pressing issues today?” Okay, well, it's like, you know, how to regulate social media, and trans rights, and racial justice, and climate change. I stop them like, okay, hold that thought. Let's think about the average 15-year-old. Okay, so social media. They are on TikTok. They know so much more than my octogenarian father-in-law. Trans rights: my octogenarian father-in-law, he doesn't have any trans friends or gay friends. Racial justice: the youngest generation is the most diverse multicultural generation America has ever seen. Let's talk about climate change. Well, that 85-year-old is going to be long dead as the worst effects of climate change ravage the United States. That 15-year-old is going to be living through those floods and forest fires, and the civil unrest around the world that is coming down the pipeline and has no ability to choose the leaders who will make decisions today that will affect them for the rest of their life. And I think, again, that's not democracy. Democracy is about people who have a stake in the decisions, political decisions, having a say in those decisions. BLAIR HODGES: Right. And so you talk about extending the franchise to young people, like at least local elections or school boards. And I don't find you to be an absolutist in the sense of saying, like, here's this fundamental right, they need to just have every, you know—You seem to be willing to negotiate and willing to talk about how this unfolds. ADAM BENFORADO: I think there are many different pathways here. One of the things we're seeing around the world is lowering the voting age to sixteen. Over the last several decades we've had more and more countries— BLAIR HODGES: It's been proposed here, hasn't it? Didn't you say someone's proposed it in the US? ADAM BENFORADO: It's been voted on in the House. We are seeing more municipalities, we have a handful now of municipalities where 16-year-olds can vote. But we have a number of countries—and these are like, you know, it's like Austria and Brazil. I mean, these are big countries. BLAIR HODGES: I didn't know any of this until I read your book. I don't understand how I missed it. I listen to NPR. I'm an avid news reader. I don't know how I missed it. ADAM BENFORADO: It's a really interesting phenomenon. And I think what we've seen is all the horrors, the fears of like, this is going to destroy society, don't happen. And I think what we will see, in my opinion, as we extend this right, we're gonna see a lot more engagement. And I think this, in some ways, a solution out of some of the gridlock. I think bringing in new voices and new voters is a great way to actually move forward on some of these intractable problems we have. I think young people can actually help us move away from this period of political polarization, in part because I think young people are more changeable and are less doctrinaire on a lot of these issues. I interviewed this young man who, because of a loophole in the law, ran for governor in Kansas. And what I think was just fascinating about talking to him was, he was running as a Republican. But one of the issues where he was just different was gun control. And that's because he was like, “Hey, I go to a public school. And this is something I'm really worried about, school shootings.” BLAIR HODGES: And he's been through drills. Getting under his desk and stuff. ADAM BENFORADO: He's like, “I'm in favor of sensible gun control.” One of the people who interviewed him on TV was like, well, that doesn't align with the party. And he was like, “Yeah, I'm proud of that.” Old people running for office on the Republican platform would never say that. He would say that because he actually believes it. And I think that's on the liberal side, too. I think there are issues where some young new Democrats may not toe the party line on something. And you know what? I personally am comfortable with that. I think we need to break out. BLAIR HODGES: I think that's why it won't happen, though. [laughs] Because the people that get to make the decision about letting it happen are gonna do the calculus of, will this help me politically, yes or no? And that's the question they'll ask in order to make it legal. ADAM BENFORADO: I think young people have got to stop asking and start demanding. I wrote a piece in Rolling Stone a couple of weeks ago, where I said, it was after the latest gun shooting, and I was like, you know, it's great. The March for Lives folks, and all these folks out being politically active. But my argument is: stop marching to try to get adults to act on gun control or act on climate change and get out there marching for the right to vote. The adults are not going to save you. You need to exercise that protest power to demand power. Because until you have power, those in power are not going to listen to you. And so, again, I think this is something—I'm optimistic. I think this is something where we're going to see a lot of changes in my lifetime. This is one of the areas I'm most excited about is lowering the voting age. BLAIR HODGES: Well, you have my hope. And, you know, I'd love to see it. But time will tell. ADAM BENFORADO: We can talk more on the show in twenty years. [laughter]   ON THE CUSP OF ADULTHOOD: THE RIGHT TO START FRESH (58:36)   BLAIR HODGES:  Wow. Cool. All right. We're talking with Adam Benforado about the book, A Minor Revolution: How Prioritizing Kids Benefits Us All. And Adam also mentioned the book Unfair: The New Science of Criminal Injustice. That's also a great one. Adam is a professor of law at the Drexel University Klein School of Law. All right, let's talk about on the cusp of adulthood, this is “The Right to Start Fresh.” This chapter has a lot to say about how economic conditions are harder for younger folks today than they were even just a few decades ago. People are economically less well-off right now. The economy is looking harder, wages are stagnating, inflation is happening, college debt is ballooning. But back in the 50s, or 60s, there might be a guy who could marry his partner and be the sole breadwinner and have kids and buy a house really early and do all these things. These opportunities aren't on the table anymore. So this chapter talks about trying to get younger people off on the right foot at this cusp of adulthood when it comes to job choice, when it comes to mobility, when it comes to inheritance. ADAM BENFORADO: I think this really focuses on the popular perception that childhood maybe is tough because you belong to someone else, but once you become an adult suddenly the shackles are off, and you're free. The world is your oyster, and especially in America, you are the freest of the free. BLAIR HODGES: You've got bootstraps, you can pull ‘em. ADAM BENFORADO: Yep. Live where you want, control your destiny, do what you want, marry who you want. And what I look at is all of the ways we actually have locked young people in. We've already determined the trajectory of their life before they even get to that. And so I look at the ways how we capitalize, or fail to capitalize, people's professional development. We could make a decision as a society that, hey, you're a future worker in the United States of America and so we will pay for your training and your education until you are finished and you're ready to work. That's the bargain that we make. But instead, we say, no, no, no, no, you who have no money will self-finance your education, to the tune of $100,000, $150,000 and you will pay that off for the rest of your life. Maybe actually, you'll do it by joining the military and paying it off that way. But somehow, you're gonna start life in the red. And actually, I had this moment, I think I cut it out of the book, but it was actually right before I went to law school. I finished undergrad, I got into law school, and I wasn't quite ready to go and I took a deferment for a year and I went over—my then girlfriend, her parents had bought this 16th century farmhouse outside of London. And I was like, “I'm gonna go and kind of work renovating this house.” And there were some professional builders who were also doing things that year. And I remember being out and I was cleaning off bricks to fix up this like rental with this guy. And we started talking. It's like, hey, so you're going to law school? Oh, you're going to Harvard? And he was like, “So how much is that going to cost?” And I was like, “I don't even really know. I think it's like, you know, $50,000 or $60,000 a year.” And he suddenly was like, “Adam, you cannot do this. Let me tell you, I'm 50 years old. Like, there's so many things that come up in life. People get sick, you know, you get someone pregnant. You can't start life in the red. That's madness.” Honestly, I had gotten into law school. Everyone up to that moment had just been like, “This is the best thing. Everything's great. Of course, everyone goes into debt.” And that was the only person who was like, this is crazy, what a stupid system, because of the things life throws at you. And the truth is, he was speaking the truth. It is mad to put people down, you know, to have the weight of hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt to start out life. And it's particularly unfair, as I point out to do this, based on sort of the different economic situations people find themselves in. One of the areas I focus on is not simply how we lock people in with that, but also how we lock them in geographically. Because coming out of college, you cannot take that job in San Francisco unless you already have existing family wealth. Why? Think about how much money you need. You need the money for the first and last month's rent and the security deposit. And that means you need like $8,000 starting out. A lot of young people who are from poor families, they can get the job, they went to the good college and can get the job, but they cannot move there. And that's really different, I think from previous generations. It wasn't just a myth, the idea that you move where the opportunity was, that was a reality in America, right? You move where the jobs are. “Go West, young man.” People really did do that. But they cannot do that now. And again, that's bad for America. We need workers where the jobs are. We don't need workers stagnating in areas of the country where there are no jobs. We need them moving out to the Bay Area where the jobs are, that increases our GDP. But they cannot do that, based on the choices, and a lot of those choices are things that seem to have nothing to do with young people. They seem to be things like zoning laws. Like okay, it makes sense that any new construction in the city needs to have parking. Well, what does that do that limits housing for those young people, and that means that they do not move there? And that keeps those houses for those older people, skyrocketing property values. But you think about, you know, some of the rules about licensing. So many jobs now, you know, it's like, farmer, hairdresser, you have to have special licenses. And again, that also prevents— BLAIR HODGES: Which are state-dependent too, right? ADAM BENFORADO: Yes. And geographic mobility, even things like, traditionally, law licenses. What is the main reason we have these state bars, I am very skeptical that it's to protect the public. I think it's to protect the monopoly lawyers have in each of these states to prevent new entrants into the market. And I think that hurts all of us. And so I want to focus on ways we can make young people freer at the start of life. Let's stop with different legal regimes that lock in things for old people and think more about ways we can free up young people, because that's going to be best for us as a country. BLAIR HODGES: You talked about inheritance and dead hand laws when it comes to that as well, the right of older folks to be able to lock in wealth in particular ways. ADAM BENFORADO: So I give this example—I really love art and I'm lucky enough to live really near one of the most amazing art collections in the world, which is housed at the Barnes Foundation in downtown Philadelphia. It has an amazing post-Impressionist collection. And one of the funniest things is, or the amazing thing is, thousands of people now visit every year, and that might never have come to be had the law originally been followed. So this guy Barnes, who made basically trillions of dollars in gonorrhea treatments around the turn of the century and bought up all this art, he stipulated in his will that this collection of art was going to be housed in his house out in Lower Merion. And that, you know, only a certain number of people could visit every week and all these rules. And that's how it would have been for all eternity if he had left enough money to preserve it in that way. But the fact of the matter is, he didn't. He didn't leave enough money. And so to the court system, this amazing collection was moved to downtown Philadelphia. It was placed in this, in my opinion, much better space. And now thousands and thousands more Americans and people around the world get to see this groundbreaking work. I think this is an area where we need to focus more on the benefits to living than the rights of the dead. And this is actually not a new notion. I have this wonderful quote from Thomas Jefferson in the book in which he said the same thing. And he was fighting down in

Your family is...loving? Your family is...hurtful? Your family is...all this and more? If you feel overwhelmed when you think about your family, this episode will help you understand your anxiety and give you evidence-based tools to repair it.  Dr. Mariel Buqué is a leading specialist in trauma psychology. She says our physical and mental health challenges can be rooted in family trauma passed down through the generations—not just culturally, but even biologically.  We're talking about her new book, Break the Cycle: A Guide to Healing Intergenerational Trauma.   Transcript   MARIEL BUQUÉ: My family is loving and hurtful. My family is nurturing and invalidating. They have a mixture of characteristics—and I myself have also been a part of how this family has operated, perhaps in dysfunction, for a multitude of years. BLAIR HODGES: How do you feel about the family—or families—that you were raised in? Dr. Mariel Buqué says a lot of our current physical and mental health can be better understood based on how we answer this question. Dr. Buqué is a leading specialist in trauma psychology. She says a lot of families go through cycles of dysfunction, and these cycles are passed on, generation to generation—not just culturally, but even biologically. She says understanding our trauma can help explain why some of us are people pleasers. Or why some of us find ourselves in codependent relationships. Or why we avoid relationships. Why some of us avoid forging our own families, or why we forge unhealthy wounds. Dr. Buqué has been helping to develop cutting edge therapy techniques to address trauma to help heal minds, bodies, and hearts. Today we're talking about her new book, Break the Cycle: A Guide to Healing Intergenerational Trauma. As you listen to various episodes of Family Proclamations, I think chances are you're going to hear things that touch a raw nerve. I've definitely experienced that myself as a host. I hope this episode provides some ideas about how to address those feelings, and maybe become a cycle breaker yourself. There's no one right way to be a family, and every kind of family has something we can learn from. I'm Blair Hodges and this is Family Proclamations.   A KEEPER OF THINGS (1:52)   BLAIR HODGES: Mariel Buqué, it's great to have you on Family Proclamations. MARIEL BUQUÉ: Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to be here. BLAIR HODGES: Yes! We're talking about the book Break the Cycle: A Guide to Healing Intergenerational Trauma. And this is one of the newest books that we're going to be covering, this one actually comes out in January of 2024. So first, I just want to say congratulations on the new book! MARIEL BUQUÉ: Thank you, I'm excited for it to be out in the world and for people to be getting their hands on it, and hopefully doing a lot of good healing from it. BLAIR HODGES: It must be an interesting time, because you've spent so much time with this book already. And now it's coming out. So by the time it gets in people's hands, you're sort of like, “okay, like, I've spent so much time with it,” how does it feel? MARIEL BUQUÉ: I keep telling people that it feels almost like that moment when a person who is about nine months pregnant is ready to just birth their child and meet them and have them out in the world. But also, because I just don't want to hold it anymore. I want everyone else to have it. BLAIR HODGES: I do too. Let's start by talking about how you personally used to be a keeper of things. And maybe you still are resisting this impulse. You describe hanging on to stuff even when you don't need it anymore, and that you even experience some guilt or fear when you think about throwing something away rather than finding some use for it. Talk about being a keeper. What are some of the strange things you've kept in the past where you've been like, “Ooh, should probably get rid of that, but I can't!” MARIEL BUQUÉ: Oh, my goodness, I haven't gotten this question. And it's such a good one, I appreciate it very much. So, you know, the actual through line especially in my maternal line, my grandmother, my mother, we've had this way of actually keeping things, first to preserve them for anybody else that might need them even if they're not functional items. And secondly, because of this terrible, terrible guilt of being wasteful. And it comes from there being a lot of scarcity in their lives, my life growing up, and feeling like if we don't keep every little thing no matter what it is that there's a likely chance that we might just be left with nothing. So it was just this irrational fear that was so profoundly ingrained in me. And you know, as far as keeping you know—there's so many things but one thing that I find to be particularly interesting that I've been able to keep and use to the last little bit for years and years and years is actually a white sage that I have. I've had it for about—I've been burning almost the same three bunches for like five years. BLAIR HODGES: Oh wow. MARIEL BUQUÉ: Which in part, I say it's a good thing because there's a lot around that plant that, you know, we're kind of over-utilizing it in on the planet. But I felt like that was like a such a curious thing that I continued to do, even though I'm still working on not being so much of a keeper, that I am so carefully preserving every last bit of everything. Even to this day, I have little things that I do still. BLAIR HODGES: You talk about how it comes from sort of a scarcity mindset; you mentioned poverty or need in your family's history and how that kind of gets passed down. That's why I wanted to start off with this personal example of yours, because your book talks about how some of the things we experienced in our lives are directly connected to what we've inherited. What came before us. Our ancestors, our direct relatives. I want to ask about—was it a mug that you broke? MARIEL BUQUÉ: Yeah. BLAIR HODGES: My heart went out to you, because I used to have this small little drinking glass that was my mother-in-law's, and I made fun of her for it. I said, “Who would ever need a glass of that size?” And she said, “It's perfect for juice at bedtime.” And she since passed away and I started using that glass and fell in love with it. And I would drink a little juice before bedtime. And one day I dropped it and broke it. And it was terrible. Because she's gone. And now my glass is gone. MARIEL BUQUÉ: I share the sentiment! Like, it still kind of makes me a little bit tender to even reflect on the fact that I broke that mug. Now, my grandmother, she lived in this—one might call it almost like a hut. It wasn't even a proper home. It had no indoor plumbing, you know, it was just this set of sticks really in the Dominican Republic. And for her to actually find a way to make this mug reach my home in the US was just like, I could tell the profound sense of love she had for me, that she did so much to try and provide me with a gift. And yeah, I felt an immense amount of guilt. I felt also like I could never see the cup again, like it just it was gone, right? And so there's this yearning for that part of my journey and my connection to her, to have been there. So actually, you know, I'm in the process right now of actually—I'm in a ceramics class, I'm actually going to create my own cup that in essence emulates the one that she gave me. BLAIR HODGES: I like that. MARIEL BUQUÉ: Yeah, it's a way that I can visibly still stay connected to that cup. But it did make me feel a deep sense of guilt. And guilt is that general kind of, let's say, more common emotion that we tend to experience in my family. We're very guilt driven. We're very guilt motivated. We're a guilt people. And we understand that about each other, too. So sometimes, you know, we utilize guilt almost to kind of get each other to do certain things. [laughs] Some subconscious, some not subconscious. But guilt has been so prominent, and it left me with this deep sense of guilt that was really hard to shake off for a number of years.   DEFINING INTERGENERATIONAL TRAUMA (7:22)   BLAIR HODGES: Okay, so we've talked about this physical object that you inherited, this beautiful mug that's now gone, and also a sort of temperament or an inclination toward guilt that you inherited. We're talking about inheritance here. Your book talks a lot about trauma as an inheritance—intergenerational trauma. Let's hear a definition of that. When you're talking about intergenerational trauma, what do you mean? MARIEL BUQUÉ: What I mean by it is, intergenerational trauma is the only type of trauma that is actually handed down our family line. It actually is at the intersection of our biology and our psychology. If we come from individuals who have actually endured adversity—chronic adversity, specifically—that has led to trauma symptoms, and that they didn't get a chance to actually resolve those symptoms and lived with the experience of trauma for a long-standing period of time, that it would have actually made its way into altering their genetic encoding, or their genetic markers or genetic expressions, as they call them in a scientific way. And that, upon conceiving us, both parents would have transferred over that genetic makeup that would have also included some emotional vulnerabilities or predispositions to stress and trauma. And then in comes everything else that life throws at us once we're born, which is our psychology. And if we're born into that family that perhaps is still under some sort of distress or trauma, and we're not feeling like our home environment, the initial home environment we grow into, is safe, or feels nourishing, or helps us to develop enough of an emotional foundation of connection and a sense of trust—which are basic elements of our foundational makeup—then we're gonna start developing symptoms of unrest. And then everything else happens in life. We can go into the school system and get bullied, we can get into a really bad relationship and all of a sudden, there's toxicity and cycles of abuse that are part of our journey. We can actually suffer from having a marginalized identity. And so all of these things play into our psychology. And when they're matched with an already vulnerable emotional state that is there since birth, and even before of birth, then we have the recipe for what we call intergenerational trauma. BLAIR HODGES: And it might sound unbelievable to some people, to think that something that could happen to an ancestor of mine, a stressor or some traumatic event, could literally be passed down. So later on, I want to unpack that biological inheritance and how that works, what the science says about it, so people can really wrap their heads around it. But before we do, let's talk about trauma in general. Your book introduces us to the fact that there are big “T” traumas, the big ones, and the little “t” traumas. Give us some examples of these and how they're different from each other. MARIEL BUQUÉ: Yes. We bucket trauma into those two categories, big T, little T, capital T, lowercase t, there's different ways of referencing to it. But the big T traumas tend to be the kinds of traumas that actually threaten our sense of safety. They make it so we believe we may not survive the moment. Those kinds of traumas can be like theft at gunpoint, maybe getting into a car accident. It could also be the types of traumas that really hit hard and are very profound, like childhood abuse and neglect. Things like that tend to be like the bigger T traumas. Now, the small t traumas tend to be experiences that unnerve us and unravel us, but don't necessarily threaten our sense of safety. A traumatic experience that would be categorized under small t could be perhaps losing a job and then entering into financial difficulties. It's not that your life is being threatened or that there is a critical moment in your infancy where there's a profound disruption. But there is enough of a disruption in your life so as to say you're living under some element of trauma. Now, the thing about big T and small t trauma is that there are times when people suffer a big T trauma, and they experience enough nourishment, enough support and love in their lives—whether it's from a caregiver or other family members, community members, people that just hug you and care for you through those moments, and those symptoms can actually dissolve. And we can have somebody that has an accumulated, layered number of different small t traumas happening throughout their life that go on and addressed, and the layering of those can actually accumulate into really intense trauma symptoms. So on both ends, it's really about not just what happened, but also, how were you taken care of through it? And then also, were there other things that were also tossed into the trauma bucket that could have made life a little bit more difficult to bear.   YOUR ALLOSTATIC LOAD (12:23)   BLAIR HODGES: The big term you use for this is “allostatic load,” it's sort of like all the stuff that adds up over time. I've also heard of “weathering,” a weathering thing. And I've heard this in racial studies where they talked about all the microaggressions that people of color might experience just add up over time to increase the likelihood of heart disease or chronic stress. So what you're talking about are traumas that affect our emotional state, but they also affect our body. Talk about how trauma has not just psychological and behavioral consequences, but also some physical consequences in the way our bodies try to deal with stress. MARIEL BUQUÉ: The allostatic load that you reference is actually the wear and tear meter of the body. And you know, neurologically, where we are actually formatted as humans to go through stress and then resolve that stress and then come out of it. Our nervous system is actually structured to be able to go into a state of alert if it senses there's some elements of danger in our environment. And once the danger has passed, then our nervous system says, okay, we can rest, digest, and calm, and we feel at ease, we go into balance, we call it homeostasis. However, if we're not able to acquire that sense of balance on an ongoing basis—meaning that, for example, as you mentioned, individuals that experience racial discrimination on an ongoing basis, there is a little chance to actually recover from the last emotional injury or the last racial injury. And so then they go into yet another battle, and yet another situation, and yet another, and their nervous system—which is connected to all of their organ systems, which is connected to their brain, you know, it's all a part of one uniform system starts wearing down. And what happens is that the organs that are connected also start wearing down. One example that I think is fairly common to offer is that of gastrointestinal discomfort. So our nervous system has endings that land right at our gastro tract. And so whenever we're in a state of alert and we sense that there's danger, our nervous system is actually partially shutting down non-essential functions, which includes the function of actually digesting food. So our actual gastro tract is constricted, in part. And so when we think about, for example, individuals that complain of symptoms that mirror irritable bowel syndrome, and we start looking into their history, and we started looking into the things they battle on a day-to-day basis, there are some correlates. We start seeing the fact that these individuals are suffering stressors and traumas on an ongoing basis. And sometimes, when we start addressing the trauma factors themselves, the so-called IBS symptoms tend to dissolve. Which means that one, we're actually diagnosing physical conditions that are tied to stress, right, we're not actually addressing the stress, which is the root. And in addition to that, it's all one body. So it's interconnected. And that happens with many other things like a lot of cardiac issues have been mapped back to stress and trauma. A lot of autoimmune conditions have been connected to trauma in very specific ways. And even some cancers have had trauma elements, they're stress-derived as well. And so when the body is worn down, the body breaks down its own capacity to actually fight off any physical threat, meaning any cancers or any other conditions like viruses, or anything that may inhabit the body and then leave room for chronic illness to take root. BLAIR HODGES: During COVID, the irony there is, the stress could make someone more susceptible, and we have to consider the ways that the pandemic itself was a trauma that could make people more likely to have their immune systems compromised because of the stress that the pandemic itself caused. When I think about it in terms of family systems—you talk about family abuses that happen, it could be emotional abuse, physical abuse, sexual abuse. And those can actually affect the physical health of the people that are encountering them, and not just in getting hit and being hurt from that. But as you said, in the way your digestion works, in your heart health, and your nervous system in general is really getting rocked. People that grew up in these unsteady or difficult home situations are going to pay the price throughout their life. It's not necessarily the case, right, that someone can just get out of that situation and then go on with their life as an adult. What you found in your practice is a lot of people who are carrying ghosts of their family life with them, they're still haunted by those ghosts MARIEL BUQUÉ: Very, very long into their adult lives. And it's something that tends to hurt at a very profound level, but tends to impact so many aspects of a person's life. People's relationships get impacted by their childhood experiences that are adverse. Their work gets impacted. Many times, we tend to see that people struggle with attentional difficulties that are really not a biological difficulty, like ADHD proper, but that the person is in essence, dissociating with higher frequency and as a result, not able to attend even to their job duties in the ways that they would have they not been in a state of trauma. The way that people parent is very much impacted by the trauma factors in their lives. It is even said that—although we cannot say that parents who are individuals that have suffered childhood abuse in the past are going to, in essence, abuse their children. But the studies do show that there is a higher risk of those very same parents perpetuating the very same traumas they suffered. So as far as data is concerned, we do have data to support that. We have to really make people conscious and aware of how their past is impacting their present person, so they don't replicate those trauma cycles forward.   BACK IN MY DAY (18:39)   BLAIR HODGES: Alright, I want to talk about traumas and triggers. You talk about how different things can trigger a trauma. So you might have an interaction with a boss at work that triggers something in how you're related to a parent or a caregiver or a teacher from your youth, that triggers things. And your book describes the resulting trauma responses. Things like having a short fuse when you're stressed out, behaving in self-destructive ways, maybe a propensity to become addicted to substances, being chronically pessimistic, being jumpy, self-blame, self-loathing, a lack of being able to generate emotional intimacy. These trauma responses are going to be familiar to a lot of listeners. And what I've heard, especially recently, is people complaining and saying, “Oh, all this talk about triggers and trauma is too much. People are just too fragile these days. We just need a tougher mindset. When I was growing up, we didn't have traumas and triggers, we didn't have to worry about it,” and so on and so forth. “You're all snowflakes,” whatever. And I'd just like to hear your response to that kind of criticism of, “Oh, even talking about this is just too weak, it shows fragility.” MARIEL BUQUÉ: [laughs] Well, I have a lot of things I'd like to say that can help us to really understand that perspective, believe it or not. Because the thing about people—I'm gonna place the people that are saying things like that in older generations, right? Maybe like, we'll say boomers, right? BLAIR HODGES: Yeah. [laughs] Glad you said it. I didn't have to. For all my Boomer listeners out there. It's all Mariel. Not me!  MARIEL BUQUÉ: [laughs] You know, just placing an example, for sure. But there is this idea that, well, you know, “I went through the same thing, I turned out just fine, you should be fine.” And we have to also reroute to what the science is telling us. Science is telling us that, with each generation, we have an accumulation of an emotional burden that deposits itself into our minds and into our bodies. And that when it goes on unresolved, it just passes on, but it gets compounded. So when we're talking about people in other generations—and let's even say down to Gen Z, and even the generation that's coming after them, because I think a lot of the sensitivity talk is mostly geared towards them, we have to think about the fact that we—even the millennials and Gen X that have been parenting these children—a lot of us have been suffering, and have had a lot of traumas that we haven't resolved because they stemmed back generations. And also because we just didn't know, a lot of us didn't know and still don't know, that these traumas exist within us. And as a result, the biggest risk with unresolved trauma is the risk of transmission. So when we're looking at these kids who are highly, highly anxious, some of them very, very depressed, they have their own global mental health crisis that's burgeoning at the youth level, and their suicide rates are ridiculously high, it's safe to say that the sensitivity they're experiencing isn't just coming from the fact that they all suffered a global pandemic. I mean, being a child in a pandemic, I can't imagine. But in addition to that, the fact that they actually have an accumulation of genetic material, of biological data that's in their own bodies that also produces that sensitivity. I like to take it there, because we can rationalize back and forth with different generations about different perspectives. But when we start looking at the truth of how our bodies hold trauma, I think that gives us all an opportunity to hold greater compassion for one another, for the ways in which we're holding emotional pain. BLAIR HODGES: This is the real value of your book, is that it's not focused on just the individual. I think a lot of pop therapy today can be really focused on the individual. Self-improvement, self-authenticity, finding your best self, being your best self. And it can even seem narcissistic at certain points, depending on the pop therapy that we're talking about. But your book shows us that dealing with trauma and striving for self-improvement don't have to happen alone. And in fact, it's better to not think of them in isolation, because trauma is interpersonal and intergenerational. MARIEL BUQUÉ: Yes.   THE BIOLOGICAL TRANSMISSION OF TRAUMA (22:57)   BLAIR HODGES: So as you said, it can be transmitted both biologically and socially. Let's now get more specific about that biological transmission. This is the part that I just didn't have a lot of knowledge on. And to learn about the actual science behind how trauma can get passed on really opened my eyes. Give us a sense of how that works. MARIEL BUQUÉ: I'm gonna take us back, actually, to the moment in which our grandmothers were actually pregnant, and they were five months pregnant with a baby in their uterine wall that was a fetus that was developing. In that moment, as it were five months pregnant, the fetus, regardless of the sex, had actually developed precursor sex cells inside of the reproductive organs that would have eventually developed into being you. So at a specific moment in our lives at the very onset of our lives, when we developed into just one tiny, microscopic cell, we were living inside of our grandmother's womb, because we were three generations existing in one body—our grandmother, the fetus that was our parent, and then us inside of their reproductive organs. And when we start looking at when we actually developed—because we believe that we developed in our parent's womb, and we forget that there is a lot more biological data and even social data that we've been capturing from the environments around us well, before we were born, two generations prior, even, when our grandmothers were experiencing any kind of stressors, those stresses were actually filtering actual hormones like cortisol and other stress hormones into their bloodstream. And that was reaching the fetus inside of them, which was our parents, and eventually it would have landed onto us. And so everybody in that one body, that intergenerational body, was experiencing that stressor, whatever it was, they were experiencing it. So when we start thinking about biologically, what is happening, what is transmitted, how are these things interconnected, it starts making a lot of sense. And there's a lot more in the biology. I mean, I didn't get that technical in the book, because I thought it might overwhelm the reader. But there's also a lot of biological understanding from different points of expertise, different fields of study, that we understand that there's also some genetic material that's left behind in the grandmother when she gives birth. And then in the mother when she gives birth. So there's still genetic material that's tying each of these generations. So much is also implicated there in reference to what is happening intergenerationally, where there's this biological bond. Now fast forward, to now. Let's say you're already born. And now you have a parent who maybe their way of coping through stress is to yell at you. They yell all kinds of things, right, in order to just release that stress tension. What happens to that—let's say you're three years old—to that three-year-old little nervous system that has to digest this yelling big human. That little nervous system starts internalizing that the world is not safe, and it starts defaulting into a threat response, into an overactive nervous system response. Now, let's not forget, of course, that we're already talking about biological vulnerabilities and predispositions that are already manufactured inside of you. All they need is a trigger point, they need something to turn on that trauma response. And if you're living in a home where, we'll go back to abuse, perhaps you're being physically abused and psychologically abused, you're not feeling a sense of safety in the very place where safety is supposed to be formed and nourished. And so all of that is being factored into your nervous system as well. So when we're talking about the biological elements, we're talking about some of those epigenetic markers that we talked about at the beginning. We're talking about also the ways in which we exist in these three bodies in that genetic material, but also biological material is being transferred into these three bodies. And then beyond that, we're also talking about our nervous system and the ways in which it's being formed and structured around a sense of lack of safety. BLAIR HODGES: That's a helpful introduction. And as you said, you don't get too far into the weeds in the book, which I think is helpful. This is a book for a general audience. But you do let people know that there are research studies going on in cellular biology, psychiatry, psychology, neurology, neuropsychology, embryology, interpersonal neurobiology, psychoneuroimmunology—some of these I've never heard of before—developmental sciences, epigenetics. There are a whole bunch of different fields focusing in on this biological transmission. I think people probably picked up on the fact that it's not isolated—to talk about nature versus nurture is to perhaps introduce kind of a false dichotomy. Like genes exist, DNA exists, inheritance exists, but they're also triggered by social things. And so the nurture and the nature—it's really tough to separate those things. You also talk about how families develop their own intergenerational nervous system. When I thought about nervous systems, I just thought about my own nervous system, it's a part of my body. And you're talking about a nervous system that shared among people. And as soon as you described it, I could recognize this, this is where a family has to become so attuned to each other, for good or ill. So maybe you have a parent who's out of control, or really has anger management issues. The whole family has to have their nervous system attuned together to pick up on signals and to be prepared for things like that. Maybe spend a second talking about how that intergenerational nervous system gets built, and if you have an interesting example from a client or something like that, to give people a sense of what that looks like. MARIEL BUQUÉ: Absolutely. I think an example is a great place to land because that is a way that we can actually visualize something that can be so complex. For example, let's say that we have a child who is ten years old, they just got home from school, and their mother had a really, really hard day at work. So this child now asks where their food is, right, and maybe they use a certain tone and the mother just completely lashes out. Let's say that the mother's default nervous system response is to yell. She is constantly in fight mode. That's what we call it right? That's her default. And so she lashed out and displaced onto her child who was asking for food. What he did was actually run to his room crying, because his default nervous system response is to flee. Now, we have a grandfather who also lives in the home. And he comes out of his room, and he says, “Please stop yelling at this kid, please just stop. Is there anything that I can do, just stop!” That's a fawn response. It's a way in which a person would do anything to make the pain go away. And so right here, we have this contagion effect of everyone being in a state of distress because of what happened to one individual and the ways in which they responded and displaced. However, they are all having different kinds of ways of expressing that distress and that trauma response. They have different nervous system threat alarm states happening all at once, but they're feeding off of each other. And that's what I mean by the “intergenerational nervous system.” That being the psychological elements. The biological is a lot of what we've already covered. There are ways in which we're interconnected and biologically hardwired with the people that we come from. However, once we are in separate bodies, there's ways that we continue to feed off of each other's nervous system responses. And we create this contagion effect within our homes of emotions that continue to run rampant. And that tends to happen a lot with families that have emotions that have not been taken care of, or that have a lot of chaos within the family themselves.   THE INTERGENERATIONAL TRAUMA TREE (31:38)   BLAIR HODGES: That's Dr. Mariel Buqué. She's an Afro-Dominican psychologist who received her doctorate in counseling psychology from Columbia University, where she also trained as a fellow in holistic mental health. She's a world-renowned intergenerational trauma expert. We're talking about her new book, Break the Cycle: A Guide to Healing Intergenerational Trauma. Mariel, as we've mentioned, and this can get pretty complicated, but you break it down simply with the idea of a tree. And this should be a pretty easy thing for people to latch on to, we already think of our family tree. But maybe break down, how you identify the pieces of the intergenerational trauma tree—the leaves, the branches, the trunk, the roots, and the soil. MARIEL BUQUÉ: You know, what I found within my work and a lot of the therapies I've been trained in is that we have these beautiful, beautiful tools that are really helpful, including trauma trees. But they weren't necessarily filling in the full picture of what I was seeing in the therapy room when it came to intergenerational trauma, which is why I decided to move forward with developing a new version of a tree, the intergenerational trauma tree, that actually had all of these different elements you just noted within them. And they're very specific for a reason, because they're part of what we then utilize in order to help the person create a trajectory of healing and then integrate that into their healing process. The leaves of the tree signify one family member, each leaf. And each of the leaves actually reflect not only what may have happened to that individual that could have been appraised as traumatic, but also any actual trauma symptoms, or trauma responses that burgeoned in that person as a result. And this also includes the possibility that some trauma symptoms may have been reflective of physical conditions or physical discomforts, like chronic migraines, for example. And so we start making sure that we map out every individual that a person desires to be a part of their story, or for whom we have some sort of a record of, you know, of their lived experience. And we start mapping out the leaves of the tree. And this also includes any of our descendants, whether they are our children, grandchildren, anybody who is related to us. And for some people, it is chosen family, and people who we've just had some level of proximity to them. And even some sort of connection or child rearing. The trunk of the tree signifies us. So it signifies the ways in which we've internalized the hurt. What has happened to us. Ways in which we have been unwell in our mind, meaning that perhaps our thoughts have been frozen in this idea that nobody can be trusted, right, and that's just the way our minds have been able to organize around trauma. And in our bodies—like perhaps we are that person that suffers that gastrointestinal discomfort that mirrors IBS. And in our spirit, and spirit usually is how connected we are to others, to ourselves, into the greater whole. And so if we suffer a series of bad relationships, or if we have a really tough relationship with ourselves, that's something to consider also, and something we have to bring into the trunk of the tree to hold an understanding around it. The interesting part about the trunk of the tree is that I also asked one question, which is, “How have any of the trauma responses reflected in this trauma tree impacted you?” So we can look at our parents and think, okay, well, you know, I had a parent that perhaps drank alcohol every night to numb their emotions, and that was their trauma response. And that impacted me and my sense of well-being, my self-esteem, right, and so we have to bring in that question to have an understanding. How is it that the people who were not able to break the cycle left room or opportunity for you to then experience trauma. The root system of the tree is one in which, for me I believe what needed to be reflected there were all of the internalized beliefs that we've held about ourselves, that stem from what happened to us, that stem from whoever didn't actually disrupt the cycle. A lot of people that suffer trauma say the words, “I am broken.” So I thought that that would be an important piece of what needed to be added to the system so people can really see it and visualize it and see the intergenerational trauma tree that's reflected in the book, and really understand, okay, you know what? That that's actually an internalized belief, it's not an actual truth. And so there are ways in which we start internalizing these ideas about ourselves in the world that then become almost kind of immobile, they become frozen in us. Beyond that, of course, is the soil system, which I think is always not attended to within any other trauma tree systems, but we have to think about the soil because it's such an integral part of the tree's growth process. And in the soil system, we have everything that feeds specific beliefs into our homes, into our families, into our communities. And that's anything that even stems from, like, the idea that you can pick yourself up by your own bootstraps, right? It's a systemic idea that also feeds itself into our homes. Or the idea that we don't air our dirty laundry, or we don't tell family secrets. And that can actually lead individuals who could use help inside of a family unit, lead them to experience shame, and not seek out help, and then just perpetuate harm onto the people around them, which is usually their family members. So the tree needed to be that comprehensive so that we can have a very global and well-rounded way of being able to look at what happened here through the generations. And then how can we take that information to then transition into how you can heal more profoundly, but in a more well-informed way.   YOUR SOIL SYSTEM (37:35)   BLAIR HODGES: For me, your intergenerational trauma tree system helps me kind of escape the temptation to blame and instead, to seek for more understanding. So for example, I might have a relationship with a parent and feel like, “Oh, this parent failed me in this or that way. And I can just put the blame on them, they let me down as a parent,” so I'm not attending to the soil. And I think, in this case, the soil a lot of times would be like cultural gender expectations for what a proper mother would be, or a proper father would be, and how those things hurt that parent, and how that soil affected that parent in the way they parented me. But it's harder, and I think less common, to zoom out like that and think about the cultural impacts that are happening, the soil that's feeding that person. I think it's a lot easier to just say, “That person hurt me. That's the cause,” and sort of hold on to the resentment there, the pain there, without attending to the bigger things. The other thing is, it's hard to imagine myself as really being able to affect the soil in any big way. So I feel like, for me maybe it's been easier to just blame individuals because I feel helpless when it comes to the context, when it comes to the soil, like I can't really do much about that. I'm interested in your thoughts about bringing attention to that soil just a little bit more, because I think this sets your approach apart from a lot of the therapeutic “pop-therapy” stuff I see like on TikTok or Instagram, it really doesn't often get into the soil, it's just more about like, “How to be your best self” or whatever. MARIEL BUQUÉ: You know, if we don't get into the soil, we are just existing in a world that is going to continue to perpetuate trauma and feed it into our homes. And so that's why I found it to be an essential part of what we needed to address. What we needed to address as individuals who have suffered these traumas, but also as a global community, right, because we can't just like place it all on the people who have suffered. But one thing I'd like to say about that, even before I get to the logistics about it, is that I have actually seen individuals who have been socialized for decades—one of those individuals actually is my father, who's 65, and who, a number of months ago had actually talked to me about the socialized gender norms that he was, in essence, taught to believe and taught to behave in reference to. And he almost felt like this “a-ha” moment just kind of came to him about the ways things could have been different, and how he can now enact a different set of behaviors as a result. And I even had a client, my oldest client was 84 years old. And I say these things, because I think that even when we are decades, and almost a lifetime, in these kinds of patterns that have been socialized and have been almost kind of invisiblized in our world, it is possible for us to actually still find a way to look at them. Or if someone else helps us look at them, because they have a different lens, and that we can still create even micro-changes around these things. So in terms of going out into the world and actually doing the work to try and eradicate the parts of the systems we are a part of that actually perpetuate trauma is an essential part of what we need to do. One example of this is when it comes to particularly childhood trauma, and the adverse childhood experiences that people tend to experience, we understand that we can put in place specific educational programs for parents, specific educational programming for children in their health classes, and in other places where children can access information, that can actually help them to understand not only how to cope differently, but also what actually constitutes as maybe even trauma if it's age appropriate. And I think these are places where—I know there are a number of different organizations that have a connection to the original “ACEs” study who are trying to do some of this work, and trying to educate the parent-child dyad, around how to have a connection that isn't rooted in trauma, but rooted in a healthier bond. And, you know, we have to do that work too in order to cut trauma at the root, right? We also have to offer the education, we also have to put in place policies, and bills, and institutional practices, and actually protect people from being further victimized, so that we don't have this more systemic victimization but that all we're doing is helping people solve the emotional hurt in their heart without solving the root cause, which is the institutional dimension of it. BLAIR HODGES: Right, it's sort of like your basement floods and you're putting fans down there to help all the water evaporate and clean it out, but then you're not addressing the fact that your foundation's cracked, and water is just going to come right back in. MARIEL BUQUÉ: Yes.   ADVERSE CHILDHOOD EXPERIENCES – 42:50   BLAIR HODGES: You mentioned the “ACEs” study. This is the Adverse Childhood Experiences Study. And maybe we'll just spend another minute here on adverse childhood experiences and the idea of the inner child, that we all carry this inner child, we have an inner child, and you've developed a tool that people can assess what kinds of trauma they experienced as children, because sometimes we don't even remember the kind of things we experienced, but you want people to kind of tap into that. So we've talked about addressing the soil and being socially involved, and looking at that. Now we're looking at more like what we're doing personally and looking inward to ourselves. Adverse childhood experiences are something you recommend we assess and sort of try to think through what those adverse childhood experiences might have been for us. You've already mentioned one for my kids: COVID and the pandemic obviously was one of those. [And continues to be.] MARIEL BUQUÉ: Yes. Adverse childhood experiences are, in essence, what the words say. It's having experiences in our childhood that create enough of an adverse scenario or environment that it leaves us with emotional remnants that typically carry on into our adult lives. And the layer I wanted to add for the Intergenerational Adverse Childhood Experiences questionnaire that I added in the book are the layers of, not only what happened before us—because like I said before, we understand that there is a higher risk in families that have trauma for trauma to be passed on and to be perpetuated by parents and other people. But that we also needed to know the added element of what happened around you, like a pandemic, like perhaps a hurricane that devastated your community, right? Like all of these things that are very much a part of our lived experience, especially right now in history. Especially for the children right now. I believe it was the World Health Organization that did a questionnaire with some children, and I believe it was fairly open-ended, just to gauge what is making children feel so hopeless these days, because hopelessness is a large part of what leads a person to actually not want to be alive anymore. And we're seeing a lot of that in children these days. And so many of the children actually answered with the fact that they felt like, in essence, their world was imploding. Because we have so many climate crises happening on a day-to-day basis. And it feels like the world they're being raised into is a world that isn't even probably going to be here. That's a real reality for a lot of them that they're confronted with. And we're not really kind of gauging that as the adults in the room, right? We're not realizing like, they're in a world where they don't believe they may make it to 30 or 40 years old and be healthy in this earth, right? And so all of that is part of what we need to assess, to really get a good comprehensive analysis of what really is happening here that is producing adversity. So in comes this questionnaire that helps us answer some questions, but it is also a conversation starter. Because how would I know that, you know—of course, a pandemic, I think it is a little bit more of a given. But quite frankly, I wouldn't have thought about the environmental issues and that children would have already been capturing the fact that those environmental issues could blossom and lead to a destruction of earth and they wouldn't have a healthy planet to exist in. That's a real thing that perhaps some of us are have not been attuned to. So the questionnaire helps us answer a lot of questions. And it also helps us start conversations that need to be had.   PRACTICES FOR YOUR WINDOW OF STRESS TOLERANCE – 46:41   BLAIR HODGES: People can learn more about the questionnaire about adverse childhood experiences in the book, again, it's called Break the Cycle: A Guide to Healing Intergenerational Trauma. We're talking with Dr. Mariel Buqué. This book gives us a lot of information about how traumatic experiences affect us biologically, how our families and family life can impact us throughout our lives. But it doesn't just give us that knowledge. You also wanted to equip people with things they can actually do in their lives to help them heal. And you do have a proviso at the opening of the book that says there's really no replacement for contacting a professional if you can, because that's sometimes necessary when you're working through intergenerational trauma. This book can be helpful to do that, but you also say, “Hey, if things get heavy, reach out to somebody.” I really liked that. But the book has a ton of practical advice, exercises, ideas and things we can do to “broaden our window of stress tolerance.” That's a phrase that you use there. So maybe give us an example of a practice you've personally benefited from in learning to broaden that window of tolerance, being able to handle stress better, being able to heal from some of those past traumas. MARIEL BUQUÉ: Yeah, you know, a lot of the practices I include in my work in the book, and even in my personal life, have a layered element. And what I mean by that is I usually try to incorporate practices that really help the nervous system feel at ease and relaxed, but not just for the sake of feeling more relaxed in the moment. But for the sake of actually restructuring our neural networks, or forming new neural networks, that actually are formatting to a more relaxed body. So it's really essential for us to also think about what we do in response to trauma that can actually help us exist in a more resilient and resourced body moving forward. I usually go to a lot of practices that feel accessible enough to most individuals. I try and gauge people's ability statuses, and most of these tend to be practices most people can do. And these are, of course, deep breathing—I think it's been popularized enough, that we understand that taking breaths is helpful. But I like to pair deep breathing also with other exercises like progressive muscle relaxation, for example, which, for anyone that's not familiar, is a practice in which you tense specific muscle groups, usually with an inhale of a breath—which is how I organize it in my practice—and then you release the breath and release the muscle group. And then you move into the next muscle group. And you complete it usually wherever—typically like your toes, so you go from head to toe. The reason why this is a practice I have incorporated into my practice is because we have so much trauma that's stored as tension inside of the body. And on any given day, we're walking around actually with all of this tension pent up and not being released. And when I usually have conversations with folks about this, they start noticing their bodies. And they're like, “You know what? Actually, yeah!” And everyone's always like, “Oh, my goodness, I just noticed this pain that I didn't even realize was there, this tension in my neck, and there's a bit of a sharp pain there.” And well, that's curious, right, because that was there. But, you know, it took me to gain body awareness and body mindfulness in order to really understand I'm actually carrying some tension there. When we tense the muscles voluntarily, we actually almost kind of release that tension that's pent up there, and the muscles that have been constricted because of whatever threat we perceived, like, three hours ago, that can be released in relaxed. BLAIR HODGES: It could be like clenching your jaw, or just feeling that's where I'll usually feel it, like, are my teeth together? MARIEL BUQUÉ: Yeah, making fists, you can make a balled-up fist, you can squeeze yourself, like you're hugging yourself really hard, right? BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, I liked that one. I liked the song one too, where you find a quiet place that's comfortable for you and you can sing, and not just the sound, but literal vibrations of the singing can help your nervous system as well. It's a physiological response. MARIEL BUQUÉ: Yeah, there's actually, so we have this part of our nervous system that's called the ventral vagal nerve, which is the part of our nervous system that's most implicated in helping us to relax and release especially after being excited by a threat— BLAIR HODGES: And by the way, this is very evolutionary, like this is rooted back when we were running away from like some predators trying to get us or something, and our body—This helped us survive, and now it's helping us get super stressed. [laughs] MARIEL BUQUÉ: Yeah, because it's overestimating threat. It's actually seeing threat everywhere, because threat is no longer like that big tiger that was chasing us; threat is now we turn on the computer, you know, we read that first email, and it has a certain tone, and that's a threat, right? So it's like [laughs] it's a very different life we're leading and as a result, threats are kind of all around us. And then we also have ways to really kind of over-appraise a perceived threat. BLAIR HODGES: Okay, sorry about that sidetrack. But it's just fascinating. MARIEL BUQUÉ: Yeah, no, it's super important. And it actually drives me right back to my point where the ventral vagal nerve is actually a nerve we can voluntarily stimulate in order to increase the relaxation response inside of our bodies. And one of the ways in which we can do that in a very effective way is actually by humming. And if we take whatever favorite song we have, and we instead of singing it, we actually hum it, we even increase even more of that relaxation response, because we're creating even more vibrations inside of our bodies, but more specifically, within our ventral vagal nerve, which needs that stimulation, that vibration, in order to get triggered and work in our favor. BLAIR HODGES: And you point out that some of these practices are ancient. Some of the things you're recommending are things that cultures and peoples have been doing for generations, we now have a scientific add-on, sort of understanding a little bit more, perhaps, of why biologically, these things are impacting us. But I also wanted to ask you about that relationship between ancient traditions, long-standing practices and science today. The reason I asked that is because I want to know how people can discern between quackery versus real practices, right? So, “Do your own research” is a phrase that came up around the pandemic, which really meant like, “Don't get vaccinated” or “Don't believe in science at all.” [laughs] So I want to know how you have approached being educated in a university setting, but also honoring and incorporating ancestral or ancient or indigenous and otherwise practices, and negotiating that difference between sort of science quote, unquote, “Western science,” and tradition, and kind of how you navigate that relationship in ways that won't make people say, “Well, I'm never getting vaccinated, because if I hum to myself, I will, you know, I'm gonna get healed” or whatever. MARIEL BUQUÉ: Yeah, there's always nuance in everything, right? I always like to add that. But the way that I see Western modern science is—in part, I see it as a science that is so widely believed, versus, let's say, ancient healing practices. We can even take yoga as an example, right? An ancient healing practice that we are now integrating into our day-to-day lives by the millions, and are realizing even in actual scientific studies that are focused on the brain, we're realizing that yoga is actually helping us to reorganize our brains and grow our brains in regions that are actually health-promoting, and grow memory centers, and do all these things, right? So in part I see the utility of Western science because people believe in it so much. So if we can utilize it to prove that the practices that have been here for thousands of years are actually effective, and we need to look in the brain, and we need to look at the body and the ways the body is organizing itself differently as a result of this practice, then let's utilize it. Let's let that help us buy into the idea of more holistic wellness, if that's what we need to do. So I see its utility. And then I also wish that we would be more willing to actually see how effective some of these practices can be without the use of medical science or scientific inquiry. Now, one thing I always like to go back to is—I'm sure that, especially I believe that whenever I do it, or I instruct people to do it, it feels like a little bit out there, until I can actually contextualize it, which is the practice of rocking. Like swaying side to side and rocking, which actually stimulates that ventral vagal nerve and helps us to feel relaxed. When I incorporate that or tell people to do that in reference to their mental health, they're like, “What are we doing here?” But when we go back to, you know, when we were a baby or a toddler, and people were rocking us to sleep, we were going to sleep. Why? Because our nervous system was actually feeling more calm, at ease, relaxed, and we were able to segue into such a vulnerable state like sleep. And that is the thing that I'm trying to bring us back to. I'm also trying to bring us back to the data that has been there since we were kids, that we actually had, but we lost it along the way, we forgot that we can actually rock ourselves and soothe ourselves. And we even see this in individuals that are on the Autism spectrum. So there are individuals who fall under the category of neurodivergence who actually utilize rocking, intuitively, to soothe themselves. And I think when we can see that people actually do this naturally, because they need that soothing element, or people do this instinctually, or intuitively, to soothe their children, we should be thinking about the fact that this actually has utility. And we should be thinking about truly incorporating it into our day to day lives. And rocking, if we're in our office chair. And we feel like that last meeting was stressful, why not take like two minutes to just kind of rock and sway and like, you know, you can pretend you're listening to some music if you don't want to look weird to your colleagues, but it's really going to help you, so why not do it? BLAIR HODGES: It just reminds me of so many things in your book, these ideas you offer. And I think my biggest obstacle to doing these types of things and incorporating them in my own life has just been impatience. I'm thinking about the end of the day when I'm trying to get my kids to bed and just like, “Go to sleep, why don't you go to sleep? I've read to you. I'm singing to you. I'm rubbing your back. I'm doing just about everything a parent could do. And I wish you were asleep and you're not. And now I'm getting frustrated. And you're asking about you want to write this letter to your friend at school the next day. And I just don't take that time to just stop and breathe. And yet, you also point out that when we're elevated, it can take five or more minutes to come back from that. And I had this false idea that, “Oh, I just need to take like three deep breaths, and I'm right back in it.” But I think what I've realized in reading this book, is that I was actually doing this really short-term coping that was actually just bottling up what I was coping with and pushing it down and keeping it there. Then it would just eventually build up and up and up. So I was really personally impacted when you're talking about the patience that's needed sometimes, like five minutes at least, to cycle through a stress response when I thought I could do it in a couple of breaths. MARIEL BUQUÉ: Most of us think that, because we've been socialized around deep breathing in that way. I mean, I'm really grateful that deep breaths are even entering the conversation in modern-day society— BLAIR HODGES: Sure, yeah.  MARIEL BUQUÉ: But we're not necessarily doing it to the extent that most of us need. And we have to also remember all of us suffered a pandemic, whether it impacted us greatly or not. We all suffered through a global crisis. So we all have some element of emotional remnants that we're still sorting through. And so when we're talking about all of that, and we're also talking about living in bodies that are decades long—sometimes generations of remnants that are still captured there, we can't say that taking three deep breaths is actually going to help us to release the stress. Like we, you know, [laughs] we have to do a little bit more work than that. But usually—especially with parents or people that are busy because their careers just tie them up, I usually get a little bit of resistance around the timing element, Like, who has five minutes? And I always like to reference the fact that, okay, you have one thousand four hundred and forty minutes in a day. If you take five of those minutes to actually regenerate your nervous system in the direction of health, and you do that for a period of a year, I think you're going to be in a slightly different situation emotionally than where you are now. Because what we know about body memory from even a neurological perspective, is that body memory takes an approximate three to four hundred repetitions of these nervous system regulatory practices to actually start defaulting to them. So we actually have so much power within us, within our inherent nature—in our breath, which is literally something that we all carry, that we can actually integrate into our day, and a year from now, bedtime might not feel as strenuous as it feels right now. [laughter]   FALSE FAMILY AND TRUE FAMILY – 1:00:46   BLAIR HODGES: That's right. All right. That's Dr. Mariel Buqué, and we're talking about the book Break the Cycle: A Guide to Healing Intergenerational Trauma. And speaking of intergenerational trauma, again, the book requires us to think a lot about our history. So for some folks, this book will require a lot of effort, especially if they have a lot of trauma and pain in their family history, because you're asking them to think about those family experiences. And in the process, you introduce this idea of the “false family” and the “true family” that we have in our minds. This was a lightbulb moment for me. The false family could be the story we tell ourselves about who our family is. The false family can also be future oriented—it could be a hope that there's some way to fix whatever's wrong with our family. And that we can return to some nostalgic paradise of a past that maybe never even really existed. And then we're stuck with family dysfunction that's not going to solve itself. And that's hard. And so a false family can be not only the story that's not true that we tell ourselves about our family, but it can also be future oriented as well. Talk about dealing with our ideas of our false family, and then what you talk about as our true family. MARIEL BUQUÉ: Our false family is those ideas we've held on to that truly don't hold any veracity for the most part, because they're ideas we've needed to hold on to in order to preserve our idea and our image of our own families. BLAIR HODGES: Like quick give us like just a couple examples of what that would be. A person might think what about their family? MARIEL BUQUÉ: A person might think that their family is loving, and still is not able to—let's say, like, an aunt can be loving, but does not have the capacity to hurt you. Actually, no. That very human aunt that you have has the capacity to injure you. They can say something about your body that could leave emotional marks, you know, for ages, right? Like, there's something that person can do, that actually puts them, almost kind of takes them off the pedestal, and makes it so that this person is now existing both as the aunt that is deeply loving to you, and the one that can be hurtful and damaging to your self-esteem. And so it's like, you know, stuff like that—when I say that, I think any of us, probably our minds go into a multitude of ways in which different family members can and have been hurtful. And it is because we all have families like this. Our true families— BLAIR HODGES: Because we're all human. MARIEL BUQUÉ: Yeah, we're all human. We're all flawed. We all err. We all say things that maybe come from a specific place, even if it's from a loving place, can be hurtful. We all cause emotional injury to others, because that's the human way. Now, when we're able to actually acknowledge that, what happens within us is that it actually creates a moment of grief that a lot of us are not prepared for. Because we've been denying that this family member or this family unit can actually have these deep hurtful characteristics within them. And as a result, it makes it so that we just delay the grief. But eventually we have to get to it. When we start realizing that the toxic relationships we've been getting into are mirroring the relationships we saw growing up, or that there are certain words we tend to say to our children—words that have been socialized and ingrained in our brain from how we were raised, but we never realized, “Oh my goodness, that's really hurtful and kind of cruel,” right? When all of these things start coming to the fore and we have these “a-ha” moments, we have to face the inevitable grief. And it's either we are in grief but we're denying and pushing it down, or we are open to the grief and are facing it head on and are saying, “You know what? My family is loving and hurtful. My family is nurturing and invalidating,” right? Like they have a mixture of characteristics. “And I myself, have been a person that has perpetuated things on both ends, and have also been a part of how this family has operated perhaps in dysfunction for a multitude of years.” So when we can actually step into an understanding of the true family we have in front of us, what I believe has been the biggest consequence of being able to enter that stage of grief and then just really feel the grief and come out on the other side, is that when we start having a lot of compassion for ourselves, for what we've had to go through, but also for the people that came before us, and the ways in which they've also been in their own suffering. It creates a lot of compassion. It doesn't happen for everyone. But it does create a lot of compassion for many people. BLAIR HODGES: And you talk about how the outcomes could be different. It might be something where you can reconcile with the relationship in an incredible story. It might be that someone's dead, they're gone, you can't reconcile with them presently. So you offer practices people can do—write letters to the to the deceased, or meditate on them, or whatever. Or it could be someone who's painful enough to where it wouldn't be safe to reconcile with the person. But you can still try to seek understanding and empathy toward that person, and try to heal in relation to them without having to necessarily come back together. So you're not prescribing the exact outcome in this book. It seemed to me that you were more interested

Cat Bohannon says for far too long the story of human evolution has ignored the female body. Her new book offers a sweeping revision of human history. It's an urgent and necessary corrective that will forever change your understanding of birth and why it's more difficult for humans than virtually any other animal species on the planet.  Her best-selling book is called Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution, and we're talking all about it in this episode.    Transcript   BLAIR HODGES: When Cat Bohannan was working on her PhD, she noticed something was missing from the story she usually heard about human evolution. Specifically, women are missing. That seemed like a pretty big oversight. So she tracked down the most cutting edge research and pulled it together into a fascinating new book. Cat is here to talk about it. It's called Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Evolution. Since we're taking a new look at families, gender and sex on the show, I thought, what better place to begin than the place where we all begin at birth? Let's look at how that messy dangerous, incredible process came to be. There's no one right way to be a family and every kind of family has something we can learn from. I'm your host Blair Hodges, and this is Family Proclamations.   INSPIRED BY SCI-FI (7:12)   BLAIR HODGES: Cat Bohannon joins us. We're talking about the book Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Evolution. Cat, welcome to Family Proclamations. CAT BOHANNON: Hey, thanks for having me. BLAIR HODGES: You bet. I'm thrilled about this. This is this is such a good book. Your introduction suggests the idea for it was conceived in a movie theater or after you had just seen a movie prequel to Alien. I didn't see that coming. Talk about how the book started. CAT BOHANNON: Right, so as a person who is femme-presenting, as a person who identifies as a woman, I have many triggering moments for where I might want to talk about the body and its relation to our lives. However, there was this one kind of crystallizing bit. I'm a big sci-fi fan, big Kubrick fan, big Ridley Scott fan, so I'm gonna go, when they come out, I'm gonna go. Now, this is a prequel to Alien, so you know going into this film that whatever characters you meet, it's not gonna go well for them. You just accept it in that kind of sadistic way as an audience of these things, like this is—yeah, you know where it's going. But in this case, what happened is the main character has been impregnated, effectively, with a vicious alien squid, as you do. And she's sort of shambling in a desperate state, and she arrives in this crashed spaceship at a MedPod. So it's like surgery in a box, you know, that's the idea. And she asked the computer for a cesarean. I think she actually says something like, “CESAREAN!”, you know, but she wants help with her situation, her tentacled situation. And the MedPod says, “I'm sorry, this MedPod is calibrated for male patients only.” And I hear in the row exactly behind me, a woman say, “Who does that?” Exactly. Who does that? Who sends a multi-trillion dollar expedition into space? Right? Presumably that's the, maybe it costs more and doesn't make sure that the medical equipment works on women, right? And it turns out us. Yeah, it's us. We're the ones who do that. Right now, in every single hospital, It's a problem. BLAIR HODGES: So your book is looking at the “male norm” problem. You're looking at how, and not just in medical science, but I think in the ways anthropology has worked, a lot of sociological studies, studies of medicine—they assume the male body as the norm and then proceed from there. There are practical reasons for this that you talk about in the book, with medicine trials, for example, where you want a body that isn't maybe going to experience a lot of hormonal flux over the course of the study, or that isn't going to be pregnant or something. CAT BOHANNON: Mm-hmm. BLAIR HODGES: And so women get left out of scientific conversations a lot, not just in medicine but also in the history of evolution. Your book wants to address that gap. CAT BOHANNON: Yes, absolutely. And you can see it even in Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, where they're inventing the first tool, right? And they're banging a bone on the ground that they use to beat the crap out of a guy. The camera tracks it, the bone goes up into the air and turns into a spaceship. This is the classic idea of tool triumphalism—that where we come from is male bodies doing what we stereotypically associate with male body stuff, like beating the crap out of people. BLAIR HODGES: Yeah. CAT BOHANNON: And there's no females in that scene. Where are they? Are they behind a hill having the babies? Like how—this is where evolution works, people. These are the bodies that make the babies, that make the babies that make the babies, right? And it's absolutely true that in the stories we tell ourselves about our bodies and where we come from, we often erase the idea of femininity. We often erase the presence of females as this kind of insignificant side character. But in biology, particularly in mammals, it's often quite the reverse. Things that drive mutations in female bodies, biologically female bodies, are often major drivers for the trajectory of that species because the outcome of our reproductive lives is strongly, strongly tied to the health of the bodies of the female. BLAIR HODGES: I love how you framed this: You invite us to think about our bodies as a collection of things that evolved at different times for different reasons. And you're looking especially at how female bodies have evolved. So breasts themselves have a heritage; milk has a heritage; ovaries have a heritage; senses have a heritage. And instead of one singular female that we'll look back to as our origin—like the biblical Eve, for example—you say there are actually a lot of different Eves. Because you're looking at the origins of all of these different parts of the body. CAT BOHANNON: Yep, absolutely. I mean, when you look in the mirror, what you see, if you're a sighted person is—well, it's a mix, right? It's actually the photons bouncing off of that mirror surface, which have already bounced off the surface of your body and then eventually find their way to your retinas. And that's all the technical features of how your eyeballs do what they do if you have eyeballs that do that. But it's also inevitably embedded in cultural understandings. And it's also embedded in an idea of time. That you begin at a certain point, your body arrives through—well actually through a very wet passage usually, into the world and so you are you. But actually, the body itself is a continuation of many processes that work very chaotically and intricately together that started a very long time ago. And your intestines are effectively way older than even your upright pelvis. Your pelvis is way older than your encephalized brain. So what you're looking at in the mirror is almost like, this might be too lyric, but it's almost like a point in a stream of light blasting out backwards from you and out forwards in front of you, because what you are isn't so much a thing, but something that is happening.   MORGIE AND THE MILK (7:12)   BLAIR HODGES: And you take us way back in time. 200 million years ago is when you take us, back to the first Eve. This is the “milk” mom, the mammal who kind of brought milk here. You describe her, you call her Morgie, and she's sort of this little weasel mouse. Tell us a little bit about Morgie. CAT BOHANNON: Morgie's fun. We nicknamed her Morgie because the Smithsonian did that before I did, thank you very much. She is an exemplar genus. There are many species of morganucodon, but they're often nicknamed Morgie in the community of paleo folk. And they are this lovely little kind of weasel rat bitch. She's great. She's only about the size of a field mouse. She is presumed to be burrowing. So she lives in little holes in the ground. BLAIR HODGES: The drawing is so cute, by the way, that you have in there. CAT BOHANNON: Isn't she wonderful? I hired this amazing illustrator. And as you'll see in the book and duly cited, she was very, very talented and we worked together. She wanted to have portraits of all the Eves. And I was like, yeah, let's do portraits of all the Eves. But she's coming from a Catholic background, my mother's Catholic too, so she wanted to do them like Saint cards, where you have the iconography in the center, but then all in the periphery around the side, you have all of these symbolic things. So you have a picture of Morgie, which is the real Madonna, thank you. But she doesn't have nipples. She's sweating drops of milk out of her milk patches on her belly. And she has these weird little pups sipping from it. Anyway, this is a podcast. You can look at it for yourselves when you get the book. But it's a beautiful, beautiful portrait. And the reason I picked Morgie as the start is, what people often forget is that, okay, yeah, we know we're mammals. You might've heard that even in high school bio. You're like, okay, homo sapiens, mammals, right? But what's not often talked about is, one of the many characteristic traits that make us mammals are deeply tied to how we reproduce, which is to say are deeply tied to the female sex of a species. And Morgie is this moment roughly when we think, okay, here's where we start lactating. Here's where we start making milk. And that becomes a key part of how we continue the development of our offspring after they exit the womb. And the funny thing about milk, of course, is that we're still laying eggs while we're first making milk, right? So we are egg-laying weird weasels, which is Morgie, in our little burrow, under the feet of dinosaurs, but also that we start lactating before we have nipples. When we often, for those of us who have breasts— BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, I didn't know this. CAT BOHANNON:  I know, isn't it wild? I also learned this on my journey in the research. So when we look in the mirror, we think, oh, breasts, these things, where do they come from? And we think of them as a sexual trait. We think of them as a thing that is meant to signal attractiveness to our partners. But the thing is, is that exactly—But we may not even parse that, “Oh, are we talking about the shape? Are we talking about the fat? Are we talking about the—" And it's like, whoa, no, the origin of lactation is before you even have a nipple, that you actually are just sweating this thing out from modified endocrine glands out of your skin through your hair. And in fact, the duck-billed platypus, which is often modeled as a kind of weird monitoring basal mammal, she doesn't have nipples either. Her pups through their weird little bills are slurping the milk off the bottom of her belly through these milk patches. So that's where these things come from. BLAIR HODGES: I had no idea. And also that milk wasn't just for nutrition, but also a way to sort of protect the eggs, right? So Morgie was laying eggs and then milk would be produced to help the eggs, rather than just feed the babies? CAT BOHANNON: Yes. So for a lot of egg layers—not hard shell, not like a chicken, but a softer leathery shell, there are many species that make leathery eggs, yeah? The trick is, is when you're on land, you need to keep them moist. You can't have them dry out while that offspring is continuing to develop in there. So a lot of egg layers, it's kind of gross, but they secrete this kind of egg-moistening goo that also has a lot of useful anti-fungal and antibacterial properties. Because of course you also don't want the eggs to be overrun like old bread. You want it to both be wet but not moldy. Wet but not infested with parasites, right? BLAIR HODGES: [laughs] Sure. CAT BOHANNON: And so, yeah, the best model I've seen for the evolution of milk is actually derived from that original egg-moistening goo. Which is of course incredibly gross to think about, but more likely the origin of lactation. BLAIR HODGES: And you talk about the mechanics of the nipples themselves. So we do get to a nipple, evolutionarily we do develop these nipples. CAT BOHANNON: We do. I got two. BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, I do too! CAT BOHANNON: Some people have more. Yeah. BLAIR HODGES: I mean, mine would be a little bit trickier to get to milk from, but you do point out in the book that some male folks can lactate, given the right exercises and the right stimulation, et cetera. But with the nipple— CAT BOHANNON: And the right hormonal cocktail, usually. Yeah. BLAIR HODGES: Right, right. But with the nipple, it wasn't so straightforward. So even today, babies—it's not this natural, you know, it can be tough to get babies to latch. So it's like the odds were still stacked against us. Even though we developed a nipple. It's this dance that a breastfeeder and a baby have to do to figure out how to still transfer that food across. CAT BOHANNON: Absolutely, and some species seem to be a little bit better at that, what we often call latching than others. My son was terrible at it. Absolutely just mangled my chest wall in ways that alarmed even the nurses. They're like, “oh God, here's a pump.” It's okay, eventually, whatever, I didn't have a moral goal for it. Luckily, I was able to not be embedded in that debate that many women do in the way we punish ourselves. “Oh, I wasn't able to lactate well enough!” But yeah, come on, it's fine. I mean, and when you think of it from a biological perspective, when you think about it in that evolutionary frame, in many ways, the mammalian chest wall, our bodies know how to make milk better than babies know how to latch. It's an older trait, right? But there are many really, really cool traits about the latching when it does work, because milk is what's called a co-produced biological product. That means the mother and the offspring are actually making it together. Not simply because when you suckle, when an offspring suckles, that means you arrive at that letdown reflex—because we're not carrying a sloshing cup of milk around in our boobs no matter how big they are. This isn't a Ziploc bag in there, right? This is actually like maybe a couple tablespoons at a time if you're lucky when you're lactating. But no, the suckling actually triggers the milk glands to kick up production, and that's what starts the whole process rolling. But the more important thing there, for the latching—because once you have that vacuum-like seal, once the kid's mouth latches on, forms the seal like a weird lamprey, and sucks that relatively giant nipple into its mouth, well now actually you've created something of a tide. Because as the child suckles, it's creating a vacuum while it sucks its cheeks in. And that's to suck the milk down as it's coming. But the tongue's moving back and forth, which moves the focus of the vacuum back and forth, which creates a tide, like a wave on the shore, of milk over the top and under the bottom. The baby's spit is sucked back up into the nipple because that's how undertow works, it's just physics! Which is gross and invasive to think about as a person who's done it. But it's true that the spit is then drawn up into the whole lining of the tubing of the breast where it's read like some weird ancient code. BLAIR HODGES: Right! CAT BOHANNON: And the mother's immune system is responding. All sorts of different sensors are responding and changing the content of the milk to suit. So if the kid's sick, then you get more immunoagents coming down that nipple to help the kid fight off the infection. And a bunch of hormonal stuff and ratios of proteins to sugar. We make our milk to suit, given what we're effectively, anciently reading in the kid's spit. Now that said, breast pumps are awesome. Your kid will be fine if you're not able to do this, okay? You know, modern technology is beautiful, “Fed is best.” But if you are getting the latching, then that's what's actually happening. BLAIR HODGES: This is the kind of thing your book is chock full of. So many times people are going to run into things they may have never heard of that are just unreal. You also talk about how the breast can be dangerous business too. I mean, evolution has trade-offs. Breast cancer, for example, is so common with women. So you can benefit the baby, but having the ability to produce this milk and do this thing through the breasts also increases a risk to the breast-haver as well. You talk about such trade-offs throughout the book. CAT BOHANNON: Absolutely, and I'll also offer that male bodies and men and trans women are also all capable of getting breast cancer. We all actually have mammary tissue, but male typical bodies tend to have way less of it. And mammary tissue, because it's so dynamically responsive to hormonal signaling, is just one of those places in the body that's more vulnerable to the processes that can drive cancer. And BLAIR HODGES: Mmhmm. Cells going haywire. CAT BOHANNON: Exactly, exactly. So it's still something absolutely that non-binary folk and gender queer folk of all types should pay attention to. If something's bugging you in your body, talk to your doctor. BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, there are so many footnotes that have that caveat of like, by the way, talk to your doctor just in case. CAT BOHANNON: Well, it's so important.   DONNA AND THE WOMB (16:27)   BLAIR HODGES: Let's talk about the next Eve, this is Donna. And this is a chapter about the womb. Donna emerged after a catastrophic cataclysm, whatever killed off the dinosaurs. There was this little weasel type animal that made it through all that destruction. This is 60 million some odd years ago, and you point to her as a reason why so many women today have periods. Let's talk about Donna. CAT BOHANNON: Donna, which is, I nicknamed her Donna, of course, Protungulatum Donnae, but Donna's easier. It's cuter to call her Donna. So she is an ancestor of the modern placental womb. Now we only have one womb. Many mammals still have two because they're evolved, of course, from the shell gland of our former egg layers. And the reason we have one, we're not entirely sure why, but we know the mechanism is that you have these two organs that are merging into one and producing that kind of, in our case, pear-shaped thing, but many, many women and girls are still born with a uterus that has a little dent in the top. Very common. Some even have a whole fibrous divide down the middle. Some are even still born with two uteri, less common, but happens, and two cervixes and two vaginas to match. CAT BOHANNON: So the easiest way to remember the difference between us and marsupials is: marsupials pouch, us no pouch. But also marsupials: two or more vaginas, which is fun, and us only the one. But the thing the reason to think about that isn't simply that it's cute and weird and fun imagining all of the things you might do with an extra vagina—all of which I'm sure are for the good, but that it's really talking about, at what point in development is that offspring coming out of that maternal body, and how much of development is finished outside of the womb, in or out of a pouch or a burrow or what have you. So this is the moment we start going down the path towards our somewhat catastrophic human reproductive system that is long derived from early, early mammals just after that cataclysm, which knocked out almost all the dinosaurs except for a few disgruntled birds, right? That's what's left of them. Your house sparrow. But what we have now is, we have this really patently crazy thing where instead of laying eggs like a sensible creature, we effectively hot dock them into our bodies within a uterus and then transform, not simply the uterus, but the entire body into this kind of eggshell slash meat factory of a burrow. Because our body is now effectively the burrow for that phase of development. In marsupials, it comes out like the size of a jelly bean, comes out a lot sooner, finishing out most of that development in the pouch and then elsewhere. For us, we're finishing a lot of the development inside our bodies, which has all kinds of knock-on effects. BLAIR HODGES: One of my favorite parts of the book that just blew me away was the illustration—I think it's on page 76—of the female pelvic anatomy. What we usually see is the uterus, and it's stretched out and it looks kind of like hip bones. It looks like our hips, like the ovaries are stretched out, the tubes are. And you show, no, it's actually sort of just like balled and smooshed up in there all together— CAT BOHANNON: Totally. BLAIR HODGES: —which I mean, I have never seen this illustration before! I've always seen that other illustration where it's all laid out. CAT BOHANNON: Yeah. So a lot of us learn—if we're lucky enough to have something like sex ed. Sadly, not all of us do, but for those of us who are able to have that be part of our education, it's kind of like a T shape, like a capital letter T, where you have that uterus and the vag in the middle, and then you have those fallopian tubes extending out to the side with two little grapes, you know, near the fringy bits, right, which are the ovaries. But the body doesn't have all this extra room in it. It's not like stretching out its arms. It's all kind of smooshed up in there. Which means that I've had the very real and very common experience of having had a transvaginal ultrasound, where they're like trying to image my ovaries and they can't find one. Because for whatever reason, the path of that ultrasound beam is being blocked by a part of the bowel or the uterus itself, or just, something's in the way and the ovary's hiding.  And I was very alarmed at this moment, partially because I had a large thing inside my vagina and I was trying to maintain a conversation. It's rough. BLAIR HODGES: [laughs] Right. CAT BOHANNON: But it's also like, this person's telling me they can't find one of my ovaries. I'm like, “Well where the hell is it?” Like, did I lose an ovary? Like what? You know? And no, actually it's just that everything is very smushed in there, which is part of why ovarian cysts can hurt so much for people who have them. Because you have that radiating signal of irritation hitting many different organs in that area, right? And so it can be kind of hard to pinpoint what you're feeling exactly. You just know it hurts or that it's like pressure, right? And it's different person to person. It's also unfortunately why ovarian cancer is so very dangerous. People who have these biologically female bodies, we kind of get used to aches and pains down there. It's kind of a weird common sensation, for fluctuations over a menstrual cycle, to have some kind of achy bits, some kind of bloated bits, some kind of “what was that sharp pain, I don't know, it went away, cool,” right? So in the early stages of ovarian cancer, it's often the case that a patient may not be fully aware that what's happening might be new. Now that's not to have your listeners be terrified. If something's bothering you, again, talk to your doctor. BLAIR HODGES: Yeah. CAT BOHANNON: But it is absolutely why it's so dangerous, because of course, given that it's so smushed against everything in there, it's not hard to metastasize. You're right up against the bowel. You're very close to the liver. You're in the mix in there. BLAIR HODGES: It's packed in there! And you talk about how bonkers this is, and how many people who have gone through pregnancy have said, like, “What the hell is this?!” [laughs] Like, why do I have to do this? CAT BOHANNON: Fair! Fair question. Yes. Somewhere in our very deep sci-fi future, if we don't blow ourselves up first—which given the news today seems very close to happening, thanks—but assuming we survive the insanity that is human culture and conflict, there is a future in which there is a truly external womb. Which would have to be effectively an entire synthesized female body, right? Because it's not just, it's also your immune system, it's your respiration, it's many things. But assuming in the very deep, many hundreds of years in the future that this happens, it immediately changes everything. Because of course, then it immediately becomes unethical to ever ask a female to do this dangerous thing. She may still choose, but it becomes unethical to ask, because there's truly an alternative. BLAIR HODGES: Hmm. CAT BOHANNON: Anyway, so there's a thought experiment for you in our future sci-fi. But yeah, it is nuts. It's nuts that we make babies the way we do. Our pregnancies and our births and our postpartum recoveries are longer and harder and more prone to dangerous complications that can and do cripple and or kill mother, child or both. And that's true compared to almost any other primate except for squirrel monkeys, and we feel sorry for them. But that's true for almost any other mammal. We suck at this! We're actually bad at reproduction, which seems counterintuitive because there are eight billion of us. But it's true. BLAIR HODGES: Right. And we see you trying to theorize as to why that is. Like, we're so bad at reproduction, but we're also so highly successful, one might even say an invasive species in a way. CAT BOHANNON: Right. BLAIR HODGES: We've spread out everywhere. How did that happen if we're so bad at reproduction and it's such a costly and dangerous thing to do? CAT BOHANNON: Well, it took all of our very classic hominin resources to pull it off. We had to be super social and super clever problem solvers who are good at thinking about the world as a tool user. Which is to say, tool use is about behavior. So it's not like a paleoanthropologist actually gives a damn about this rock that someone used to cut something, right? The stone axes are not the thing they care about. They care about what they can infer about the behavior of its user. All paleoanthropologists are deeply behaviorists. What that means is, if all tool use is essentially overcoming a limitation of your body in order to achieve a goal in your given environment and using some manipulation of your behavior to do that, well, our most important invention, if we suck at reproduction, was gynecology. Lucy—and I'm not the first to say this—Lucy the australopithecine, 3.2 million years ago, had a freakin' midwife. And habilis after her had even more reproductive workarounds, as did erectus, all the way up to homo sapiens. We were manipulating our fertility patterns through behavior. And that's a huge upgrade. Now you don't have to wait around for your uterus to evolve to a thing that's less deadly—because, of course, you could also just go extinct. There's that. That's an option in evolution. You could also just not exist when you have bad reproduction. But if you can work around it behaviorally, if you can have midwives—we're one of the only species that regularly helps each other give birth. If you can manipulate your fertility patterns to up or down regulate your fertility too, because in any given environment, it might be better to cluster your births earlier in your reproductive life and then care for your sort of “useless” babies—I love my kid, but they're useless, right? For a long period of time, right? Like in your given environment, given your food supply, maybe that's a good plan. Or maybe things are more seasonal, or maybe it's actually there's not a lot of food at all and you need to stretch that sh*t out. You need to actually have them every four to six years or so, which is what chimpanzees do, which is what some known human communities do. So you have to think about how we choose to have babies and what we do to manipulate our fertility, including medicinally, including behaviorally, in the space of medical practices, as something that's adapting this buggy and fault-prone thing that is human reproduction to suit our different environments and lifestyles. And that starts not a few hundred years ago, not just in the deep history of racism and eugenics sadly in modern gynecology, but actually millions of years ago. BLAIR HODGES: Sure. And you're inviting us to think again about tools. So you talked about that scene in 2001: A Space Odyssey, where the tool is this bone that's a weapon, and we think about the rise of humanity as being tied to this type of tool. You're inviting people to re-envision that and say, actually, the tool of gynecology—which would have involved our own hands as tools—would have been such a crucial turning point for who we are as a species or who we could become. CAT BOHANNON: Mm-hmm. BLAIR HODGES: Because I think you even say, we “seized the means of reproduction,” or something at that point, which is a great pun. CAT BOHANNON: Yes, yes, and meant to be, because I too am a nerd. Yes, we do. We do indeed seize the means of actual freakin' reproduction and get our hands on the levers that are controlling not only our reproductive destiny, but then effectively our destiny as a species.   PURGI AND HUMAN SENSE PERCEPTION (27:29)   BLAIR HODGES: That's Cat Bohannon and she's a researcher and author with a PhD from Columbia University in the evolution of narrative and cognition. We're talking about her book, Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution. It's a brand new book, and it's a fabulous book. The next part I wanted to talk about was perception. And you say you got thinking about whether men and women perceive the world in different ways. And you got thinking about this as a college student working as a nude model at the local art school. And when students would take a break, you'd kind of wander through and check out how people were seeing you, how they were drawing you. And you noticed, invariably often, the men would be drawing your breasts too big. You're like, those aren't mine. But then as the weeks went by, they would get closer to normal size. Like something was changing in how they initially saw you, how they were drawing you. And so you wondered, like, are they seeing things differently than me? Is perception different? CAT BOHANNON: Mmhmm. BLAIR HODGES: Now, the danger in this question is falling into the trap of “men are from Mars, women are from Venus,” right? Essentializing gender. CAT BOHANNON: Yyyuuup. BLAIR HODGES: So we'll keep that in mind as you talk about perception and what you found in this chapter. CAT BOHANNON: Yeah, so there were some genderqueer folk in the art classes where I was a professional naked person, which was my job at the time. But for the most part, they were cis folk with a variety of sexualities. So I would just point out that in these rooms, there of course was diversity, and there was racial diversity too. However, the most obvious variable, you know, if you want to call it that, was simply that the male presenting folk who were almost universally cis, were drawing my boobs too big. Now, they're not small. I'm like a 34D. It's a problem. The straps dig into my shoulders. I know that I am not a small-breasted person for good and ill, but it's more that there's just the skill of literally, proportionally, how big are these knockers you're putting on this figure drawing. And the females, the women, the femmes, were not doing that. And it wasn't the case then—And it was happening semester after semester in multiple classes. So this is not a scientific study that I'm basing this on. This is an anecdote. But like, it was a thing. And I asked some other people who had been models and they were like, “Oh yeah, they always do that.” And I was asking them, what do you think it is? And they usually said something like, “Eh, it's just porn. Whatever, they get over it. It's fine. They just don't know how to not see porn when they see naked female bodies,” right? Although this was the late 90s and early aughts, so it was before the massive proliferation of internet porn, but whatever. It was a thing, is what I'm saying. It was a freakin' thing that was fairly consistent. And so I had to ask myself, like, do they literally look larger to them? You know? Is this a cultural thing? Is this gender mess? Is this just sexism? Is it just, you know, that soup of that thing where it's complicated? Or is there something physiological going on? And so for that, I take us back to the dawn of primates. Not in the “men are from Mars, women from Venus” way, but actually when were we actually weird little proto monkeys in a tree? And can that tell us anything about why they draw my boobs too big? And it's a journey. I go through quite a lot because there's a lot that goes into the evolution of the sensory array. The nose, the eyes, the ears. So there's a lot to work with there and it doesn't always come back to my naked self. The central reason why, as best as I could tell, they were drawing them too large is that they were literally fixating on them. So when your eye looks out on the world, it's doing a mixture of things. It's doing a mixture of saccades, which are these twitchy little movements. Your eyes are doing back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, that you don't even notice. And fixations, which means they're landing on one spot and staying there for a period before they move around again. And there does seem to be in the lab notable sex differences in how male saccade versus fixation patterns seem to work. Again, mostly these subjects are cis men. So there's your caveat, right? But one of the famous things about male versus female facial perception that classically in the psychological literature, cis women seem to be better at remembering faces—and these are sighted people of course—than cis men. And it seems to be, after doing some eye tracking studies with some careful cameras, that what's happening is that male eyes seem to focus more centrally on the center of the face, almost kind of around the tip and bridge of the nose, like that center zone. Whereas female typical eyes are doing fixations through all of the major points of facial features, eyes, nose, cheekbones, chin, up again, all around, all around, all around. BLAIR HODGES: Huh. CAT BOHANNON: Which is to say it may be the case that it's not that—you know, the stereotype women are more social, we're just better at remembering people because we're all kind of emotionally mushy or some sh*t, right? No. It's actually that where you fixate is giving you more signal for your long-term memory. And so if you're getting a broader range of information to dump into long-term memory, just literally what your eyes are doing may be helping you do that, right? Which is not about a psychology thing, it's a physiology thing. And in the boys' cases, I think they were quite literally fixating more on my breasts. Now, why they were doing that may well be cultural— BLAIR HODGES: Right. CAT BOHANNON: They don't have them for the most part. And you know they're 18 years old, people. I was naked in front of 18-year-old boys, so I have no more nightmares, right? But like, that's new. That's not in our culture. That's not a thing they've seen a lot in the social setting as opposed to an intimate setting, right? So you know, literally it's looming large in their mind and over the course of the semester as they get used to it—right? So it's both what their eyes are doing, but it's also cultural. BLAIR HODGES: Right, and this is where—and you point this out as well sometimes, especially in the footnotes—where studies on trans folks are going to shed a lot more light on this— CAT BOHANNON: Oh yeah. BLAIR HODGES: —where we can probably get a better sense of where culture fits in, where expectations fit in versus physiology. And we're still so early in scientific endeavors of thinking about trans perception— CAT BOHANNON: Absolutely we are. BLAIR HODGES: It's just huge questions to explore, so much more to explore there than we know. CAT BOHANNON: Mm-hmm. It's gonna be fun, it's gonna be great.   THE NOSE (33:38)   BLAIR HODGES: Yeah! This also talks about—So our eyes, our nose, and our ears are in this chapter. The nose, it was really cool to learn about how our faces flattened out over time, which made smell—We're not as great smelling like as we used to be. Our faces are flat. We don't have this big organ in there that does a lot of good smell stuff. And a lot of these changes happened when we were up in the trees, to our eyes and ears, that point to what seem to be some sex-based differences. Give us some examples of these sex based differences in smell, in sight, in sound, that still carry through today that are kind of throwbacks to this time when we were swinging from the trees, or I guess really just kind of crawling around in the trees. CAT BOHANNON: Yeah, yeah, we didn't have those brachiated shoulders yet. So swinging less so. But no, this is a kind of classic story of how we got the so-called monkey face. Even a kid can kind of draw a monkey face on a piece of paper. You got the big ears, got that kind of flat face, two forward-facing binocular stereoscopic eyes. Like we know what that looks like, but that's a very big change from something like a weasel or a mouse, right? Where you have that elongated snout, you have eyes a little bit more to the side. Right, and most of the people who talk about the evolution of primates do talk about how this came about. If a face is a sensory array, it's not just what we use to smile at each other. It's where we're hanging our primary sensors of the eyes, the nose, and the ears, and how we position them on our head is very much shaping how we perceive our environment. So the move up into the trees is a very different environment from the ground, especially from burrowing. There are many different ways in which we have to process the world differently. When it comes to the nose, one of the things that's interesting about human beings is we lost what's called the vomeronasal organ. In a lot of mammals, the perception of pheromones, you know, smells that usually the opposite sex put out that we innately strongly react to, which in a mouse is incredibly a dominant part of their perceptive lives. For us, we don't have it. We evolved away from it. We actually still have a teeny tiny little passage. It's like at the bottom of our sinuses, but it ends in kind of a—it hits a wall. It's not much going on there. Human beings don't seem to have a whole lot of pheromone perception left. But what we do have is a whole bunch of cisgender women who are a lot better at smelling stuff than males are. And we're not entirely sure we know why it is. But it is absolutely true classically in olfaction that female subjects are going to be better at detecting scents that are faint in a room. That's a concentration thing. You only need a little whiff, you know, whereas a male typical might need a stronger dose. We're better at discerning between different kinds of scents and we're better at recognizing it quickly. So we're literally smelling more finely than males are. But it's not because we have more receptors, actually. And in fact, our noses, our nostrils sucking in that air are smaller than most males in fact. No, the big difference actually seems to be in the olfactory bulb itself. This is the part of the brain that processes smell information. Yeah. And the cells are more tightly packed with more of them, even controlling for body size, in a female typical brain than in a male. And that just means it is transmitting that signal more quickly and more widely and more effectively, and then sending a stronger signal out to other parts of the brain. So we're literally wired differently. Don't entirely know why. And we're not really sure if that's a tree problem or if it's just like a sex pheromone problem that's a leftover. Not really sure.   THE EARS (37:19)   BLAIR HODGES: Not only not only our smell is discussed in this chapter, but our hearing is as well. You say that probably the most important differences between sex as pertains to hearing here—volume and pitch, women tend to hear better in higher pitches, they retain hearing better with age. What are the differences that stood out to you in a male typical versus a female typical body when it comes to our hearing? CAT BOHANNON: Uh, this was kind of wild for me. So I'd often heard the story, and maybe you have too, that female ears, human female ears, are better tuned to higher pitches that often correspond to baby cries, right? Men and women can hear the same pitches for most of our early lives, but we're more tuned in to the pitches that are associated with the pitches that babies usually use when they cry. To me, this was kind of an annoying story. Once again, I seem to be hardwired to make babies. And as a feminist, I'm like, “ugh.” But it's true, so it's fine. It's a long-evolved thing. But the more interesting thing in that story for me was that most cis men start losing the upper range of their hearing starting at age 25. Now it's a gradual slope. Guys in their thirties don't need a hearing aid necessarily if they're normally hearing people, right? But you do have this slope of decline that's just, it's like a band filter. It's just cutting off the top end of your range, every year a little bit more, down, down, until you arrive in your fifties. And the thing is, female voices, female typical cis women's voices are a little bit higher pitched and our overtones on our voices, the full timbre of our voice, it really extends up to the top end of human hearing. So what happens is quite literally starting age 25, cis men aren't hearing women's voices very well and the older they get, the worse it gets, until finally in their fifties or so, quite without realizing it, a lot of men, a lot of cis men, our voices, our female voices sound thin, a little bit tinny, harder to pick out, and may well be boosted by a hearing aid. Right? So that totally changes some of how I understand the dynamic of a boardroom. Now, it doesn't explain why a sexist man cares about what a woman says less. It doesn't say that. That's just sexism. BLAIR HODGES: Right. CAT BOHANNON: But it does say that literally he might be having trouble hearing you without realizing he is. BLAIR HODGES: And again, as you discuss, all of these interesting things throughout the chapter of perception—and I don't remember if we mentioned Purgi is the name of this Eve, 60-some-odd-million years ago. CAT BOHANNON: Purgatorius, yes! BLAIR HODGES: Yes, ancestor of the primates. So if people want to learn even more about these kind of things about our nose, our eyes, our ears—Purgi's chapter is the place to go. We're talking with Cat Bohannon about her book Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution. You can also check out some of Cat's essays and poems. They've appeared in Scientific American, Mind Science Magazine, The Best American Non-required Reading, and other places. She lives with her family in Seattle but is currently touring to talk about this new book called Eve.   ARDI AND THE LEGS (40:21)   Let's talk about the legs. So we talked a little bit about being up in the trees already. But at some point, we came down, this is about four and a half-ish million years ago, we decided to stand upright. And that had some big implications for differently sexed bodies. Let's talk about some of those. CAT BOHANNON: Yeah, absolutely. Well, I don't know that we decided to do much of anything, at least in the sense of conscious choice— BLAIR HODGES: [laughs] Maybe had to. CAT BOHANNON: We didn't choose, I mean, to modify our pelvic arrangement. Although some individual choices happen along the way. So yeah, one of the big things in a shift for the human evolution pattern is that we mistakenly believed for a while that our ancestors were knuckle walkers, like chimps or gorillas, and then we stood upright. You remember that old diorama, that old, you know, you got the knuckle walking— BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, it's classic. CAT BOHANNON: —and then you eventually stand up and then there's jokes about it, eventually you're like sitting typing on the computer at the far right. You know? BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, all hunched over, yeah. CAT BOHANNON: Yeah. And so that kind of meme kind of has been around, but actually we were never knuckle walkers, none of our ancestors were, none of our Eves certainly. We were just hanging out in trees and then on the ground a bit more and eventually walking. The thing about walking is that what you really need to be able to do besides just having a spine absorb more pressure than it would otherwise—that's why we have an S-shaped lower back to help distribute that force over our bodies without crippling us. But also, what we needed to be able to do was endure. In other words, the story of walking and bipedalism is an endurance story. A primatologist once told me that there is no safe place to be in a room with a chimpanzee. There's no possibility that you are in a safe space because they are incredibly fast, incredibly strong, and can be incredibly violent. They will rip off your face—sometimes, literally, hopefully not, and they'll do it really, really fast. So the idea that we got faster when we became upright is actually wrong. What did happen, however, is that if a chimp does attack you, not long after all of that incredible violence and speed and running away more than likely, because that's mostly going to happen if the chimp's scared, you know, they're going to want to go eat a mango under a tree somewhere. They're not keeping it up for a long period of time. BLAIR HODGES: Hmm. CAT BOHANNON: What we can do is we can walk all freakin' day. Very few animals have the kind of metabolic capability of doing such a thing. Because it's not simply what your muscles can do. It's how your muscles are utilizing what's called the substrate. Utilizing local energy resources, and when those run out, tapping into other resources—usually in our case from fat. So that's why we're able to walk from point A to B for hours and hours, whereas a chimpanzee can't do that sh*t, right? So the interesting thing about sex differences here is that, we know that female bodies in human bodies are slightly better at endurance by many different measures. So untrained bodies—bodies that haven't been trying to do this, in other words, haven't been working out in the gym—your classic female body does have slightly less muscle mass, but that isn't the big story. The bigger story is that when you do a deep tissue biopsy, female typical skeletal muscles have a little bit more of what's called slow twitch muscle. You might have heard, that's an endurance muscle. That's a type of tissue that's better at doing things for a long period of time, as opposed to fast twitches, which is what lets you be a sprinter, which is what lets you really have explosive strength. There does seem to be that sex difference, I mean, between male bodies—typical, average, I mean—and female bodies, just in terms of what those muscles seem to be geared for, right? And it's tricky, right? Most of us aren't ultra marathoners, for many reasons, most of them psychological! Uh, some of them financial actually, right? But most of us aren't going to do those extreme tests of endurance. But once you get up to those extreme lengths, actually, female runners, tend to not only match or beat male runners in those races, but actually tend to outpace them over time. Which is to say there may be something about the female body that, in long feats of endurance, is slightly better at this. Very slightly better at tapping into a second wind. And so if that's the case, then it's curious that usually how we tell the story about becoming upright is all about some sh*t that we assume guys were doing. Usually it's around hunting. The idea that we were running down big game, you've probably read some popular science books about that, that we evolved to run, right? BLAIR HODGES: Right. CAT BOHANNON: And sort of. Maybe. But it's a little bit weird, one, to assume that the males were the ones doing that. Two: We were upright way before we were hunting big game. Like Ardipithecus is the Eve I use in the legs chapter— BLAIR HODGES: Yes, Ardi! CAT BOHANNON: And you know, this is a very, very—Ardi, she's wonderful, recently discovered, wonderful, wonderful fossil. She was upright well before big game was a big part of our food strategies. So like we were actually doing stuff on two legs way before it was a matter of running anything down.   CRAFTING SCIENTIFIC NARRATIVES (45:23)   BLAIR HODGES: And this is where it seems tricky for researchers to pin down is, we're dealing with these huge lengths of time, and we're dealing with a pretty limited record. CAT BOHANNON: Mmhmm. Yeah. BLAIR HODGES: And we see you piecing the story together in ways that challenge the conventional narrative. And you've got the evidence there—just as much evidence and sometimes more than what the typical narrative tells us, which is, like you said, we started walking upright because males were hunting and running after game or whatever. And you're like, “Well, actually, there's all this other evidence that shows there's probably other stuff going on.” And looking at today's bodies gives us some ideas about the bodies of the past as well. So you mentioned the different sort of muscle things that female bodies tend to have. Now would that definitely be something that developed through evolution rather than through, like, boys getting played with more or something in their youth than girls do, or roughhousing with boys versus girls, or something like that? CAT BOHANNON: You know, it's hard to say. I think that's a smart question. I think of the studies that I was using, that I was wielding—juggling even, in the legs chapter—those were all done on adult bodies, in part because there are ethics around doing a deep tissue biopsy in an infant. You know, like what is consent there? Why would a—you know, and also the occasion; why it might happen and what's the clinical setting. Like there are many ways into a scientific study, but adult consent and informed consent's a big one, right? BLAIR HODGES: Mm-hmm. CAT BOHANNON: So yeah, I don't think those were pediatric studies, and I think it's smart. I think it's smart to say that when we do studies on adult bodies, there have been whole lived lives and whole lived childhoods up to that point. That's absolutely true, and that plays into some of the issues we talk about later in the book too. So I don't know, I don't know. I do know that at least when there have been cellular studies of metabolism in human muscle cells, XX cells seem to be slightly better at utilizing multiple substrates, which is to say multiple energy sources—tapping into that second wind when the local sugar runs out is usually how we tell that story, yeah?—than XY cells, right? So it does seem to be true at the cellular level and not just types of tissue. But you're absolutely right that I don't know how much childhood is gonna play into that adult musculoskeletal system, at least not from the research I've seen. BLAIR HODGES: And you also say that going upright was harder on female bodies. Can you give me an example of why that would be? CAT BOHANNON: Yes. So, for one thing, relaxin. Relaxin is this thing that is floating around in the bloodstream of both male and female bodies, but it is slightly more dominant in female typical bodies. Again, I'm always here talking about “biological females,” usually pre-menopause here, okay? Just to put a pin in that so we know what we're talking about. BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, okay. CAT BOHANNON: Relaxin is a thing that during pregnancy loosens the ligaments and the support structures around, not only the hip bones and the pelvic structure to help it widen and carry that additional load, but of course also to widen our very narrow birth canal, which is a problem! BLAIR HODGES: Yeah. CAT BOHANNON: But it's also, even when we're not pregnant, it tends to make the fixtures of the joints a little looser. It actually has to do with a vascular response around the joints, so I won't get too technical with you. But basically what it does is it makes a typical female body a bit more flexible, you know. Now this is part of why our feet expand when we are pregnant. It's not simply fluid retention, but for female bodies that become pregnant, it's also that these higher doses of relaxin are loosening the ligaments that are binding all of those foot bones together. So they literally get wider, and sometimes a little bit longer, which is very freaky when you think about it. And, uh, it doesn't always quite go back—I can tell you—afterwards, many women gain as much as a whole shoe size during pregnancy— BLAIR HODGES: Wow. CAT BOHANNON: —and then just retain that, which sucks for buying new shoes, but there you go. You have greater concerns when you're in your postpartum period, I could say, um, yeah. But it also means that we're especially prone to lower back pain, possibly because of some instability there in the lower back. Especially going through pregnancy and back again, that can make you more vulnerable too, because it does a lot to the curvature of the spine. Right? So in other words, being upright with this extra relaxin in your bloodstream can make you a little more vulnerable to certain kinds of bone and muscle related pains than it would be if you were a totally sensible four-legged creature who isn't doing this crazy thing, because basically we used to be like tables with four legs and now we're standing on two of the legs of the table and our body is still kind of catching up. BLAIR HODGES: [laughs] Right. Yeah, and you're bearing that extra weight of a pregnancy, too, on that back. And so the common lower back pain is a remnant of this decision—or not “decision” as you pointed out, but this evolutionary move of going upright, exactly, right. CAT BOHANNON: Accident. Yeah.   PREGNANCY AND THE BRAIN (50:06)   BLAIR HODGES:  That's not the only change that women undergo during pregnancy, these physical changes you talked about—the joints, the feet. But also the brain undergoes changes similar to what happens to the brain during puberty. You describe it almost like a second sort of puberty. There's so much development and change happening in the actual brain that it's like a second puberty for women who become pregnant? CAT BOHANNON: It's like an extra transition in a life cycle. Yeah. BLAIR HODGES: Okay, right. CAT BOHANNON: So in biology, you have these classic, maybe you've seen, developmental trajectories in the life cycle. It usually looks like a circle with arrows around it. You see like an egg and then a juvenile—like in insects, you'll have like a larva and then you have a chrysalis and then you have a butterfly. For mammals, we do this too. And we say, what are the developmental phases? What are the phases of this life cycle? And one of the interesting things, at least when it comes to how the human brain seems to go through this life cycle—because there are changes in our incredibly plastic, very malleable human brain that shift and actually have very notable physiological changes at each of these major transitions. So in puberty, there's actually an incredible rewiring and developmental thing that happens all throughout the teens. Can be very challenging, can make you more vulnerable to certain kinds of mental illness, actually, and then not suffer as much when you come into your twenties. There are outcomes, in other words, from what's going down in there. BLAIR HODGES: Yeah. Schizophrenia will often emerge around that time, for example, and a little bit later for women than men, right? CAT BOHANNON: Yeah, yeah, yes, absolutely so. And one of the cutting-edge things in research there is whether or not the brain development during puberty is in any way affecting that trajectory. Both men and women—and by this I mean males and females—are prone to schizophrenia, right? Schizophrenia, it's a strongly genetically related thing, but we're not entirely sure what all the triggers are. What we do know is that males and females both get it. But what happens is that males are diagnosed sooner. And very obviously so, they move into psychosis. Whereas females have a slightly different symptomology, slightly different path towards diagnosis. And then they have, and are diagnosed later in their twenties. Now some of that's a diagnosis bias in that— BLAIR HODGES: Sure. How signs are read by society or whatever. Yeah. CAT BOHANNON: Exactly, which is a cultural thing and sometimes a sexist thing. There are just, there are complications there. There are confounds. However, it may also be the case, that because the pubertal shift is sort of long and slow in humans, we actually start many of the features of our puberty sooner and then take longer to complete them in female bodies. Whereas for males, it hits you later and it hits you like a truck. It just hits you like a ton of bricks. It's just, um, it, that's just, it's just faster and a bit harder, if you will, because you're condensing that into a later point. And interestingly, even in rodents actually—though what you might call a puberty isn't exactly the same as what we do—they likewise in the female have a sort of longer period of going through it than the male. So it might just be a basic mammalian thing. But the effect in the human brain is that you have this longer and slightly…Subtle isn't the right word but you have this longer period of brain development that's dealing with the hormones of puberty, that has a slightly different slope while that brain's developing, whereas in the male brain, it's shorter, it's more impacted, it might be a bit rougher, you know. So in a brain that's already prone to psychosis—this is where the research, some branches of research are going, you know—is that a factor? Are there physiological shifts in sex differences in puberty that make those brains differently vulnerable to different kinds of mental illness? BLAIR HODGES: And so female brains are undergoing these changes during puberty. But then later during pregnancy, as we were talking about, there's also more shifts. And this is literally like stuff sort of moving around. Is this like neurons kind of remapping and different things? Like what's actually happening up there? CAT BOHANNON: Yeah, yeah, yeah. What the hell is this wet lump of tissue in our heads that we center the self in? Good question, good question! Neuroscience would like to know. BLAIR HODGES: [laughs] Yeah. CAT BOHANNON: No, it's true. Well, a pregnant female's brain—and by this I mean human now, actually shrinks in the third trimester, like significantly so, which is alarming. Like is the baby actually eating my brain? Good question! No one's really sure quite why this is happening. BLAIR HODGES: Mom brain! CAT BOHANNON: I know, actual mom brain, it turns out, is hella real. Yeah, in the stereotypical sense. So yeah, some of it actually, interestingly, doesn't seem to be a loss of neurons. It's not a loss of cells necessarily from what little they've been able to see in various studies. It seems to be more a loss of—There is a rewiring. There is a kind of clear, you know, snipping out a bunch of connections in your existing neural network, which in some ways may make room for new pathways. So one of the big arguments for why our brains develop so long during that pubertal period—which is very unlike other primates, right? We really have this huge period of social learning in our childhoods and then our adolescence—is that we have deep social learning to do. We have really complex social societies, and we're constantly having to map them and learn not just new things to do with ourselves, but new ways to be in different social environments, especially as we shift around through different social environments. So in that case, when you think about what's happening in the last trimester of pregnancy, and then in the postpartum recovery period, this is someone who is having major social shift. Now the story in the sciences is usually told that, oh, this is helping her better bond with her baby, her really, really vulnerable baby, who's so very useless, can't even hold up its head. You know, so like, wow, so this is all about that bonding. And it's true that some of the regions that show some of that shrinkage, if you will—which sounds like a bad thing, but is actually allowing for more pathways to form. That's the argument that's usually made about it— BLAIR HODGES: Okay. CAT BOHANNON: —have to do with social bonding and reading social cues, and so it's a sociality story. One of the things that I say in the book is that, must we again render the mother invisible? Maybe it's not all about the baby. Maybe she matters too. Because actually one of the big things that happens in a social species like ours when we give birth and come into motherhood, especially for the first time, is that we are learning new ways to be. We're learning how to differently map our social environment and new relationships with different sorts of people, and who's going to be most helpful in this new feature in my life. And who of my old friends are like, maybe not gonna help out with the kids so much. Just, you know, we love them, but that's not their strength. You know, in other words, and how to ask for things that you need, and when to learn new social rules. Which is to say, I suspect some of the brain changes that are happening there are not simply about bonding with the baby, but are about being able to read the room once you have one. Which I assume is a long-evolved trait that is just repurposed in the human. This is probably happening in chimps to a degree. It's more like, “Okay now that you're human, let's repurpose this trait in your hyper social environment.” Does that make sense? BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, it does. CAT BOHANNON: Okay.   WHAT MAKES A WOMAN (57:16)   BLAIR HODGES: And time and time again, we see this in your book where you'll take the mainstream story about why a particular biological thing is happening—so mom brain, for example, which is that maybe people might encounter forgetfulness or feeling scattered or like ADHD type symptoms or whatever—and saying, “Oh, this is happening because they're doing this for baby.” And you're saying, “Okay, like, sure. But also, what if it's also this?” CAT BOHANNON: Yep. BLAIR HODGES: Because those type of questions are what are driving scientific outcomes and the theories that we have about it. So your book, again and again, is saying, well, what about this as well? Or what about this instead? So we're just sort of getting a different point of view. CAT BOHANNON: Mm-hmm. BLAIR HODGES: And I think with a lot of these questions, it's hard to just say, this is the definitive answer. And you do write with a level of humility there. But you're really opening up possibilities that can change the way we the way we interact with people who aren't parents, or people who are. Because you're also not saying, “Look, in order to be a perfect woman, you need to go through this change in your brain or else you're an unfulfilled woman!” CAT BOHANNON: Oh, god no. No no no no no. BLAIR HODGES: Right. So you're speaking to a lot of different experiences. CAT BOHANNON: You know, I think this is true for all women. We people who have uteri are not merely vessels for babies. Even in an evolutionary sense, because we are a hyper-social species in interdependent complex social environments and cultures. Which is to say, it is not a woman's destiny to freaking give birth. It is a woman's destiny to survive as best as she can, just like any other organism. You know what I mean? And it's also true that there are many, many ways to contribute to the wellbeing of a group, even in a biological sense, even in an ancient ancestral sense, besides simply producing more babies. And that's sometimes the confusion when we talk about the book. Some people have been confused thinking, “Are you saying that women are the way they are—you know, cis women—because it's our destiny to have babies?” And I'm like, “No!” It's more that the way we have babies is really crap, and many, many features in our bodies have evolved to withstand it. If this is a thing that hopefully you choose to do and isn't forced upon you, hopefully you have some long-evolved traits to make it suck less. It's more like that, more like that. BLAIR HODGES: And so, women who don't undergo that or have the same kind of like brain changes, it doesn't mean that their brains are somehow lesser than or whatever, they're just suited for different things. CAT BOHANNON: Exactly. BLAIR HODGES: And this is also where trans identities come into play as well. You don't have to be this “biologically sexed”—let alone intersex folks as well, where there's not this sort of binary that exists there—but that trans women can experience the world as women, as trans women especially, even though they may not be able to physically carry a pregnancy. Because I think one of the reasons people who are sort of anti-t

COMING JANUARY 2024—Dad, mom, two kids, a white picket fence, and everybody knows their role. It's the classic nuclear family. I grew up believing this was the one right way to be a family—until I started getting to know real people who didn't fit that mold. Now we're watching this old nuclear family model explode in real time, but we don't need to hit the panic button. We can let curiosity lead the way.    I'm Blair Hodges, host of Family Proclamations. I'm on a quest to find out everything I can about family, gender identity, and sexuality. I want you to join me. On this podcast I'm talking to best-selling authors about marriage, divorce, cohabitation, single adulthood, parenting, childlessness, adoption, fostering, gender identity, human biology, and lots more. We'll learn  more about different families and identities, past, present, and future. So please get ready to surrender old stereotypes and embrace new perspectives.    There's no single way to be a family. And every kind of family has something we can learn from.   Family Proclamations arrives in January. Follow for updates on IG @famprocs.