Feminism
Posts tagged with feminism explore how gender shapes experiences of schooling, care work, and institutional power. We examine the gendered dynamics of advocacy, the feminisation of teaching and parenting, and the systemic devaluation of emotional labour. Drawing on intersectional, disability-informed, and anti-colonial feminist frameworks, these posts connect personal experience to broader patterns of exclusion, responsibility, and resistance in education.
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Coats, care, and control: microaggressions, ableism, and the moral surveillance of mothers
Every autumn, as the rain returns and hallways fill with dripping boots, an unremarkable genre of school communication re-emerges: the gentle reminder, the kind note, the message of concern about whether a child has a coat. The tone, perfectly calibrated, performs care while enacting surveillance. “I hope your child had a good rain jacket, umbrella,…
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The children don’t see autism, they see meanness
How schools weaponise ableism through gendered care expectations. Harm amplified by systemic ableism The principal once told me, almost as an aside, that the children “don’t see autism, they see meanness.” It was meant as an explanation, but to me it landed as an indictment of a school culture—to let that ableist misunderstanding stand unchallenged.…
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Double the love, double the discrimination
Public education systems punish families of multiples by forcing impossible choices between their children—often withholding support until one child reaches visible crisis, while the other’s suffering is quietly disregarded. The statistical reality schools refuse to prepare for Schools are rarely prepared for what families of multiples often bring to the classroom: These families often arrive…
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Poise as pedagogy
There is a cost to composure that institutions never count. When schools reward mothers for staying calm in the face of harm, they turn grace into a gatekeeping tool and punish those who dare to grieve out loud.
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Bound by blood
Maternal embodiment and the unbearable violence of institutional disbelief. We were once one body There is a biological, emotional, and moral reality so fundamental that no policy manual can contain it, and no professional training can domesticate it—my child once lived inside me. His limbs pressed against my ribs before they ever touched the outside…
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Too competent to help, too angry to believe
The impossible performance of grace in systems that harm our children. Holding two pieces in tension This essay is written alongside a truth that cannot be softened. A truth that spills out, unsanitized, unmanageable, and fully lived. A truth that takes the form of intrusive thoughts, violent imagery, desperate poise, and carefully practiced restraint. That…
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How do you live with yourself
Part of my neurodivergence is fatalism; part of it is hyperphantasia; part of it is the inability to look out at a beautiful landscape without imagining loss, rupture, and death, because even as a small child on the ferry to Victoria, while other people were looking out over the water and the mountains and the…
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I have thought about writing her a letter
I have thought about writing her a letter—something long and deliberate, something shaped by memory and moral clarity, something that names what occurred and places it in her hands before the door finally closes. The idea moves through me with a kind of gravitational pull, neither urgent nor calm, just pressing and circling. I return…
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The architecture of exclusion: how schools erase, silence, and wear down families
Schools are supposed to be spaces of inclusion and support—but for many families, especially those raising disabled or neurodivergent children, advocacy is met with a wall of politeness, professionalism, and performative listening that hides a deeper violence: rhetorical control. One of the most common tactics is tone policing: the redirection of attention from a parent’s concern…
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Gaslighted by proxy: how schools grant coercive power to the quietest parent
When one parent advocates and the other undermines, the school almost always aligns with the one who “gets along.” Not because that parent is more informed, more accurate, or more protective—but because they are easier to accommodate. They agree easily. They stay quiet. They don’t write long emails. They rarely attend meetings. They couldn’t draft…
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Why school advocacy is a women’s issue
This site exists because public education systems harm children—and then gaslight the people who try to stop it. Those people are not randomly distributed. They are overwhelmingly women. Advocacy is a women’s issue not because women are naturally better at it, or more available, or more nurturing. Advocacy is a women’s issue because institutions depend…
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You’re not wrong: reflections on motherhood and advocacy
This piece is for the mothers who have become unrecognisable to themselves in the crucible of advocacy—those who perform calm while their bodies tremble with rage, who write polite emails through tears, who scream in the car and smile in the meeting. It is for the women whose clarity was framed as aggression, whose persistence…
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Few of us remain our best selves in a room starved of air
If you are a parent of a neurodivergent child, you can recite the script before the phone even buzzes. “[Child] had a very good day and really showed leadership with the younger kids” Pause. “But in the afternoon [Child] had some unexpected behaviour. [Child] is waiting at the office.” Praise is meant to help us feel that…
