Overqualified and disbelieved
Why does it feel like the more clearly we speak, the less we’re heard? Why do accomplished women—consultants, strategists, health professionals, lawyers, policy advisors—so often leave IEP meetings feeling erased, doubted, or emotionally bruised? These posts explore the strange and infuriating phenomenon where high competence triggers institutional defensiveness, especially in gendered and maternal contexts.
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Epistemic silencing of disabled children’s primary caregivers
Epistemic silencing in BC schools discredits mothers’ knowledge, reframes advocacy as aggression, and erases disabled children’s pain, leaving families punished for truth.
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Why clarity gets punished
I’ve written about documentation, tone policing, gatekeeping, gaslighting, institutional betrayal, and grievability and legitimacy separately, butsometimes it helps to see those pieces in conversation—because together, they reveal something larger. This post draws together the threads of clarity, competence, and credibility, and asks: why do systems recoil when mothers speak plainly about harm? Why does it…
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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…
