I was honoured to receive the Best Roundtable Presentation Award at the 2025 Division of Coaching Psychology Conference for a session exploring a question that sits at the heart of my work:

What happens when coaching unintentionally reproduces the very barriers it seeks to help people overcome?

Coaching is often presented as a neutral process. We talk about goals, performance, resilience, productivity, growth, and success as though these concepts are universal and value-free. Yet every coaching conversation takes place within a broader social, cultural, and political context. The assumptions we hold about what constitutes a “good life,” meaningful progress, or successful functioning are rarely neutral. They are shaped by dominant societal narratives.

One of those narratives is ableism.

Ableism refers to the privileging of certain ways of thinking, communicating, behaving, learning, working, and existing, while positioning other ways as deficient, problematic, or in need of correction. While overt forms of ableism are often recognised, more subtle forms can become embedded within professional practices, including coaching.

During the roundtable, participants explored a case example and engaged in reflexive discussion about how ableist assumptions can quietly shape coaching goals, interventions, and outcomes. Together, we considered questions such as:

• Who decides what “success” looks like?
• When does adaptation become pressure to conform?
• Are we helping clients flourish, or helping them fit into systems that were never designed for them?
• What assumptions sit beneath concepts such as productivity, motivation, communication, professionalism, and resilience?

These questions become particularly important when working with autistic individuals, people with ADHD, and other neurodifferent clients. Traditional coaching approaches often emphasise linear goal progression, behavioural modification, productivity enhancement, and performance optimisation. While these approaches can be helpful, they may also inadvertently reinforce the message that the client must change in order to be accepted.

Many neurodifferent individuals have spent years receiving explicit and implicit messages that they are “too much,” “not enough,” “too sensitive,” “too intense,” “too disorganised,” or simply wrong. Coaching that focuses solely on adaptation without questioning the systems that create these pressures risks reinforcing internalised ableism and further disconnecting individuals from their authentic ways of being.

The discussion also explored the potential for coaching psychology to become more than an individual change methodology. Coaching psychology has the capacity to act as a vehicle for social change by helping people critically examine the narratives that shape their identities, challenging deficit-based assumptions, and creating spaces where difference is not merely tolerated but genuinely valued.

This requires a shift from asking:

“How can this person function more effectively within the system?”

towards also asking:

“What aspects of the system need to change?”

Such an approach aligns with broader movements within psychology that recognise the importance of context, power, identity, and social justice. It invites coaches to move beyond individualistic explanations and to consider the wider structures that influence wellbeing, opportunity, and belonging.

The conversations that emerged during the session were thoughtful, courageous, and deeply encouraging. Participants shared reflections from their own practice, challenged assumptions, and explored what anti-ableist coaching might look like in action.

Receiving the award was a genuine honour, but the most meaningful aspect of the session was the collective willingness to engage with these complex questions. The discussion reinforced my belief that coaching psychology has an important role to play in creating a more inclusive future—one that recognises human diversity not as a problem to be solved, but as a valuable part of what it means to be human.

Thank you to everyone who attended, contributed, and helped create such a rich and reflective conversation. The work of challenging ableism is ongoing, and I look forward to continuing the dialogue together.

The question sounds biological. It rarely is.

Bodies exist. Chromosomes exist. Hormones exist. Biology shapes aspects of human development. Yet the meaning societies attach to bodies, the roles, expectations, permissions, risks, protections and hierarchies associated with them, is not determined by biology alone. These meanings are socially organised through law, culture, religion, economics and power.

Simone de Beauvoir famously wrote that one is not born but becomes a woman (Beauvoir, 1949/2011). She was not denying biology. Rather, she was exposing the social process through which societies interpret bodies and assign them meaning. The category “woman” is therefore not simply a biological description; it is a social position produced through history, institutions and cultural expectations.

To become a woman is to enter a social category.

And social categories are never neutral.

For some of us, that becoming did not unfold gradually through age or socialisation. It arrived abruptly, through moments when our bodies were no longer treated as entirely our own. Moments when responsibility quietly shifted away from those who acted and towards those who endured. Moments when silence felt safer than speech.

I do not need to provide detail. The pattern is historical.

Across centuries, women’s bodies have been regulated legally, morally and socially. In the United Kingdom, marital rape was not recognised as a crime until the landmark legal ruling of R v R in 1991. For much of legal history, women’s testimony in sexual assault cases required corroboration, reflecting institutional scepticism toward women’s accounts of harm. Women’s distress was frequently medicalised under diagnoses such as hysteria, framing emotional suffering as pathology rather than as a response to social conditions (Showalter, 1987).

Even credibility has historically depended on respectability, an uneven standard shaped by race, class, disability and sexuality. Feminist scholars have long documented how some women have been believed more readily than others, while many have been excluded entirely from dominant narratives of womanhood (Crenshaw, 1989; hooks, 1981).

Sexual violence is therefore not an anomaly within the historical experience of womanhood. It has been structurally embedded in how societies have organised power around female bodies.

But this is not the whole story of being a woman.

Because the category itself is unstable.

Judith Butler later argued that gender is performative, produced through repeated social norms and practices rather than simply expressed from biology (Butler, 1990). Gender is not something one simply is; it is something societies continually enact and enforce. Through everyday interactions, expectations and institutions, people learn how to “do” gender (West & Zimmerman, 1987). Behaviours are rewarded when they align with dominant norms and corrected when they diverge.

In this sense, gender is less a fixed property of individuals and more an ongoing social process.

Transgender women illuminate this dynamic with particular clarity.

If womanhood were purely biological, it would not require constant policing. It would not provoke political panic, legislative battles or intense cultural debate. The anxiety surrounding transgender women reveals something deeper: that womanhood has always been socially organised, negotiated and defended.

Transgender women do not destabilise womanhood. They reveal its construction.

They show that identity is lived and embodied within social recognition, not reducible to reproductive anatomy alone. Their experiences expose how fiercely societies defend particular definitions when those definitions are tied to power.

History shows that the boundaries of womanhood have always shifted.

Racialised women were long marginalised within dominant feminist movements. Disabled women were frequently cast as asexual or incapable of autonomy. Working-class women were labelled immoral. Lesbian women were pathologised. Today, transgender women face political and legislative battles over belonging.

Each era redraws the boundary.

Each redraw reveals that the boundary was never fixed.

To ask “What is a woman?” is therefore not simply a question of biology or ontology. It is a question of authority.

Who decides?

Who is protected?

Whose harm is recognised?

Whose voice is believed?

Philosopher Michel Foucault argued that power operates not only through laws and institutions but through knowledge itself, through the categories societies construct to describe reality (Foucault, 1978). The categories through which we understand bodies shape whose experiences become visible and whose remain marginalised.

For many women, cisgender and transgender, the nervous system learns vigilance early. It learns that safety is negotiated rather than guaranteed. Bodies can become politicised, scrutinised, legislated, desired, dismissed or violated.

For neurodivergent women, this negotiation may be even more complex. Social expectations that are implicit for others may not be intuitive. Masking can become a survival strategy. Direct communication can be misread as defiance. Compliance can be exploited.

When sexual harm intersects with social marginalisation, silence is not simply personal. It becomes structurally reinforced.

Yet womanhood cannot be reduced to vulnerability.

Women have also been theorists, organisers, leaders and architects of social change. Across centuries they have challenged the very institutions that constrained them. Feminist movements have transformed law, labour rights, reproductive autonomy and cultural norms.

Transgender women have also been central participants in struggles for liberation, even while being excluded from parts of feminist discourse.

If gender is socially constructed, then it is also socially reconstructible.

Existential philosophy reminds us that identity is lived within conditions we did not choose. We are shaped by history, but we are not entirely determined by it. We inherit categories, but we also participate in reshaping them.

For me, being a woman now means holding tension.

It means recognising that harm has been patterned, not random.
It means understanding that definitions shift because power shifts.
It means acknowledging that womanhood has been both imposed and reclaimed.

It also means refusing narrowness.

Womanhood cannot be reduced to reproductive capacity.
It cannot be reduced to victimhood.
It cannot be reduced to stereotype or compliance.

It is a social location that continues to evolve.

The future of womanhood will not be secured by policing its boundaries more tightly. It will be secured by expanding dignity, autonomy and safety for all who live within it.

The question is not only what is a woman?

The deeper question is this:

What kind of world are we constructing when we answer?

Cara Langford Watts

References

Beauvoir, S. de. (2011). The second sex (C. Borde & S. Malovany-Chevallier, Trans.). Vintage. (Original work published 1949)

Butler, J. (1990). Gender trouble: Feminism and the subversion of identity. Routledge.

Crenshaw, K. (1989). Demarginalizing the intersection of race and sex. University of Chicago Legal Forum, 139–167.

Foucault, M. (1978). The history of sexuality: Volume 1 – An introduction. Pantheon.

hooks, b. (1981). Ain’t I a woman: Black women and feminism. South End Press.

Showalter, E. (1987). The female malady: Women, madness and English culture 1830–1980. Virago.

West, C., & Zimmerman, D. H. (1987). Doing gender. Gender & Society, 1(2), 125–151. https://doi.org/10.1177/0891243287001002002