Rextopher

Wild how abusive artists like Micheal Jackson can have biography movies made and not a single mention of accused abuses or the subsequent trials will be mentioned.

If someone were, as a random example, say hospitalized for over two weeks with no explanation, I think that should automatically trigger a special election to replace them.

If you're still able to do your job, then prove it. And if you're not, then you're actively obstructing democracy by not stepping down.

Which is to say, that if a public official were to pass away or into a coma, and their handlers choose to obfuscate that fact, this should be seen as intentionally obstructing democracy.

Q. You want to raise every boy as a girl? Yes.

Q. Why? A boy will learn to hate girls as long as he is raised in such a way where he is treated as better, and superior to, his girl peers, whenever he is cruel to girls. So, instead, we raise boys as girls.

Q. What if they say they are not a girl, and want to be acknowledged as boy? Then you know they are a boy, so you must make sure to understand them as boy, and not a girl.

Q. What does it mean to be 'raised as a girl'? That's up for you to decide. The only difference is that you should not raise boys any differently than you raise girls, since you raise every boy as a girl.

Q. Girls and boys are raised in specific ways for specific purposes, so it does not make sense to raise boys as girls. If you raise every boy as a girl, then there is no being which is not raised as a girl, so anyone raised as a girl necessarily must learn to do anything and everything to grow up, without restrictions on tasks, labours, or interests.

Q. But boys and girls are different. All two girls are different, and raising girls in one specific way destroys this individuality in favour of moulding girls to serve the same master. Still, the girls resist to live life on their own terms. If girls can be raised such that they know they can do anything they want, including not being girls, so too will boys raised as girls.

Q. Why not raise every girl as a boy? Because if a girl does not exist among boys, then the girl is made.

Q. Why not raise girls and boys as themselves? The self must be made in a world where girls and boys can first and foremost be themselves. One step towards this goal is to raise every boy as a girl.

Q. The way people raise girls is cruel, so why would you raise boys with that cruelty? If you raise girls with cruelty, then you should stop being cruel to girls.

as i understand it the core point being made here is challenging the concept of "raising a child as a gender" entirely by going straight to the misogyny that is fundamental to patriarchal gender. to me this suggests "raise boys as girls" is about raising boys to identify with girls, rather than to develop an identity as a boy around opposition to girls. this is not being depicted as simply "genderless parenting" because it is making a specific point about misogyny & its role in gender socialization and identity formation. to deviate from patriarchal demands of masculinity is to become associated with femininity / girls regardless of intention or actual intentional performance of femininity (what i assume is meant by "a girl is made"). rather than trying to pursue an almost apolitical gender neutrality that fails because it doesn't engage with the role misogyny plays in preserving patriarchal gender as a whole, gender neutrality is presented as synonymous with identifying with girls, as under patriarchy the entire construction of gender is built (not exclusively but fundamentally) through sexism that is both oppositional (exorsexist) and traditional (misogynistic).

the point is that raising a girl should not involve cruelty, or stereotype, or stigmatization, and boys should be encourage to feel no shame or identity conflict in identifying as the same kind of being as girls. so its a purposeful act of provocation to say "boys should be raised as girls" which to me sends the message that challenging misogyny and challenging the construction of gender itself are the same project. and that being (raised as) a girl should not mean anything other than being raised as a whole person, as part of a community of whole people.

I had trouble understanding this part, so I reframed it in my head as:

"Because if [the other] does not exist... then [the other] is made."

Which might not be exactly what this is going for, but it helped me understand it a little more, at least from one angle.

It's actually two separate things:

Masculinity is understood in a hierarchy. Under this system, there is no masculinity without a Highest Ranked Man and a Lowest Ranked Man (LRM). All men must jockey at all times in every group of men to be, at least, not the LRM.

All similarly-classed men are above all similarly-classed women in this system. All white men are above all white women, etc. Because men are understood to only exist in hierarchy, and because all men in a group are above all women from the same group, to be the LRM is to sit on the boundary between Man and Woman. The LRM might as well be a woman. (There is homophobia in this as well, but let's keep it simple for the moment.)

Therefore, the easiest way to not be the LRM is to make another man into the woman of the group. From this we get insults which denigrate men by accusing them of womanhood. You throw like a girl, it's feminine to wash your ass, etc.

Boys have already been taught this behavior by being raised as boys, that is, as beings whose socially-constructed gender demands an internal hierarchy which is always at war with every other member of itself for the purposes of establishing hierarchy.

Therefore, this problem is not fixed by raising girls as boys.

The problem is fixed by raising all children such that their gender is not dependent upon an internal hierarchy.

A lot of us were raised with the idea that “its normal for wives/children to get hit! it helps them learn– only white folk don’t get beaten when they misbehave”. That’s not true, white people aren’t the only ones who deserve a safe and abuse free environment. Black and brown people can and do have loving families. 

Everyone participates in chores, sure. And helping out your family with projects etc. can be great, but there’s a line when it comes to being forced/coerced into excessive labor against your will and at the expense of your health and/or education. That line is usually clear to people when they see it happen to white kids, but for the rest of us, especially children of immigrants, it gets written of as a normal part of the culture.

I've opened a few slots for commissions in this style 🍡🧃🍰

Couples Counseling Needed

They had to write a letter to the NFL team they were assigned to, they had to do a research project to find out where the teams practiced, they had to write a letter to the mayor of the city the teams practiced in, they had to keep track of their team's statistics, they had to do research about the state history of the team they'd been assigned to, and they had to do a presentation.

It was a big project. She provided all the materials, she made sure there were copies of the newspaper sports section in her classroom so the kids could stay on top of stats. The students got this project in their first week at school and it wrapped up right around winter break, so it wasn't like it was an all-day "today we are doing statistics" thing or "today we do research, today we write a letter, today we make a presentation" one-week project, it was five to ten minutes a day in various subjects that got organized into a presentation at the end of the semester. The kids could work together, they could work independently, they could ask my mom or the librarian or their parents or their older siblings for help. They just had to end the semester with a report on the team's history, the stats for the season organized into a chart, copies of the letters they'd sent (and copies of any of the responses they'd gotten), a two-page social studies report on the state where the team played, and a presentation to the class about their favorite thing they had learned while doing the NFL project.

The kids fucking loved it. And for years I spent my winter break going to the classroom and organizing the bulletin board with a huge map of the US and materials from each student's report, showing the work that the students had done that semester. It was a way of getting kids engaged with classwork, because who cares about statistics at 10, probably nobody, but if you get a set of pencils from the Jets NOW you want to learn about the team. The Jaguars sent one kid a jersey one year. The city in Minnesota where the Vikings practice sent postcards for every student. Part of this was happening when Schwarzenegger was governor in California so one kid got the Terminator's autograph for part of his project.

I think maybe the thing that I admire the most about it in retrospect was the way that it taught actual project management to young students. I don't actually know of that many schools that have projects more than a month long for 10-year-olds, and I think it's a great concept. I didn't get something like that until I was a senior in college, and it would have been a great skill to learn younger.

Anyway, in 2006 my mom had to stop doing the NFL project because the district wanted to focus on raising their test scores. She was specifically told that if she kept doing the NFL project she would not be rehired at her school.

She even wrote up what standards each part of the project worked toward - the kids had to make graphs because "organizing information into a bar graph" was a specific standard for students that age. "Writing multiple paragraphs on the same subject" was a standard, which is why the letters to the cities and states were multi-paragraph. The project WAS standards based.

But the administrators wanted to make sure that the students had more practice with reading the kinds of questions that would be on the tests because most of the student body spoke Spanish at home.

My mom taught at that school for another ten years; the school's test scores never showed any marked improvement with test-based lesson plans.

My mom's project wasn't the only thing like that that got cancelled. There was another teacher who had a craft-based thing that was similar, and a 7th-grade teacher who did a kind of history/social studies Magic Schoolbus LARP thing who was told not to do that anymore. Eventually my mom was told to stop having her students write journals for ten minutes a day because it wasn't being taught from the textbook and wasn't being taught to the test.

Additional pictures and commentary from me below the cut (skip if you already know how to fold a paper crane).