You are beautiful

friend whos always available: i can do whenever

friend whos constantly busy: im sorry i have work and then school and then the labyrinth and then more work :( i can do tuesday at 3:00 am for five minutes tho

friend with the randomly generated sleep schedule: (no response)

friend who went missing in the woods behind their house 12 years ago and hasn't been heard from since: (no response)

I had a lot of fun with this project and I also learned a lot along the way. Looking at the finished blanket, I can see how different my tension was for squares by how much they puff up after the seaming! This picture is after washing and drying, because first off, a blanket made over a year and a bit probably has a bunch of dirt on it and second, I don't want there to be any surprises if I tell the parents to toss it in the washer and dryer. I also lightly ironed but that didn't really stop the puffing.

I am extremely pleased with the design I chose for this - there were many variations in the running (and I had a little poll for it as well, here and on my discord) and in the end I went with a fun asymmetrical pattern that still had a lot of orderly lines to make me happy.

Also cannot believe that the colour lines could turn out this crisp - like I am shocked at the effect when they're arranged like this.

And now that I've made this, I do want to make something else with half square triangle crochet but not with cotton again because this was a pain to seam and it definitely has less stretch than wool would. Before this, I had bought yarn to make a cardigan from half square triangles and maybe I make that or I try for something else. We'll see.

This is what the backside looks like! the squares are joined with a slip stitch join through the back loops of the squares. It also worked out that there were 11 seams horizontally and vertically and I used 11 colours on this so I just used a different colour per seam and then did a final slip stitch edge all the way around.

who i am

*if comfortable doing so, you may include your age range/generation in the tags for helpful demographic data

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.