notdexterousatall

It's very good, and was prescient for a lot of the early days of the covid pandemic. I found myself returning to it often in the first couple of years because of how steadfast it was in its hopefulness.

Last year she wrote a novelette, "The Year Without Sunshine," which attacks a similar problem in a similar way; instead of pandemic, this one is about the aftereffects of a distant nuke or a massive volcano explosion (it doesn't say), which has churned a great deal of dust into the air, causing massive damage to society and agriculture. The story covers one neighborhood, pulling together to keep each other alive--not through violence, but through lawn potatoes and message pinboards and bicycle-powered oxygen concentrators.

Like Gastornis was thought to be a carnivore for decades and then carbon isotopes were like, "nah this thing was basically a giant goose honk honk".

Art by Ja Chirinos

Oviraptor was thought to be an egg eater, then much ink was spilled about whether it ate mollusks, and now it's thought to be an omnivore, but mostly a fruit/seed eater like a parrot.

Somehow this Adobe Stock image is the only art of an Oviraptor eating plants I can find. How is that?

And even birds with some teeth are getting in on these dietary mysteries.

Longipteryx was first thought to be a kingfisher-like hunter of aquatic prey, but it has since been found with seed contents in its guts, making it another surprise frugivore.

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.

“as Eleanor puts it, the system treats life not as "a test that you either pass or fail but instead a class you take." The test comes in the afterlife, when a Good Place architect and a Bad Place architect team up to design a customized scenario that forces you to confront your moral flaws. The test can be anything — from being sent to a fake Good Place "by mistake" to reliving a version of your life — and its difficulty depends on the number of points you earned before death. Regardless of points, if you don't pass the test you're rebooted to take it again and again, with the hope that one day you'll learn enough to ace it and get into the Good Place.

"But wait," interrupts the version of Timothy Olyphant Janet conjured in her void, "how do you learn and grow if you're rebooted?" Thanks for asking, Tim. The trick is that after every reboot, you retain a vague memory of what you learned in your evaluation — like, in Eleanor's words, "a little voice in your head, helping you become a better version of yourself."”

Compare that this description of how the soul is cleansed in the afterlife in Judaism: 

“Gehinom [is not] a place for eternity, but a temporary—albeit terrible—place for the soul to be cleansed. In fact, the vast majority of souls do not stay in Gehinom for more than eleven months. Because we do not presume most people are so sinful as to warrant a twelve month sentence (reserved only for the wicked), the recital of Kaddish for a departed soul, which brings elevation to the soul and relief from Gehinom, is only recited for eleven months and thereafter only on the anniversary (Yartzeit) of death. On Shabbat all souls have an elevation. Souls in Gehinom are given relief, while those in the world of Yetzirah are allowed through the “Amud,” the pillar that connects the two worlds of Yetzirah and Beriah. After the purification of Gehinom, the soul enters the World to Come—the Garden of Eden—where it receives the rewards it earned through work in this world.”

#the idea that someone can simultaneously be a bad parent and a good person is one that seems to escape a LOT of people#I see far too many people who insist that if someone is a bad parent they're also a bad person#because being a bad parent MAKES them a bad person#“well they never should have had kids if they were going to be bad at it!” cool cool so I don't know if you know this but#not everyone is able to see how things will play out before they happen#also someone may be a GREAT parent for one kid but a mediocre one for another kid#because (and I know this is another pretty alien idea to a lot of tumblr) everyone is different#what one child needs is not necessarily the same as what another child needs#anyway#it's much more fun to explore this concept in fiction than in reality#when it happens IRL at least one real person gets screwed over; in fiction it's an interesting story to explore

So fucking true