I fuck with this
[image description: screenshot of writing formatted as a question and answer exchange. headline of piece is: The Proposal to Raise Every Boy as a Girl. (author not listed)
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.
/end description]
The blog post this is screenshot is from
the title made me wary but i do think this is an interesting proposal to chew on!
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 feel like this is less of a practical, literal proposal and more of a thought experiment and consciousness-raising effort. i think there's some quibbles i could make with how this goes about it but its interesting regardless! i think this is an overall good kind of feminist provocation & its more nuanced than some people in the notes are giving it credit for.
"Because if a girl does not exist among boys, then a girl is made."
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.
And also I agree with what @genderkoolaid said.
I think that's a good translation of that line! Its in line with feminist work on woman-as-other a la Simone de Beauvoir.
I think following that reading, you could sum up this work's ethos or message as "in order to destroy the concept of the Other, we all must identify with the Other, rather than trying to achieve equality without challenging the model of identity-through-othering which still preserves the patriarchal hierarchy that creates and maintains the binary of dominant / other itself"
