hi, it's chorui! i like writing and reading a lot about parenting, youth liberation, social reproduction theory, family abolition, and the history of childhood. my work explores the overlap between youth lib, feminism, gay and trans issues, racial justice, disability justice, climate action, anarchism, and socialism. i've been working really hard on this project and i'm excited to share it with y'all!
i'm not an academic, and i don't have credentials in this field. my professional background is in tech. this is a passion project that i've been working on since 2021. i'm always taking recommendations for texts regarding any of the fields i've mentioned above, especially those that focus on childhood in the imperial periphery.
if any of this sounds interesting to you, you can follow me on here, and sign up for email notifications on my website.
A former NASA engineer's take on modern childhood, parenting, education, childhood in world history, and everything in between.
btw, all the essays i post here will be under my #antiparent tag! and check out my recommended reading list here.
common tags:
pinned
youth liberation
family abolition
parenting
education
kids (usually more lighthearted)
sexgender (transfeminism)
obstetrics (pregnancy, birth, postpartum)
racism
imperialism
child abuse
social media, AI, digital surveillance, etc.
words (quotes & excerpts)
reading list (articles & books i may or may not have read)
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edit: a few updates given the dire state of youthlib discourse on this site
before you follow, pleeeeaaasseee check out my #pinned tag first for a representative sample of posts
minors are welcome to follow. my content is generally more geared towards adults, but i really value your perspective & constructive criticism!
understanding youth as an axis of marginalization means understanding adults as oppressors. that means all adults. even if you think you're one of the good ones.
i can't fucking believe this needs to be said, but i don't condone the sexual exploitation of children, and i don't condone the sexualization of child exploitation either. using youthlib theory to sexually groom kids & teens is unconscionable. i don't give a shit about your excuses.
i'm a parent of two young kids. i think antinatalism is silly at best & eugenicist at worst. generally i try not to get into "mommy wars" stuff - i try to explore the structural processes/incentives of childcare instead of criticizing the actions of individuals.
i enjoy putting a lot of time & effort into answering questions that i believe are being asked in good faith. but i also can't answer every single question people ask. be nice, please!
i love how white people are supposed to be graciously forgiven for having a racist past because "they were kids and didn't know any better" but no one gives a flying fuck about the black kids that were subjected to brutal racist bullying during their childhoods. bullying that we're still subject to today because nothing has changed. white people were not being racist to some amorphous, unfeeling entity in some vacuous, isolated section of the internet, they were hurling slurs, racist "jokes"/imagery and antiblackness at REAL ACTUAL CHILDREN while gaslighting and mocking us for being upset, and no one gives a fuck!! we're just supposed to forgive these people who are never sorry and never will be and if not we're the problem and im so sick of it
now that that's done. i really need a break from this place so i'm gonna go on hiatus until may. i'll leave my queue on though. beloved mutuals i would still like to keep up w you on signal <3 see ya!
if you're reading this it means my queue ran out. also i'm going to try to get as much writing done as possible before summer break starts, so i'm actually going to be out till june. come hang out me on my website antiparent.com ! hopefully this hiatus will give me the time & energy to post more on there :)
people make a lot of flippant jokes about the literacy crisis but like. learning to read isn't an automatic neurodevelopmental process the same way learning to walk or talk is for most people. it takes explicit and systematic instruction for the vast majority of people to be able to do it at all. if someone doesn't know how to read, that is a systemic failure, not their individual fault.
in cognitive science, there are a lot of different ways to think about reading. but the various models for the most part hinge on two specific processes: word recognition and comprehension. word recognition means the way people recognize and break down words, and comprehension means how people understand the words they read. some of the dominant literacy models in cognitive science include
The Simple View of Reading (Gough and Tumner 1986)
Scarborough's Rope (Scarborough 2001)
The Active View of Reading (Duke and Cartwright 2021)
all of these involve some combination/exploration of recognition and comprehension.
unfortunately! in the US starting the 90s, phonics instruction was increasingly abandoned in favor of the three-cueing method. basically, instead of learning how to break down the sound chunks (phonemes) that make up words, kids were encouraged to learn to read by looking at the pictures or guessing via context clues. so the word recognition aspect of reading took a big hit. many kids grew up with functional learning disabilities because of that style of instruction alone.
reading comprehension is also really, really culturally dependent. the way you understand (or whether you can understand) what you're reading relies on the body of background knowledge you have access to, which in turn depends on your socioeconomic position. there's also the matter of what kinds of knowledge and analysis are valued/prioritized by society. critical thinking is a key part of comprehension, and schools are actively invested in not facilitating that skill because their overall objective is to produce a compliant labor force that will ensure the reproduction of capitalism. critical thinking is emphasized in imperial core education only to the extent that it's absolutely necessary: for developing decision-making capacity for postindustrial knowledge workers, managerial types, politicians, lawyers, doctors, and so on.
so. basically. both recognition and comprehension are core to literacy development, and they've both been fucked with heavily in the US (and a lot of other countries). breaking the literacy crisis down this way also helps with figuring out how to fix it. teaching more kids phonics will help them decode words more effectively, but it won't help them comprehend new material. and when we talk about the "media literacy crisis" we're mostly talking about a comprehension problem, which can't be fixed just by having people read more. each issue needs targeted intervention.
so! recommended reading list:
my full essay on the literacy crisis, of course. there's more analysis of structural interventions that would actually work to address children's literacy issues.
Let's talk (and read!) about the US literacy crisis - what the real causes are & how to fix them.
the podcast Sold a Story by APM Reports. it has a lot of good information about the shift from phonics to three-cueing. the narrative is a little oversimplified and they weirdly keep praising the bush administration while ignoring how it contributed to the problem, but i still recommend the podcast for understanding the basic facts of the situation
Schooling in Capitalist America (1968) by Bowles and Gintis on how the US school system developed to meet the needs of the capitalist economy
Making Workers (2018) by Katharyne Mitchell for a more recent analysis covering more western countries besides just the US
So a creche in ecology is a group of animals that take care of their offspring as a group. Grouping together like this can help with protection against predators, finding food, enduring the weather, and gives the parents time to "rest", as sometimes the parents will alternate who's being the primary watchers while others get to hunt by themselves for a bit, like a baby animal daycare.
But ye lions do this once cubs each a certain age. A decent amount of birds do it (for example: flamingos and a lot of penguin, duck, and goose species). Gharials (a type of South Asian crocodilian) form creches with hundreds of babies from multiple nests (they lay under 100 eggs each and sometimes as few as 20). Feral hogs tend to form groups of mothers and young like this, and I saw 3 sows and like 15+ tiny babies the other day and they were so cute
Rattlesnakes will creche!! In some species mature adult females will hang out together (they're friends!) in shared dens and even birth their clutches together. Then one will babysit while the others go get food. Adult females have been seeing caring for their young like shooing young back into the den when a predator approaches.
You can watch LIVE rattlesnake den mothers and all their babies on Project Rattlecam!!!!
It feels cool to be "in" on celebrity gossip before anyone else. I ran into Californian Condor V9 and looked her up on the condor lookup website. It says her current mate is dead and she has no kids but I saw her with a new man AND a juvenile.
Not stupid! I have a bunch of overall ‘structural’ complaints about the way these diagrams theorise sex/gender, and also a bunch of more minor/petty complaints about individual components. My overall critique is that they are transphobic and intersexist despite their (supposed) function to do the opposite.
First, I think it’s important to state what the purpose of these diagrams are. They are an educational tool that act as a theoretical intervention into dominant societal conceptions of gender - ie, vagina = girl, penis = boy. The central way this intervention happens is by disaggregating various components of what usually get lumped together as “gender” (but NOT sex, which is an important distinction I will return to later). This is meant to show people that gender is actually a lot more complicated than they might think, and by disaggregating these various gendered components, you can demonstrate how LGBTQ+ people ‘fit into’ these components.
I think it’s also important to talk about the visual tradition these diagrams are drawing from, which are anatomical diagrams of the human body shown to children and students for the purposes of teaching them about the human body. These “gender diagrams” metaphorise the concept of ‘anatomy’ by superimposing non-anatomical traits onto various organs of an abstracted human form (bear/unicorn/gingerbread). The fact that they are animals or baked goods as opposed to human bodies is very important in their visual language - they are necessarily metaphorical. This ‘anatomy of gender’ is a social anatomy.
So what’s the problem with doing this? I don’t think there’s any inherent problem with this - for example, trans people often have to explain that sex is an assemblage of traits that are not binary, mutually exclusive, or immutable. You could make a “sex trait unicorn” to show that sex isn’t ‘just’ genes or gametes or sexual organs or reproductive capacity or physical traits or birth certificates or etc, and I think that would probably be fine. But these specific diagrams are, perhaps contrary to their purpose, reaffirming this sex/gender aggregation through disaggregating them.
So, getting to the structural critique, I think the biggest theoretical problem with these diagrams are their ‘organ-ness’ - the heart is where sexuality is contained, the head is where identity is contained, and the… chromosomes between your legs are where sex is contained. It visually communicates that bodily organs are distinct containers for gendered/sexed traits. There are several problems with this, so let’s go organ by organ:
(this is getting long so I'm putting the rest under a cut)
The brain 🧠 - this is where identity is ‘stored’ in the human body. Identity is a thing inside you that arises from your thoughts, the ‘contents’ of your brain. If I were being really uncharitable towards these diagrams, they argue that gender identity is the delusion of how you see yourself that doesn’t interact with/reflect the rest of your body or person. I can “identify as a man” while every other gendered component of myself “is a woman.” Which like, I don't “identify” as a man, I am a man lol. More charitably, I think it’s trying to communicate the fact that trans people discover that their gender identity is in conflict with the rest of themselves, and seek to address this conflict through various forms of transition.
Even taking the charitable view, I think this is still deeply problematic. Just using my own experience, I did not ‘discover’ my gender identity in my head, I discovered it socially - dissociating during sex, friction in romantic relationships, problems with family members, difficulty socialising, being ostracised by peers, forcible assignment of femininity by my parents and especially my mother, and so on. Placing gender identity in the brain visually argues that gender identity can be discovered/thought of in isolation to the social world, because it is a symptom that comes out of a discrete organ, the brain (this is the transmedicalist view of transgenderism - gender identity is a mental illness that needs to be medically treated). This is where the visual tradition of anatomical diagrams works against these gender diagrams, reinforcing the biological view of gender despite the attempts to challenge it.
The heart ❤️ - Now this one is a bit more abstracted and ‘apolitical,’ because the diagrams all use the heart symbol ❤️ as opposed to the anatomical heart 🫀, but I think my criticism still stands, because it is part of the anatomical metaphor of the diagram. I don’t think you can extricate the fairly inoffensive visual association of heart = attraction from the rest of the diagram. The heart is the organ that stores sexuality and attraction, just like the brain is the organ that stores identity, and this sexuality/attraction can be isolated and identified from the rest of yourself. It is just as internal and divorced from the social world as identity is. It’s also bizarrely disaggregated in the unicorn and bear diagrams as physical and emotional attraction lol? What does emotional attraction even mean. I became emotionally ‘attracted’ to all my friends after getting close to them even though I’m not physically attracted to most of them, so I guess I’m demi-pan-emotional? This feels like a more minor nitpick, but it’s part of this containerisation of gendered traits, the idea that you can neatly divide emotional and physical attraction. They are ‘separate symptoms’ of the heart.
The chromosomes 🧬 - probably the easiest one to critique, and imo is the most egregious. Even mainstream pro-trans critiques of sex, which heavily rely on medical authority as the basis of their critique, argue that chromosomes are not “what sex is.” As I laid out above, sex is an assemblage of things that are ideologically bundled together for the purposes of enforcing a set of social systems, such as patriarchy and cissexualism. Using chromosomes to represent sex is an argument that sex is an immutable facet of the body that cannot be changed - even if you take HRT, have surgery, change all of your sex markers on your documents, and live your life as your gender, your sex hasn’t changed because you didn’t “change” your chromosomes. You will always be a biological male or female. Sex, these diagrams argue, is a biological essence, and ‘biological’ is a stand-in for immutable, mutually exclusive, and unalterable.
The other insidious part of this is that the chromosomes replace genitals in the diagram - you can’t show a penis or vagina to your audience, that’s icky and gross, so you use chromosomes instead. It’s the only place on the anatomical diagram where the organ is replaced by a non-organ, and the absence of genital organs only draws attention to the ‘genitality’ (to use Butler’s term) of chromosomes as a stand-in for sex. It is straightforwardly a transphobic and intersexist depiction of sex. The associated graph with it is even worse, placing “intersex” in between “male” and “female,” as if intersex is an undifferentiated amalgam of male/female sexual traits. It upholds the idea that intersex people are just sexually fucked up and have the “wrong” parts of M/F sex combined together, which again, can’t be altered. Which is ridiculous and contrary to reality! One of the core bases of intersexism is that doctors are very much invested in changing the sex of intersex infants, children, and adults through forced surgery and hormones to ‘correct’ a pathological incongruence of sex to either an acceptable ‘male’ or ‘female’ sex. This is what I meant earlier when I said this diagram might attempt to challenge was gender is, but not sex. It partitions sex off from gender as the stable immutable part of the body, which gender is then overlaid “on top of” (Butler also critiques this view in Bodies That Matter), which is, again, a transphobic and transmedicalist view of sex and gender. These diagrams beat you over the head with this point - the gender expression component is a dotted line traced over the body of the unicorn/bear/ginderbread. It is segmented and ephemeral in contrast to the solid lines of the body. Crucially, gender expression never touches their bodies. Gender expression is a thing that can be removed or changed, revealing the true biological essence of the body, which remains intact beneath its facade.
My more minor grievances are that these diagrams are visually ugly and infantilising. It is the queer equivalent of telling children to call a vagina a hoo-ha and a penis a ding-dong. I hate how infantilised and cutesy mainstream queer art and branding is. I’m an adult, I’m not a fucking unicorn or bear or “gingerbread person,” use plain visual language in your educational guides for the love of god. Trans minors also deserve proper representation and education that isn’t this quirky horseshit. The amount of abstraction going on in these diagrams, coupled with the ugly-ass cutesy aesthetic, obfuscates what is trying to be communicated and ends up (imo) being a poor educational tool, even setting aside the many, many ideological problems with them.
So I think these diagrams are deeply transphobic. They represent “components” of gender by assigning them to various organs, which re-inscribes gender as biological. They are also really ugly
when you see the words girlhood girlie pop girl’s girl female experience and you immediately know you’re about to see something so completely unrelatable that it makes you feel like you’re on a different planet
Do you mind if I ask some questions? I’m really interested in a lot of stuff on your blog, but I still have some questions and would love more insight.
1. Isn’t there a reasonable amount of “kids should not be allowed to make decisions” that we shouldn’t be getting rid of? When I was 15, I wanted to get a permanent body modification that now mortifies me as a 26 year old. Part of growing older really IS growing wiser and having a better sense of what’s an impulse versus what’s a genuine worthwhile desire. It seems foolish to grant children the same rights as adults. And it seems to be reasonably understood with disabled adults—we do require many disabled adults to have caregivers, because they cannot make safe or healthy decisions for themselves. Why is that bad to do with kids?
2. I fully concur with the issue that most child abuse happens inside the home. But what’s the solution? If a kid has the right to leave, where do they go? “The state” seems obviously also bad, so like, what is the material plan for an abused child trying to leave their family, besides the state-sponsored foster care or homeless shelter?
i think these are reasonable questions. they're common first questions to encountering unfamiliar liberationist frameworks. the problem is that there are ten million ways to answer them and none of them are good enough. there is just too much context to cover in a single tumblr ask. i'll provide some book recommendations at the end - please take the time to at least skim them.
anyway, i'll give it my best shot.
the reasonable amount of "kids should not be able to make decisions" is highly context-dependent. right now, as much as i'd like to, i don't let my kids (4 & 1) make independent decisions about when they can go outside. all the technology to make it safe & possible exists. but car-centric infrastructure and a police state on overdrive make it unsafe. in plenty of other contexts around the world and throughout history, it would be perfectly fine for them to go play outside wherever & however they want. that concept extends to a lot of different things, from diet to media to digital spaces to education to juvenile crime (and so on). the "necessary" level of coercion is defined by the systems & priorities of society at large.
however, how is "kids should not be allowed to make decisions" enforced? i wanted a cringe tattoo at 15 too. i'm glad i don't have it now (though really i could go either way). but does that mean that i should be denied legal & financial personhood? why does that not extend to me getting a cringe tattoo at 35 that i regret when i'm 50? adults make permanent, life-changing, bad decisions all the time and it generally doesn't translate to an assumption that our brains are fundamentally deficient for doing so, except when it comes to overlapping cases of marginalization.
there is no switch that flips at 18 (or at 25, for that matter) that transforms your brain from Immature Impulsive Adolescent to Reasonable Responsible Adult. i would argue that our current societal treatment of adolescents, which started in the 1940s in the US, cultivates helplessness in a lot of ways that we then blame on neurological deficiency. there are ways of providing care that empower instead of disempower kids, and i think we should pursue them instead.
requiring disabled adults to have caregivers, especially in the form of conservatorships, is actually something that a lot of disabled people fight against, and for good reason. i recommend reading more about Mad liberation and antipsych to learn about why.
as for addressing child abuse:
in part 4 of her 2022 book Torn Apart, Dorothy Roberts offered a vision for addressing child abuse without relying on the carceral family policing system (but it did preserve the family form). chapter 6 of the book Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune 2052-2072, M.E. O'Brien and Eman Abdelhadi explore one way that a "crèche" (a kind of voluntary group home for kids) could operate. i personally like the idea of expanding the public library/rec center model to include 24/7 access to food & places to sleep, and massively expanding public transit to make it more possible for kids to get there.
every model will have its pros and cons, and there are a lot of options we could pursue that would be better than what we have now. i'm not interested in being king of the world and dictating which one everyone goes with - i assume that the specific structure would differ based on the material & cultural characteristics of the community it's based in. all of them require divesting from racist/sexist/ableist/classist systems, though.
book recommendations:
Family Abolition by M.E. O'Brien
Torn Apart by Dorothy Roberts
Social Reproduction Theory ed. Tithi Bhattacharya
Everything for Everyone by M.E. O'Brien and Eman Abdelhadi
Trust Kids! by carla bergman
Hunt, Gather, Parent by Michaeleen Doucleff (i kind of hesitate to recommend this one because it leans towards exoticizing/fetishizing Indigenous people & it's like a mainstream western parenting book. but it also really opened my eyes to how different cultures have different expectations of children & adolescents. read with an especially critical eye)
aaaaaaa anti-parent I saw you tagged me in comments before here and I meant to answer and forgot to!
so guardianship or conservatorship versus care-giving... social movements that have understood that putting people under legal guardianship is inherently abusive include
ASAN (Autistic Self Advocacy Network) , ADAPT (Free Our People) , & Justice For Jenny Hatch ... Also I did not realize this until recently, probably I should have guessed, but a big part of how modern guardianship law via the probate courts developed was indigenous dispossession specifically stealing oil rights from the Osage Nation cw the link is the wikipedia article "Osage Indian murders"
and on caregiving the thing is that any services a person under guardianship might get, many people not-under-guardianship also get ('assisted living', state-funded housing, state-funded healthcare, at-home care, etc)
what's happening to caregivers (not guardians) for disabled people: a few reportbacks on privatization being used to cut medicaid-funded caregiving services, wage theft from immigrant workers who fight back as rank-and-file while 'business unions' are complicit, & some more workplace commentary from a c.n.a.
Went to the grocery store with my kindergartener. We weighed some bananas: 2 pounds even. We weighed a watermelon: 4 pounds even. We weighed some mangos: a little over 1 pound. We weighed the watermelon AND the bananas: 6 pounds even.
“That’s funny” said the child “because 2+4=6 and two pounds and four pounds is six pounds. It’s like the same as math!”
“What happens if you add 6+1?”
“SEVEN”
“What if we put one pound of mangos on the scale?” <mangos added>
“IT’S THE SAME!!”
“OK, what’s 7-4?”
“Three?”
“What if we take the four pound watermelon off the scale?” <watermelon removed>
“Mama! Are you telling me math works In Real Life? Think of all the things you could measure!!”
i needed to write this out anyway for my book so here is the actual dialectical materialist argument for family abolition and youth liberation, by the way:
the continued existence of capitalism depends not only on the circuit of production but also the circuit of reproduction. social reproduction is the process by which the working class prepares and maintains itself for the exchange of labor-power for a wage. this can also refer to how the bourgeoisie maintains its power generationally. marx introduced this concept in capital but did not explore it in depth.
there are two scales of social reproduction: day-to-day and intergenerational. the labor pool is replenished via three processes: gestation (having kids), immigration, and slavery.
day-to-day social reproductive labor is usually carried out by women. this includes the work of cooking, cleaning, budgeting, and all the other work that goes into running a household. the wife in a typical nuclear family does this labor unpaid, but many affluent households choose to hire cheap migrant laborers (usually also women) to carry it out for them.
intergenerational social reproductive labor is usually understood as the work of raising children - that's as far as it's been theorized in existing marxist feminist work. but i believe that children are responsible for the bulk of this type of labor. the work of formal and informal education for the dual purposes of developing job readiness and internalizing capitalist norms - it's not recognized as labor by, well, much of anybody but i hope that changes in the future.
one of the key features of capitalist education is establishing the alienation of labor, so that by the time children grow up, they're ready to integrate into a compliant labor force. another key feature of education is maintaining the reserve army of labor, which works to undercut attempts to organize labor or establish worker solidarity. the neoliberalization and globalization of the economy has extended this second feature of education both to adults and previously inaccessible labor markets around the world.
this (unpaid) labor occupies most of childhood and its imperative is reinforced by three pillars: the family, the market, and the state. you could argue for the education system to be considered a fourth pillar since it operates somewhat independently of other state apparatuses, at least in the US. depends on how you look at it. the family, the market, and the state work together (imperfectly, unevenly) to reproduce capitalism.
the family is the smallest unit of social reproduction. the nuclear family form developed around the same time as the industrial revolution and is inextricable from patriarchy, white supremacy, ableism, and all the other -isms we usually talk about. the family form in general developed after the agricultural revolution, as a mechanism for inheriting wealth and maintaining socioeconomic hierarchies. families aren't just a source of violence and coercion; they're also most people's primary source of care and support. but abolishing capitalism also necessitates abolishing the capitalist family form (as stated in the communist manifesto).
family abolition doesn't just mean tearing families apart. it means expanding systems of care so that the family isn't the only place that people can receive it. in their original writing, hegel, marx, and engels all used the word aufhebung to refer to abolition, which is really better translated as "positive supercession." so people should still be able to get care from their families if they like, but it shouldn't be their only option. marx believed that this principle was well represented in the paris commune. i believe that the 2022 cuba family code referendum also provides a great model.
to me (an adult), if a socialist/communist movement is going to last, it requires a thorough analysis of minors as an oppressed class. the continued existence of capitalism depends on the extended disenfranchisement of young people until they internalize capitalist norms and prove themselves capable of capitalist reproduction. this process is absolutely key to establishing the alienation of labor. dialectical analysis of children vs. their parents, children vs. the state, working class children vs. the bourgeoisie is all sorely needed. the thing is that hardly anyone has explored this! marx and engels make some passing references to it, and contemporary marxist feminist theorists like m.e o'brien and susan ferguson incorporate this idea into their analyses somewhat. but nobody that i can find has approached this question comprehensively or systematically. which is why i'm here! writing! a lot!
sources!
the communist manifesto (lol)
the origin of the family, private property, and the state by friedrich engels
capital by karl marx (heinrich's introduction to capital is much more beginner-friendly btw)
marx's 1844 economic and philosophical manuscripts (to understand the theory of alienation, specifically)
childhood in world history by peter n. stearns
social reproduction theory: remapping class, recentering oppression edited by tithi bhattacharya
family abolition: capitalism and the communizing of care by m.e. o'brien
making workers: radical geographies of education by katharyne mitchell
schooling in capitalist america: education reform and the contradictions of economic life by samuel bowles and herbert gintis
