[ID 1, 2: But that actually only gets us so far when it comes to young people and actually, a lot of the problems that trans youth face, although they would be greatly improved if we could deal with some of that anti-trans hatred at the core of the world we live in, it actually wouldn’t be fully resolved. Because a lot of the problems trans youth face have to do with being children, and their transness sort of accelerates the way that adults are used to mistreating, disliking, and even abusing and manipulating them in the name of taking care of them and loving them. This is how modern American, really Anglo-American culture invented childhood in the late 19th century as this protectable, idealized, innocent space that therefore it is ignorant and incapable and inferior to adults. And we like—we can just slow this down for a second to think about how bizarre the West is about some things, okay? It’s like this is truly—okay. Everyone in theory is a child, right? So it’s like, this social status that we’re all supposed to come through, but that we’re like, “Everyone is a child, but children are absolutely less valuable than adults.” So everyone is supposed to go through this debased period in their life.
ID 3: And then if you survive it, you get to be an adult. And kind of the most amazing trick Western culture ever came up with is like, “Then you will have childhood amnesia and you’ll actually never remember what it was like to be a child,” right? Like we can’t actually remember truly how fucked up it was to be treated like we didn’t know shit about ourselves, to be thrown into a world where we didn’t have a hand in writing any of the rules, where adults lied to our faces and are hypocrites all the time and are constantly mistreating us and we’re like, “Wait.” And also our point of view does not matter whatsoever. We’re constantly being told, “You don’t know anything. You are ignorant. You are innocent. I have to protect you.” And where adults are like, “Anyways, so I’m gonna protect you by hurting you.” Right? And then you’re supposed to roll over and be like, “Thank you so much. Oh my god.”
ID 4: And I think that I tend to be pretty polemic about this when I talk about this because I am, you know, a historian of childhood. It’s like, you have to do a little bit of deprogramming, right? We have actually all been taught since before we could consent, to accept being mistreated, to accept being harmed in the name of being cared. We are told that it’s okay to infantilize and make people vulnerable and put them in situations where they’re at the whim of institutional adult power because it’s good for them. It’s literally all victim blaming! Right? And so when that situation is rigged, and every single one of us has been put through a kind of brainwashing, right, because we’re all raised in that culture, right. And then we’re asked to perpetuate it. I mean, it’s just staggering, right? I mean, it’s really, it’s intense, right.
ID 5: But I think one of the lessons that I thought a lot about, right, is like if we could just cut through the fake moral panics around trans people, then we’d get to the real heavy lifting, which is why do we dehumanize and mistreat children on such a widespread scale that we actually have to actively lie to ourselves and mislead ourselves as a culture every second of every day? end ID]
the text above is from jules gill-peterson's gender reveal podcast episode but one of the other things i can't stop thinking about re: paper girls is how it functions as a critique of the way that childhood is lived for adulthood. childhood comes with so much abuse, as described above, and the way that it's justified is in large part by encouraging kids to have huge dreams for their futures -- president, ceo, celebrity -- that will make the years of hardship worth it and turn it all into the first chapter in a story of rags to riches that they'll be proud to tell; the more broad, bootstrappy idea that you have to go through something hard to get to something great operates in the context of childhood in a powerful way. but what happens when the child shows up to confront the adult and finds that their future is not exceptional after all? how is the child supposed to justify their suffering-filled present if not with the mirage of the perfect future where suffering has been transformed into hard-earned success? the kids in paper girls judge their future selves so harshly, and their adult selves have no answers for them as to why they have not become what they dreamed of as children. it is an extremely powerful thing to watch a child ask their grown-up self, why did i suffer this way? and come to understand that there was no justification at all, that the adults who told them it was necessary in service of who they would later become were selling them a lie.
snowghoul
romaincrisis
turnnoffyourmind
vaporwave
annaxmalina
andulkaphoto
