I want a movie where Jennifer Garner tells her transgender daughter she's beautiful and perfect and exactly who she's supposed to be and then that daughter goes back to school after fucking up all her relationships to find her friends hurt but willing and ready to forgive her and her life goes back to normal.
every so often this will get circulated around again and I resist the urge to start telling off the many, many transmascs who comment on it about how scary it was for them going on T because of this so "transmasc here, I totally get it" and its like. you don't. you really dont. the parallel of the lack of agency PAIRED with the ability to call for help is the entire thing. the consistent lack of understanding that estrogen doesn't change our voices. that it's something we just Lose and never get back. it fucks with me & every time I get a wave of Men Insisting They Understand Something That They Clearly Don't it's like. the poems keep writing themselves huh
Chronic pain pisses me off cause I'm not even incapacitated for like a cool or badass reason instead my body is throwing the world's biggest temper tantrum because it's raining outside
a lot of you are more offended at being told trans women make less money than you than you are at naked discrimination against trans women in your own communities
oh and they do get very mad when we exclude them from our spaces. and by "spaces" I mean "the category we created to discuss being the type of woman who faces transmisogyny, such as--just pulling a random example here--being categorically excluded from 'afab only' spaces"
The ideological construction of "children's entertainment", a work sanitized of topics that "children" are ostensibly without the frame of reference nor insight to process - or else shouldn't be exposed to for reasons of moral or emotional harm, is one of the most insidiously deeply ingrained bits of ideology in the modern consciousness that Hitler would have clapped in delight to see.
Children cannot be exposed to "politics", because childhood is a time of naive innocence, you see. Oh, this child's life is made political by virtue of not being white, cisgender, heterosexual, able bodied, and middle to upper class?
Well, then they are to be deprived of any media that touches on their life experience, and their parents to chide them for engaging with "adult" art that does so.
Hmm, I wonder who determines which topics are appropriate for young, impressionable minds to be exposed to? I'm sure that will have no overton window enforcing effects.
a very interesting terf objection to this one boils down to "but how would the state know who to protect?" because it speaks to the incredible privilege of being in a class the state actually ever remotely wants to protect. most oppressed groups do not want the state to have a registry of them, lol
cis people are always so convinced you're transitioning to try to trick them and it's like. it really cannot be overstated just how much you are not a part of the equation whatsoever
really i think the most insidious part of white supremacy is the way it will convince white people everything is actually About Them. being called out isn’t about you. poc expressing frustration at your behaviour isn’t about you. it’s about how you are affecting others. step one is literally just de-centre yourself from the conversation. anyone who’s not white has already had to learn this lesson the hard way and it gets tiring waiting for the rest of you to catch up
Text of tweet under the cut because it is loooong.
But... Stochastic Parrots.
Timnit Gebru was fired from Google in December 2020 for refusing to retract a research paper, and every single warning that paper made about large language models has now happened at a scale the industry spent 4 years trying to make people forget about.
Her name is Timnit Gebru.
She co-led the Ethical AI team at Google. She co-wrote a paper called "On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots" with Emily Bender at the University of Washington and two other researchers. The paper was 14 pages long. It was submitted to a top AI ethics conference. And it was the reason Google decided that one of the most senior Black women in AI research could no longer work there.
The story Google told publicly was that she resigned. The story she told, confirmed by 2,695 of her colleagues in an open letter, was that she was fired by email while on vacation because she refused to either retract the paper or remove her name from it.
The paper had not even been published yet.
Here is what she actually wrote, and why every prediction inside it has now come true.
The first warning was about scale itself. Bender and Gebru argued that training ever-larger models on ever-larger scrapes of the internet would produce systems that appeared fluent but had no actual understanding of language. They called these systems stochastic parrots because they would repeat patterns from training data with statistical confidence and zero comprehension. The paper predicted that this apparent intelligence would fool both users and developers into trusting outputs that were structurally incapable of being reliable.
This was 2020. GPT-3 had just come out. The paper predicted the hallucination problem before anyone had a word for it.
The second warning was about bias amplification. The paper documented in detail that internet-scale training data contains systematic overrepresentation of dominant viewpoints and underrepresentation of marginalized ones. The models would not just absorb this bias. They would amplify it, because the optimization process rewards confident outputs, and confidence in language patterns tracks frequency in the training set.
The prediction was that hiring tools built on these models would discriminate against women. That healthcare triage tools would underperform on Black patients. That loan approval systems would entrench inequality while presenting their decisions as neutral algorithmic judgment.
Every one of those things has now been documented in deployment.
Amazon's hiring algorithm penalized resumes that contained the word "women" in any context. Healthcare risk scoring algorithms used by major US hospitals were found to systematically underestimate the medical needs of Black patients. Apple Card's credit algorithm gave wives credit lines 10x lower than their husbands for the same financial profile.
The third warning was about environmental cost. The paper calculated that training a single large language model produced emissions equivalent to the lifetime output of 5 cars. The prediction was that the race to scale would create an environmental footprint that would eventually rival entire industries.
In 2024, Google's emissions were up 48% from 2019, and the company explicitly blamed AI infrastructure. Microsoft's were up 29%, same reason. Both companies have now quietly abandoned the climate commitments they were publicly celebrating the year Gebru was fired.
The fourth warning was about documentation. The paper argued that the training datasets being assembled were too large for anyone to actually audit. Nobody at Google, OpenAI, Meta, or any other lab could tell you with confidence what was in the data their models were trained on. This was not a temporary problem to be solved later. It was a permanent feature of the approach.
In 2023, researchers discovered that the LAION-5B dataset, used to train Stable Diffusion and other major image models, contained thousands of images of child sexual abuse material. The companies that had trained on the dataset had no way of knowing. The paper predicted that category of failure 3 years before it was found.
The fifth warning was the one Google cared about most.
Bender and Gebru argued that the deployment of these systems would centralize linguistic and cultural power in the hands of the small number of companies that could afford to train them. The internet would become a place where the dominant voice was a statistical average of dominant voices, presented as a neutral assistant. Languages underrepresented in the training data would degrade over time as more web content was generated by these systems and fed back into the next training run.
This is now happening in real time. A 2024 study found that 57% of new web content in English is AI-generated or AI-assisted. Researchers studying low-resource languages have documented active degradation in translation quality, because the synthetic content fed back into training is itself worse in those languages.
The paper Google fired her for predicted the model collapse problem before model collapse had a name.
The mechanism behind why this all happened is the part of her work that nobody quotes.
Gebru's argument was not that AI is dangerous in some abstract sci-fi sense. Her argument was that AI is dangerous in a very specific structural sense. The technology was being built by a small group of researchers who shared similar backgrounds, worked at similar companies, and were rewarded for shipping products faster than competitors. The incentive structure made it impossible for safety, ethics, and bias concerns to slow anything down. Anyone inside the system who raised those concerns was either ignored, sidelined, or removed.
She was making that argument from inside Google.
Then Google proved her right by removing her.
The team Google had built to make sure their AI was safe was dismantled in 90 days because they did the job they had been hired to do. Margaret Mitchell, the other co-lead of the Ethical AI team, was fired two months after Gebru for searching through her own emails for evidence of how Gebru had been treated.
Gebru did not stop. She founded DAIR, the Distributed AI Research Institute, in 2021. The mission is to do AI research outside the control of the companies that have a financial interest in not hearing the answers.
Every prediction in the Stochastic Parrots paper has now been validated by deployment. Hallucinations are an industry-wide problem the largest labs cannot solve. Bias amplification has been documented in hiring, healthcare, lending, and criminal justice. Environmental costs are larger than entire small countries. Training data audits remain impossible. Model collapse is an active research crisis at every major lab.
The question worth sitting with is the one almost no one in the industry will say out loud.
Every researcher with the technical credibility to call out these problems watched what happened to her in December 2020 and made a calculation about their own career. The number of people willing to speak publicly about safety and ethics issues inside the major AI labs collapsed after that firing and has not recovered.
The researcher Google fired for warning about exactly what is now happening was right.
The company that fired her is now the second-largest deployer of the technology she warned about.
And the people inside that company who agree with her are not allowed to say so.
BTW if you call yourself a transfeminist you HAVE to get educated on racial intersectionality. It is not optional. The fact that the transfeminist movement is largely on Tumblr, a site that continues to delete every single Black user it possibly can, has made it so that this site is overrun with white transfems who fall into the exact same trap as the tme transmisogynists we speak out on.
NEVER let yourself think that you are immune to bigotry. NEVER. Just because the movement as a whole pledges racial justice, doesn't mean that you aren't actively harming Black people, both in our community and outside of it.
We have stray thoughts about the whole: "male socialisation" being used as an excuse to exclude transfeminine people while the same bioessentialist concepts are used to claim transmasculine people having a greater connection to feminity and how that ties to a need to move into assemblages alongside intersectionality.
Assemblages [as i understand them] refer to movement, life and being. Theres no pinpointing of identity where you freeze to define yourself within the systems present. To define yourself by your coercively assigned gender would be to hold still and settle into the very systems that look to discipline you, the movements that will homogenize you into homonormative identities to further define who is permitted to live. Living here not just being mortality but the right to privacy, food, shelter, trust, care etc.
I gotta organise those thoughts i gotta read more, im not the person to write this but i wanna at least try and organise these thoughts
It should go without saying that pushing for queer assemblage does not call for discarding intersectionality. To do so would be horribly ignorant of the black feminists who established the concept and undermine how useful intersectionality is for communicating and identifying axes of oppression.
We have stray thoughts about the whole: "male socialisation" being used as an excuse to exclude transfeminine people while the same bioessentialist concepts are used to claim transmasculine people having a greater connection to feminity and how that ties to a need to move into assemblages alongside intersectionality.
Assemblages [as i understand them] refer to movement, life and being. Theres no pinpointing of identity where you freeze to define yourself within the systems present. To define yourself by your coercively assigned gender would be to hold still and settle into the very systems that look to discipline you, the movements that will homogenize you into homonormative identities to further define who is permitted to live. Living here not just being mortality but the right to privacy, food, shelter, trust, care etc.
I gotta organise those thoughts i gotta read more, im not the person to write this but i wanna at least try and organise these thoughts
they literally taught you that trans people were subhuman and that you were better than them. I don't know if you can be trusted around other trans people
haven't yet seen a post about this on here. a man was murdered on the streets of dublin on friday. his name was yves sakila and he was 35 years old. there's a video circulating on social media of multiple security guards violently restraining him, with one of them kneeling on his neck/head area. yves died soon after. he was murdered.
Arnotts conducting security review as it expresses sadness over Yves Sakila’s death
this incident cannot be separated from comments made by former taoiseach (prime minister) bertie ahern last week about muslim people and african people in ireland, specifically congolese people. he said "the ones I worry about are the africans" while out canvassing in a local bye-election for a fianna fáil candidate.
The chairperson of the Irish Muslim Peace and Integration Council has described comments by former taoiseach Bertie Ahern on migrants as "de
if you hear friends, colleagues, family members, classmates, neighbours or anyone you know repeating racist comments from the likes of bertie ahern, call them out. do not let their racism go unchecked. a climate of suspicion and hatred against Black people and people of colour makes murders like this more likely to happen. everyone needs to do the work do dismantle this climate of fear and encourage compassion, tolerance and community in its place.
please reblog, especially with further news/updates/info. yves deserves justice. Black irish people don't deserve to live in fear. please keep your thoughts with the irish congolese community at this time.
i hate the part of depression that’s like all the things that bring me joy are empty and i can’t do anything. like come on bitch i know you love book can you just be happy about book :/
The thing is a whole lot of trans women would LOVE trans unity, if it actually meant being treated equitably instead of the current version where it means “shut up and take whatever we want to hit you with, bitch”
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