marcela

their account name I'm guessing their primary work is with trans inclusion

Hers.

TERFs are nazis. And vice versa. Why are you surprised by the latter?

It is telling that Labele's work has gone from intellectual takes on being and growin up trans, to mostly counter-TERF comebacks, to strictly political cartoons lately.

Much like the evolution of the copaganda toy equipment, it is an attestation to the rise of fascism.

You have read more books than me, and I won't suggest more. Knowledge does not seem to help you. Two things I learned early in transition and helped me come alive on the other side. These two things (and faith). The axioms are: 1) Being trans sucks. 2) But being trans is not wrong.

Surgeries are anyone's own privilege and they should not be gatekeeped. But surgeries do not resolve trauma and setbacks formed through years of closetedness, dysphoria, and denial.

You choose to fixate over the tissue details, at a scientific detail I can't follow. But I have get across other people who like you have gone through surgeries to find something to be desired at the other end. As a congenial stranger, a fellow trans person, I see you deprive yourself of options and also deprive yourself of happiness.

Happiness many of us achieve with and without surgery. You will definately benefit from therapy, although finding the right person can be challenging. Mine was an LGBT specialist, but had also a background in cognitive therapy and dealing with trauma. I had other therapists before, and had lots of groundwork done before even tackling transition issues. (Don''t get me wrong I would never achieve a basic level of psychological functioning without transitioning.)

You had many therapists and none helped. With all respect and solidarity to your troubles, this might mean that you are not allowing yourself to be helped. Many therapists will also be intimidated by your intelligence and attention to detail. This is a tricky bit, with many of us, growing up accustomed to being the smartest person in the room.

You have your advanced takes on things, your intelligence and diligence and it might be hard to make yourself vulnerable enough to allow and be helped (either by therapy or faith). But you're setting yourself up. You need to change route, and I worry about you.

Instead of trying to nullify your transness, consider what being trans has done to your psyche, as you have mostly done whatever is possible for the part that relates to your body. Not having been helped by many therapists still means you have not received the care you need on that front. You still owe that bit to your future self, as you did with SRS.

I no-op and further down in my transition, I also know several other women closely, so I hope I am not overstepping here. We all have internalized shit in our brains about how are bodies are supposed to be, and this is why gender-affirming counseling and studying transgender theory is as important as medically transition. Many people have psychological set-backs even after transitioning. Your tissue down there is the exact same tissue that it would be your vagina. The surgeon restored the vagina you would have naturally developed. Same goes for HRT, as it activates the exact receptors that would be active if you had undergone typical female puberty. That is the whole reason HRT works on our bodies in the first place. It can't turn us into dolphins, but it can activate our DNA expression that would have been, because human beings can develop one or the other or yet intermediate ways with respect to sex differentiation. The same embryonic tissue can form the one or the other way, and there is not an essentialist difference between a neovagina/vulva and a typical one. We all have old trauma with our past dysphoria that raises its ugly head but has nothing to do with who we are now and what our bodies look like now. Look, I really don't want to say more, transition is a very private journey, and many people, myself included, have benefited from discussing such things with a specialized affirming therapist. Best of luck and congratulations on your milestone.

Wow, you keep acting like you have the high ground in this pitiful position you are. Are you chastising me for allegedly making light of bigotry? This is ridiculous. I know bigotry first hand, and I wouldn't think the same of you based on your attitude on this topic. Should I have you in front of me right now I would kick you all the way down a cliff, because you are a sad little bastard. Now, if you want me to clarify things, for anyone following this that is not at your level of bad faith and self-righteousness:

The pattern of thinking resembles that of bigots. Specifically transphobic bigots.

Did I call anti-ai sentiment a bigotry? No. I said in a HYPOTHETICAL FUTURE where artificial sentient being are around, these arguments would be the exact belief set that transphobes have now.

Does this make light of here-and-now bigotry? No.

Does the rest of my rhetoric amount to anything less than subverting oppression be it class, race, or gender? Also no.

So I don't know what the fuck you are trying to accomplish here you little troll, but if you know all the ways I could doxx you and fuck you up in real life you just wouldn't, so shut the fuck up right now asshole. Is that clear to you mf?

AI itself IS a structurally enforced power imbalance

I don't disagree. But since you decide to cut short the discussion by calling me:

you sound like asshole

I don't feel particularly obliged to word how this also stands true. I never said sth to the effect you seem to be projecting here. In fact, I enjoy the notion that "AI is fascism". But at the same time, I think that those parroting the statistical more likely response for an ML user have the exact brain structure I see daily in bigots.

Congratulations on curtailing a possibly interesting discussion because my idea was shocking for your synapse.

I know how it sounds. I am half serious though. If androids are to be in the future, people denying them rights will use this exact set of arguments. The stubbornness over a small set of ill-understood premises also resembles transphobia quite a lot. So yes, under a certain perspective, the belief structure of Lemmy's anti-ai sentiment does resemble some form of bigotries.

Since I follow other places outside the Fediverse, I agree that the disapproval of genAi in Lemmy is monolithic and repetitive. Mastodon also has a lot of AI-criticism, but perhaps it is more sophisticated, backed up by articles and the like. In other places, there is active research and adoption. For instance, a cybersecurity firm showed that hypnotic suggestion is a very effective jaibreaking tactic against Language Models. https://www.securityweek.com/red-teams-breach-gpt-5-with-ease-warn-its-nearly-unusable-for-enterprise/ Try explaining this to an ML user. Ai-enhanced code editors are big right now, and I have met lots of tech people that are virtually inseparable from their chatbots.

But I rarely use it, unless I have a specific type of situation where search engines are a dead end, I need to provide more context etc. This is a recent post I think provides a more informed view https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/an-ai-premortem/ . More broadly, every single time I read sth about AI on Lemmy, I feel I am witnessing the birth of anti-android rhetoric depicted in Detroit Becoming Human or even Bladerunner. It seems to me like a form of bigotry, and it was a thing that convinced me that the userbase of Lemmy is not exactly healthy. Especially ML. There must be a few of them with multiple socket puppet accounts, or they are all just parroting the same points. Ironic how they are the biggest fans of a (poorly understood) stochastic parrot theory, when they are the same people who have been persuaded that Signal is not a "really private" messenger. There is a couple topics where you see how brain dead these people are, AI is one.

Good article. Whatever.

Let me add some perspective. I really can't count how many white and Western middle-class raised trans women have a blog and don't make any impact with it. This is also about myself, since I have been tempted to start one myself. But to what end?

It is a staple of nerds, who are abundant in this particular demographic, that they can make the world better by explaining it to others. But this is a game we have collectively lost. Do you even know what a think tank is, how behavioral advertisement algorithms work, and what amount of media ownership and political lobbying has gone into moving this agenda forward in the time span between 2015 and now?

For each and every English-speaking country in the world, by deploying a mind-boggling amount of resources the right has shifted the discussion from a plane where people were transphobic because they were ignorant, to one where people are transphobic because they have been conditioned with uniform disinformation on selected key topics (such as trans athletes and gender affirming care for minors).

Ever since this has been happening, we were inadequate as a movement to respond to these attacks. I have tons of folders with gotcha videos, blogposts, screenshots, books. It makes no difference.

Some things I want to talk about:

Actual demographics instead of online echo chambers. Everywhere I read more closely, I realize that transphobes are a relative minority. Online is a different story. We might even feed the outrage beast ourselves.

Don't get me wrong, I am extremely worried. There are Nazis and christofascists out there who are keen on annihilating us. Rich influencers in the Press business and established media outlets, they are out to get us. But there is a critical mass of people who are accepting and tolerant. If it wasn't for those people, they wouldn't be spending that much on manufacturing of consent in favor of our annihilation.

Things are bad with GenZ, report after report shows that GenZ men are the most welcoming to this discourse. I am not gonna define it, you know the one. This is the Generation that grew up with meme culture and the endless scroll, and probably reached adulthood during or shortly after COVID, a time during which most of our life became even more digitized and put even more control in the hands of tech billionaires.

The article feels tired. Understandable. Who can recite all the studies and links and arguments they have repeatedly posted over a whole decade. You can see this in real life and online with individual trans activists, who don't utter the arguments any more, they gloss over them. They are hand-waving them at this point because they already have hundred's and thousands of times, to no avail.

Even trans people who are not activists, at first we might be lenient with our friends, sharing personal details, forgiving misgendering, accepting the burden of educating them. Year by year we become bitter, angry, impatient. I have seen this with older trans women and sex workers. A kind of ...spite. After being treated as the butt of society for multiple years, by the same people who secretly pay to get it up theirs by the very same women they spit on in bright daylight, they have developed a character, which is more or less summarized as "you think you are better than me, I know your ugliness, and my ugly, rotten, transness is hollier than yours".

Articles like this are the extremely online and middle class equivalents of this trajectory. She will now not bother to collect her thoughts and provide counterarguments. The quotations of the transphobes seem, even by skimming the article, as more organized, refreshed, and robust. And they are, while we have been played for absolute fools.

Because the billionaires backing Project 2025 and Alliance Against Freedom, they have employed hundreds or thousands of people, paying them full time, to develop and promote these ideas. Testing them first with fringe christian fanatics, then on online far-right and conspiracy communities, then lobbying to seed them into mainstream news and media outlets, as well as Democrat/Labor politics.

No blogger can beat that. Nor a legion of bloggers can. Unless understood as a channel to financially support creators. But don't fool yourself with this. It is no different than knitting nerdy socks and selling them over Etsy. It does not change US, let alone global, politics.

One thing that this article gets right is this. We trans people failed to organize, and failed to make political alliances surpassing the class and race barriers. Heck, anglosaxon middle class trans women can hardly be bothered about trans politics on an international level. Taking self-id driving licenses, insurance-covered HRT, and workplace anti-discrimination laws for granted is extremely privileged. Don't be mad at the average person who finds the ongoing trans persecution too complex and sad to engage. American trans women have been doing the exact same for trans people in the Global South.

No matter how hard trans civil rights were earned in the US, they are an exception internationally. And now also an exception within the States. Because we wrote blogs, made video essays, wanted to coil back to our Discord servers to mew because reality was too depressing to bear. Because it was valid to not having to be an activist just to live authentically as your true gender. And it was one's own privilege to focus on strictly individualist strategies to get to be passing, attractive, and go stealth, in order to be assimilated into an unforgiving world.

And now somehow the world has become even more unforgiving. Anti-trans politics has become the chariot of international far-right reprise, and we blame cis-normative people, the ones who always have been shielding our rights, that they continue life as normal when a trans genocide is happening, and say that their withdrawal from public engagement is cowardice and complicity.

We were the first to do this and be blamed for this.

I am mostly worried about the deployment of modern communication means for fascist propaganda. The use of generated image and videos, the ownership of social media platforms, the use of the meme culture, I don't know. I think these tactics successfully resonate with the MAGA voter base. This is whose opinions count to them. They don't give a shit if we find it ridiculous, because they have other plans for us. To dominate, or even annihilate us, with their cheerful consensus. See my other response.

By their own definition, the existence of trans people is pornographic. So they deliberately posted porn, but blame the Biden administration for bringing it to the White House. See my other response.