yes, because how can one person represent all queer experience? But often leaderships spots the "queer person in the room" and suddenly they're expected to be the voice of ALL queer people.

Coming out as an educational leader is dangerous for people in the public system but especially in the Catholic system where there are expectations of heteronormativity and expectations around patriarchal hierarchy that make high profile roles troublesome. Queer leadership is like a red flag for a bull to parents and members of the public who want to impose their stereotypes and biases on these people and the system at large. Having to deal with opposition from the public sphere can be taxing enough, but when people think they have the right to judge your capability solely based on your sexual identity, your soul gets worn down.

I have been involved in a national project interviewing educational leaders doing gender justice work. Many participants cited burnout as a leading pressure in doing this type of representation, because it's personal and exhausting work to always fight against barriers, limitations, and bias. Despite people coming to this work with passion and love, when you don't take care of yourself and get renewed with community and love for yourself, it can be very isolating.

I found the format of this overview of literature difficult to digest. I understand that they wanted to separate the concepts and create a linear sort of evolution to make the information intelligible, but the tables and such were disorienting and interrupted the flow of the arguments for me.

I took a course in 1995 at York called Language, Gender and Power in which people from a variety of disciplines met to discuss these interests. Queer theory was very new, and in linguistic circles researchers began examining the reclamation of the word "queer" by the 2SLGBTQIA+. It was a time in which coming out was dangerous, and talking about queer issues, let alone talking about the word "queer" as a positive powerful label, was tough for lot of people. There was a lot of disagreement about using the term. Many people felt it evoked too much trauma for them; others saw it as a powerful reclamation of language. It is a demonstration of complexity and tension that is important to keep in mind. This kind of bravery in scholarship and in physical classrooms is a small example of the type of risks people took and take still (risk of real physical violence) to normalize and authorize queer scholarship.

This phrase as an introduction is an interesting choice: "given", as if they didn't fight for it, as if the dominant powers hadn't felt pressured to do it because of decades of action and protest and education. But it also has connotations of "bestowal." And it comes with pressure, being in a spotlight, because it opens people up to the bias and stereotypes and misplaced anger of bigots.

In reading the articles @bonstewart posted (see replies to @ShawnaP 's comments connected to this phrase: "here's both the original article (Bender, Gebru, McMillan-Major & Schmitchell, 2021) https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3442188.3445922 and a 2026 update post by the primary author https://medium.com/@emilymenonbender/stochastic-parrots-frequently-unasked-questions-49c2e7d22d11")

I especially loved the following quotation: "...the astonishing willingness of so many to surrender their own power and turn to synthetic text (for which no one is accountable) for all kinds of weighty decisions" (Bender, 2026).

It is despairing (I am making up my own words) that some people will surrender or choose to ignore the implications of relying on GenAi or LLMs, but I am heartened by the recent court decision to hold Air Canada liable for what their bot told a customer. I love that courts are beginning to hold companies' feet to the fire to make them responsible for the (dis/mis)information their property and creations are disseminating to customers. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/air-canada-chatbot-lawsuit-1.7116416

GenAI is like a serpent eating its tail: feeding upon what it has access to, what it creates. Unlike the ouroboros, there is not a great deal of self-reflexivity as we understand it. GenAI and LLMs do not reflect upon their positioning and their potential mistakes or errors in judgement. That skill is left up to academics who advocate critical thinking, to the philosophers who point out ethical issues, and to the educators who warn against the commodification of knowledge.

the key words in this syntax are "a civilization's"...taking ONE civilization and providing its most popular—not its most ethical or equitable—not its brightest and best—not even its failings and bruises—idea(l)s and posing them as some type of ultimate Truth and Answer with no critique of its evolution. Indeed, in drawing from the WEIRD posters, GenAI presents (in this post truth permissability) any and all perspectives as equal and plausible and TRUE. Fact checking is nonexistent, like a Trump debate. And the more GenAI puts falsities online, the more it draws from itself for material and the more these falsities are perpetuated.

And so, if we commercialize knowledge as Sam Altman wants to do...meter it out through a pay per nugget model like a gas bill....then the future populations CAN be controlled. Their communications can be (and already are) monitored and potentially altered. If the billionaires who fund the right wing politicians provide governments with the means to surveille and control their populations, they can maintain and virtually police their privilege.

and this long process of a journey through and to knowledge...the coming to know, the knowledge being imbedded in the struggle itself is lost with an instantaneous "production" of one truth. And I use a small "t" deliberately: who benefits from people not engaging with the journey of their own knowledge generation? Who benefits from the commodification of knowledge?

And as much as I dislike the gatekeeping and pay walls of scholarly journals, I am thankful for them with regard to LLMs because...for now...that work is safe from being co-opted. With the rise of people being paid to train AI models, I fear that those doing these jobs DO have access beyond these paywalls and are inputting scholarship without providing accurate citations to those who generated that knowledge. With the amount of money these new platforms have, when will paywalls and gates be subsumed, ignored, and then selected for their compliance to dominant ideologies?

The "relationships between these words" points, for me, to the word prediction capability of of GenAI which often also falls into these same problems of reproducing biases and assumptions. Often predictive text is grounded in particular preferred systems. For instance, grammar is usually American, as is spelling. The Oxford Comma is ignored. What other writing conventions will/does GenAI value over others and thereby authorize?