I read that as “I don’t accept trans peoples gender, but will act like I do if it benefits me or my cause”, is there another interpretation I’m missing?

No, most of Graphenes features are not implemented in AOSP. There are a lot of CVE patches from Graphene that land in AOSP, but it doesn’t have any of the hardening or sandboxing that makes GrapheneOS what it is.

I’d say it’s an affront to humanity in both cases

The Ukrainian army is using them as well.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/31/magazine/ukraine-ai-drones-war-russia.html

MediaTek processors have become pretty competitive in recent years. They’re no longer the shitty, awfully slow mobile CPUs that you want to avoid at all costs.