Oh hell yeah, is this getting discussed in the mainstream more?
AMAB/AFAB seem like they have just become stand-in terms to conceal bioessentialism by using progressive-sounding words. I tend to use them only in a pinch and I've made efforts to be very intentional about saying "was" and not "is", as this subtle distinction makes a big difference if I'm going to resort to using those terms at all since your assignment at birth is not who you are but rather it's something that happened to you. Even then it's something I generally only use for shorthand to refer to socialisation and mostly only in referring to myself. E.g.:
"I was AMAB and so I'm still trying to figure out whether I'm genuinely NB/agender spec or if there's some really super deep internalised misogyny that I'm completely oblivious to lurking in my psyche which is there because of how I was raised."
This is the exact outlook I hold. "AMAB" and "AFAB" are not descriptors; they're events.
I have seen people, even those who are non-binary themselves, using these terms to generalize. People who do this shit tend to have a caricature of what an "AMAB enby" and an "AFAB enby" look like in their minds, so what they hope to gauge when they ask a non-binary person their assigned sex is whether or not they have certain traits (that they base their understanding of off of these caricatures).
For instance, people creepily assume that "AMAB" and "AFAB" are automatic indicators of what kind of genitalia a person has, but this is obviously very flawed. I've observed that individuals often misinterpret non-binary people as simply being "spicy cis," which significantly contributes to the repackaging of bioessentialism into "woke transphobia" when these terms are used. Unfortunately, this not only causes erasure to non-binary people who do medically transition, but even for non-binary people who don't, the generalizations are not always going to be accurate because they're often influenced by patriarchal, essentialist brainworms in the first place.
The way people use the terms "male socialization" and "female socialization" (which he talks about in part 2) are also concerning because it not only pushes an unnuanced false dichotomy, but it's a great demonstration of how lacking in intersectionality queer spaces can be. So much went into my socialization that go far beyond the sex I was assigned at birth: being a racial minority, being born into an immigrant family, being neurodivergent, the temperament of my family when it came to reinforcing gender roles and traditions in general, their devout Catholicism, and how all of this ties into what people "expect" me to be like even though that expectation is pretty much always entirely different from what I actually am.
Even in queer and leftist spaces, I feel like it's so common for there to be at least a sprinkle of essentialism in most discourse pertaining to gender to an extent that I actually have to avoid a good deal of it just for the sake of not getting triggered and being made to feel like a "freak" who doesn't understand societal norms, which is unfortunately inevitable with all the erasure that happens in this discourse.
If people keep asking me questions trying to figure out what my genitals are, I will just never interact with them again. Why the fuck do you need to know unless you're a doctor? Even if you want to fuck me, being that hung up on whether I have a dick or vagina is an instant turn off.
Felt
Androgyny is both a blessing (because gender euphoria) and a curse (because cis and/or binarist assholes) for me.
I'm literally just an Angel
i have never understood why using agab was ever accepted as trans possitive language. like, it's litteraly the type of language transphobes use to categorize us
the whole definition of being trans is that you don't agree with the gender you were asigned at birth!
i have literally never seen these terms used in any other way than like, people basically calling me a man or at least not seriously a woman or differentiating me from womanhood in some way. like, for the cis "allies" who think it's inclusive but also feel uncomfortable with allowing me into womanhood, so to speak. designations on genitalia like this are genuinely only useful in a medical setting and none else.
