Biochemist, mass spectrometry witch, caretaker for the nanoflow liquid chromatographs. Trans woman, lesbian. Recumbent cyclist. Wisconsin, USA


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kda
@kda

While it's a good thing for everyone to be forthcoming about their gender positionality vis-à-vis society when safe and appropriate, the phenomenon of nonbinary people who are really invested in their AGAB is… …confusing to me. Like, why are you introducing yourself by the category that you're ultimately trying to break from?

(This is a distinct phenomenon from the way that transphobes with radical feminist influences, full-blown TERF or not, "identify" as their "sex" while loudly pretending that they're not gendering themselves. That doesn't confuse me at all — it's pretty easily understood and wildly wrong.)


beige-alert
@beige-alert

I've come to feel that I'm pretty much a woman and not really nonbinary, but I spent quite a few years exploring things and thinking of myself in nonbinary ways and being quite visibly gender nonconforming. And for the first 4.5 years my community, such as it was, was the Tumblr enbies, and that experience really made me think of being AMAB as a very important part of my identity, because as far as I can tell very very few of the others were and very clearly everyone took AFAB as the default, as simply implied by "nonbinary." So I certainly tagged my posts AMAB back then just in hopes of being findable by any others.

It was very much an environment where no one ever said what their assigned gender was, but took for granted we all knew what the default was. People used the word 'everybody' to specifically mean half of us. Even after I figured that out I'd still get caught by people posting 'if you're nonbinary and [something] here's something you need to know' and I'd think, hey, I'm a [something] enby, this is about people just like me. I never read anything here that even potentially applies to me in my situation, this is surely going to be very helpful! And then I'd be confused about how it was entirely disconnected from anything I'd ever experienced or felt until I remembered of course it's not about people like me. In some cases you could flip some words around and it would more or less apply, but you were never going to see it written that way. It was all pervasive assumptions about what your mom must have made you do as a kid, what people around you are surely going to assume about you, whether people see certain things you might do as visibly queer or as invisibly conformist, none of which applied to me. For me, growing my hair long was a new thing, mom made me cut it short. Wearing dresses, for the first time in my forties, both felt new and trans and queer to me and also people around me did not see me and think dresses are very binary, I must be a very un-queer cis woman, it made me one of the most visibly queer people in the four-county metro area.

It is an extremely different experience to talk to trans men I know, because we're aware of these mostly pretty obvious differences in the specifics of our experiences, and indeed it's fun to each see the other delighting in the same things we couldn't stand ourselves. Obviously people vary a lot but we're also well aware that normally the first go-round with puberty leaves changes very visible to others, and then if you do start doing medical things then obviously your feelings about your beard will be very different if you are going through electrolysis vs. finally started taking testosterone. Sometimes we even have practical advice for each other, things you just sort of learned during all those years trying to perform your assigned gender.

Sure, there's plenty of times when you don't need to bring it up, especially if you're willing to word things in an inclusive way (no one on tumblr ever said you don't have to change your hairstyle to be trans, but they sure did endlessly repeat that you don't have to cut it short!), but I've got a lot of experience with it not ever being acknowledged and who gets excluded by that.


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in reply to @kda's post:

With the caveat that, in spaces we've frequented, this only took off after we started to move on from them, we can make some educated guesses. One factor being an attempt at recognising positionality, distorted through retellings. Things like not knowing when it's relevant to bring up, so erring on the side of constantly doing so.

Legibility can also be a factor. AGAB can, more than actually relating to the assigned gender, be about relating to other trans people who were assigned that same gender. We were actually shocked to learn that binary trans people feel misgendered by AGAB language,1 'cause we'd always understood it as their box2 we were being put in against our will.

Then there's like, the fucked up gatekeepy stuff? Things like, people who say nonbinary people who were assigned male at birth can't be lesbians, than leading to nonbinary people who were assigned female at birth to wave that around as a proactive defence. Dunno how common this is, it's kind of a tumblr exclusionist problem (i.e. we have very little experience beyond knowing it exists).

It's definitely surreal, the common take where we first explored ~2019 was that AGAB is "What's in your pants?" with a silencer.3 It all feels very naive. Hopefully this doesn't come across as justification, we're sick to death of AGAB language. We've just kind of spent some time thinking about linguistic gaps, we guess.
—🗡️🌊


  1. This was a while back now.

  2. i.e., AFAB nonbinary = trans man but inclusive, and vice versa. The expectations of the label being modelled on binary expectations, not that the label existed to help binary trans people.

  3. Ironically it does not actually inform anyone what is or was ever in your pants, but a lot of people think it does.

  • Yeah, that definitely checks out! The whole dynamic of clumsily trying to Be Up Front About Positionality to the point that it becomes more harmful than helpful is… …definitely a familiar one.
  • I think the most common alternative I've heard is "transmasc" and "transfem", which… …aren't quite as inclusive, but also don't have the same troublesome sort of implicit reification of AGAB as Something That Should Be Relevant. TMA (and, conversely, TME) has utility here as well, but I can't quite think of neat terms which get at everyone who experienced the same incorrect assignment without, in a way, repeating that mis-assignment.
  • Ah, yes, that kind of exclusionism. Being someone who mostly has sexual relations with MLM/MSM/Achillean people, I have zero horses in the "boundaries of lesbianism" race, but I can confidently say that trying to exclude people from it on AGAB bases is fucking wild.

But no, this doesn't come across as justification at all — and I appreciate the insights!