As a non-binary person, I often get asked, upon stating my gender identity, this question: “Are you AMAB or AFAB?”, and quite frankly, I hate it, and I think it reeks of bad intentions. Now, I don’t think anyone who asks this is explicitly enbyphobic. There’s a good chance that they just simply might not understand, but to me, at the end of the day, it reeks of the toxic mentality that assigned sex at birth is a “trait” or a “state of being”. I don’t see it that way. As someone who is 23 years old, my assigned sex at birth is an event that happened 23 years ago and has no bearing on any inherent part of who I am in the present moment.
This is also why I always speak in past tense for these matters. For example, I never say things like “I’m AMAB”, and I feel repulsed in those insane contexts where AMAB and AFAB are used as nouns (like someone saying “I have a question for all the AFABs here” just disgusts me). I always explicitly say, in my context, “I WAS assigned male at birth”, and I leave it at that. If you’re non-binary yourself and prefer to handle these matters differently, that’s okay, as long as you’re not projecting that I should go along with your view of this subject. I just like to emphasize that, for me, it’s really contingent on context when it comes to how willing I am to state my assigned sex at birth.
The caveat is that, in most of these instances, people are not directly asking me what sex I was assigned at birth. Let me give you a few examples:
- I take hormones, right? If someone wants to ask me about my experiences for whatever good faith reason like relating to it or just wanting more information in order to be supportive of my transition journey, then that’s totally fine. With this in mind, people won’t ask me things like “Are you AMAB or AFAB?”, but instead, will ask me things like “Are you taking estrogen, or are you taking testosterone?” which I find significantly more acceptable.
- If you’re my doctor, and you need to know something that pertains to my reproductive system, reproductive capacity, general anatomy/physiology, or any other thing that makes knowing my assigned sex at birth crucial to know, then I don’t mind the doctor asking obviously. Like I said, though, often times, a doctor won’t ask me things like “Are you AMAB or AFAB?”, obviously. They will ask me things like “Do you have a prostate? Can you get pregnant? Can you impregnate others?” and all that stuff that makes the contextual aspect of it all the more sensible.
- For people interested in me in a sexual context who find it hard to assume my assigned sex at birth because of my androgynous gender presentation, asking me “Do you have a penis or a vagina?” makes sense, especially if I indicated reciprocating sexual interest here. In these contexts, knowing my genital configuration would be important to know how to proceed with me in a sexual manner. However, let me clarify that not all non-binary people who were assigned male at birth have penises and not all non-binary people who were assigned female at birth have vaginas.
- The last point I’d state is to make sense of some more niche contexts here. For example, I talk about how short I am all the time, right? I stand at a height of 5’5", which by the standard of an adult cisgender woman, is generally not considered short. If I claim I am short at my height of 5’5", sometimes I like to clarify that, even though I’m non-binary, I was assigned male at birth to make it make sense when I’m on a forum or community for vertically challenged individuals like myself.
At the end of the day, I just like to sniff out context. I hate to be pedantic, but whenever someone asks me things like “AMAB or AFAB?” and leads it on with the fact that they’re “just curious”, I question the “why” of their curiosity. As I see it, unless the context indicates it being relevant, it shouldn’t be taken as an important matter. It seems like a fishy tactic incorporated by those with a bioessentialist mindset to tie my assigned sex as a trait and pick out what my “true gender” is rather than accepting me as non-binary at face value. Like I said to start, many people who ask this are not doing so in bad faith. Often times, they’re just misinformed, so I try to explain to them some of the more problematic aspects of said questions being asked in unnecessary, irrelevant contexts.
I agree with pretty much everything you said. I will say I don’t get too bothered by cis people asking me my AGAB, like of course I’d much rather they not but that question is pretty low on the “silly cis bullshit” scale. Like at least they’re somewhat acknowledging that I am not a man.
What does bother me is non-binary people in queer spaces who bring it up when the info isn’t relevant. The number of posts I saw on queer Reddit which started with “I identify as non-binary (AGAB)”, and it’s just like, why?
This is the only thing I disagree with, really. Obviously your AGAB shouldn’t be a defining factor of your personality (whether you’re trans or cis, tbh), but to discount it wholly seems a bit much. The toys I played with as a kid. Which kids were allowed for sleepovers, and which ones I was “supposed” to develop crushes on. Which types of expression were socially acceptable. The kinds of trauma I’ve had. My journey to discovering my gender. All of these would have been pretty different if I had been assigned another gender at birth, and they all play a role in the person I have become. Ultimately I agree that’s it’s simply an event, but it’s one which regrettably still has a vast influence on how society treats you during your developmental years.
What you’re doing is the “socialization” argument here. Socialization isn’t universal on the basis of assigned sex at birth. Also, I don’t “disregard” it wholly. I just take it at face value. Assigned sex at birth is literally just that: assigned sex at birth, and I’ve even emphasized things like transition journey being relative to my assigned sex at birth with content like the very first bullet point in the post. It truly is just an event.
“Socialized male” ≠ AMAB
“Having a penis” ≠ AMAB
“Presenting masculine” ≠ AMAB
I could go on and on.
I agree that gender-based socialization isn’t universal, but the upbringing of children is still overwhelmingly based on cisheteronormative gender norms in most of society.
I suspect we might be having a semantic disagreement, since I’d typically use “socialized male” and “AMAB” pretty interchangeably. Maybe I should start using “AMABBAABOTTMLBVPWWM” which stands for “assigned male at birth but also a bunch of times throughout my life by various people who were mistaken” :P
It is semantic, yes. I disagree on “AMAB” and “socialized male” being interchangeable, and like I said, nothing is really universal in that context either. Different AMAB individuals get socialized differently, even in the context of gender, especially in relation to their circumstances in other ways.
I think you’re dismissing their point too readily. It’s true that there’s nothing I share with every other afab person on the planet other than a box that got ticked by looking at our genitals when we were born, but if I’m looking for someone who shares a particular gendered experience, my best bet is probably another transmasculine person, particularly one who transitioned at a similar age. It’s reductionist and transphobic to argue that one’s socialisation is determined by gender assigned at birth, but it’s also reductionist to pretend it’s irrelevant.
And here’s the problem. I’m dismissing their point yes, but I do the same thing as you. I participate in a lot of spaces with transfeminine people myself, including binary trans women and transfeminine non-binary people like me. This is from a pragmatic perspective, though. If I want to learn more about feminizing effects of estrogen, then talking to AFAB trans people won’t be very helpful in comparison to talking to AMAB trans people about it.
This aspect of relating to trans people who share your assigned sex has nothing to even do with my initial response to their original comment. It was about the problematic description of “socialization”. I don’t argue that assigned sex at birth is irrelevant to socialization myself. I argue that it’s abused with transphobic intentions. As a matter of fact, the entirety of my post was to emphasize that people pry about assigned sex all the time in irrelevant matters. Funnily enough, in my original post, I didn’t even mention socialization. There is a major difference between saying “I want to interact with fellow AMAB trans people to relate my experience transitioning better” and doing things like I’ve mentioned in the post like “I want to ask enbies their assigned sex and intrude on their personal boundaries because I’m enbyphobic and don’t accept them for who they are.”, but people still get upset over this.
It’s very apparent that, even non-binary people themselves, engage in the “misgendering but woke” shit a lot. There are non-binary people who will separate non-binary people by assigned sex at birth, and this isn’t jack shit to do with socialization either. They do it because of internalized enbyphobia that usually comes with a side of sexism as well.
If you want to make your assigned sex at birth a part of who you are, I won’t stop you, but to me, I’m not comfortable doing it. Being comfortable with your assigned sex is literally just what being cis is, and I’m not even remotely cis.
I’m not just referring to the, uh, directional aspects of medical transition, though, but gendered experiences more broadly. For example, when I was in junior high, a social worker at school taught me to put on makeup. The WTFness of that is something that I’m going to want to discuss primarily with people who were perceived as gender non-conforming girls as teenagers [edit: including those who grew up to be women]. Being afab is not a requirement for that experience, but people with that experience or similar are going to be overwhelmingly afab. I get something different from talking about gender with trans people with experiences that are substantially different to mine (both people with different genders to mine, people with different experiences of gender pre-transition even if their actual genders aren’t all that different). I’m not saying that people aren’t prone to overgeneralization (there sure as hell are a lot of people out there acting like all non-binary people have genders that might be described as adjacent to “woman”), nor that gender assigned at birth isn’t something that people aren’t prone to overgeneralizing about, but your claim that it’s wholly irrelevant is preposterous.
You realise this is saying “Well I guess I’m more trans than you”?
I’d like to touch on the non-binary AGAB thing. in general I refer to myself as a non binary woman. my identity, how I feel inside, is genderless. but I was AFAB and I present feminine. I use she/they pronouns and my body doesn’t make my dysphoric. my identity may be that of a non binary person, but my positionality is that of a white woman. I may not feel like a woman, but society see me and treats me as a woman. it’s hard for me to separate the way I see myself and the way I am treated by society. I understand that isn’t the case for a lot of non binary people, but it is for me and I don’t really feel like people labels and identities should really be up for debate.
That’s another thing, though. Someone could have been assigned male at birth and be a non-binary woman too. You don’t need to make it a point to mention your assigned sex at birth to emphasize how you are a non-binary woman, as the label is applicable to non-binary people regardless of assigned sex at birth. Also, how society treats you, once again, is not explicitly because you were assigned female at birth. It’s because you present in a way that indicates to society that you are a woman in their eyes. Like, I understand what you’re coming from, but, in my view, it’s incredibly problematic to conflate the factor of you being “AFAB” with things that are not particularly relevant to it.