#'afab genitals?' 'afab chest?' tell me you don't know what those words mean without telling me you don't know what those words mean.

[contagious-watermelon]

what is the deal with everyone identifying themselves by their birth sex? i see it all the time. everywhere. and also — maybe it's just a function of the people i happen to see, but it's almost always people saying they're "afab" rather than its complement.

it's telling, to me, what they really think of (other) trans people, because they act as if your sex at birth is constant and unchanging throughout your life. one of my coworkers said they had a low voice for an afab (meaning low for someone who's never gone through a T-dominant puberty). people use the acronym — denoting what sex a doctor determined you to be when you were born — not always accurate because sex traits can be mixed or ambiguous — as a placeholder for present-day "male" or "female."

it's the same thing, i think, as when people say that sex ≠ gender and mean that trans men are female and trans women are male. sure, some of them are, maybe (though I'd bet it wouldn't go over well calling them that), but it's called SRS for a reason; transsexual. with our current technology, we can't completely change a male person to a female one or vice versa — but we can change a whole lot of their phenotypic sex characteristics, whether that be by removing them or switching them to the other sex. that's kinda the whole point of medical transition, actually.

so to me it just, idk, it reveals how people are really thinking of their own transition as well as others', that they see your birth sex as unchanging, fixed, inevitable destiny. that's exactly what transphobes think of us. why does our own community have to think of us that way too?