#assigned gender at birth

[genderqueerdykes]

Not intersex, but I wanted to share that my parents were convinced that I was a boy at the time I was born! I almost got marked M on my birth certificate, lmao. My genitals weren't clear to them for them at the time for whatever reason, but after I was cleaned up they figured I was female afterall.

Assigning gender at birth doesn't work, even for some perisex people.

that is so wild, so it really just does affect everyone. i've been trying to say this forever, so thank you for this insight, i really appreciate it. it just doesn't work.

[i-am-trans-gwender]

What is better, to be born the right gender, or to overcome your wrong gender through great effort?

[edwardallenpoe]

Why do we call agab agab. It's sex assigned at birth. Not gender. It would be dif if it was Amab and Awab for assigned man and woman at birth or abab and agab for boy and girl, because those are genders, but this is assigned sex at birth. So why isn't it asab. Hm.

Maybe it's an example of the trans community still having this weird idea that sex = gender that they haven't unpacked fully outside of validating nonbinary perisex people. Or it could just be an honest overlook. Either way.

[bupsafr3ak]

AAAB

Assigned Angel At Birth

[ontheoutside-lookingin]

Can someone explain to me why I was born with

1.) a pathological fear of all things regarding reproduction and human offspring AND ALSO

2.) a ridiculously detrimental reproductive organ to bleed from every single month of my adult life to remind me what a spiritual and biological fucking failure I am for not centering my life around reproduction and human offspring

bc I’m just wondering why I needed to be born with BOTH of these traits ?

[vanilla-voyeur]

The bestest most wonderful part of AMAB/AFAB is that it's inescapable. You can change the gender on your birth certificate, but you can't change your AGAB. You can get all sorts of surgeries and hormones and whatever to permanently alter your biology, but you can't change your AGAB. You can come out as trans at age 5 and be socialized your entire life as your real gender, but you can't change your AGAB. Beautiful concept. Very progressive. Yes I am a good ally.

[void-galaxy-shenanigans]

I am non binary. It doesn’t matter what “sex” I was Accused At Birth, and no one is entitled to that information.

[oediex]

when you are assigned a gender at birth, that is a political act

[cypric-rat-hyperfixation]

2y/o art I never posted lmao

✨Reblogs✨ > likes > murder > reposting w/out credit

I do not consent to having my work fed to machine learning programs!

[genderqueerdykes]

tbh your (and other intersex bloggers') posts about how agab is simply an event and means nothing in the way of body parts has helped me a lot in self acceptance? idk if I can really say that because I'm a perisex trans boy, it's not really my relief or validation to have... but its helped me like. idk. hate how I was born less. I hated thinking of myself as AFAB until recently, I already believed it but your posts really just helped me properly internalize how little it means. it's helped me more appreciate the trans part of my transmasculinity. idk hopefully that isn't appropriative or offensive to say. I just wanted to tell u

i don't think that's offensive, i've met a few people who are in a similar line of thinking that really opened my eyes to how broad perisex experiences can be, too. i've met several trans guys who were assigned female at birth, but did not identify with it. they identified as cis men with male bodies, already as they were, no hormones or surgery required. that they simply already had male bodies. i've met trans women with the exact same identities. i dated a trans woman who saw her body as a female body, without needing any modifications.

like hear me out, but i think in order to totally free ourselves from the biological sex binary, we have to give perisex people wiggle room, too. obviously, a perisex person shouldn't identify as intersex, but i think you're allowed to say. no, the doctor was wrong actually, my body is (this). you're not denying the parts you're born with or the hormones your body produces, but you are challenging the notion of what a "Female" or "Male" body is and looks like- which is exactly what we need to see more of in order to progress forward with intersex and sex variant liberation.

we need to be encouraging people who are willing to deconstruct what "male" and "female" bodies are and look like. we need to understand that this benefits all trans and intersex people. we can and should care about liberating perisex people from this binary as well. it helps perisex people interact with and learn more about intersex identities as they learn more about their own. it's an exchange. it's a dialogue. i'm really glad you realized that about yourself, you deserve to feel comfortable in your body! take care of yourself

[wronggalaxy]

I hate when people say that I don't need to tell anyone my agab.

A) It's very fucking obvious(oh I wonder what could possibly be the assigned gender of a person with boobs and no bulge who goes by Hannah or Belle around multiple people, especially their transphobic family(I swear if someone says not to expose my deadname—it's MY deadname, I'll tell whoever I want, fuckoff)/sarcasm)

B) My agab is a big part of my person and general life

and

C) I am my agab. I'm also a boy and both and neither and sometimes switch all at the same time.

In conclusion: gender is complicated and stop trying to police the way I talk about mine.

*agab means: assigned gender at birth

[stormy-talks]

Don't forget that AGAB is simply an event. It is not indicative of one's body parts.

Having a vagina honestly sucks bc it's like you have to do fucking alchemy just to prevent yourself from getting sick. You've got an intricate ecosystem of microorganisms down there that you're dependent on for your own well-being and they can be set off by the tiniest fucking thing

Keeping your pubes too short can cause yeast infections, but letting them get too long can also cause yeast infections. Washing the area with specialized soap can help prevent yeast infections, but it can also cause them. Your periods can cause yeast infections, and so can the medicine you take to stop your periods. Having sex can cause yeast infections, especially if the person you're having sex with is diabetic (???). Being diabetic can cause yeast infections. Wearing the wrong clothes or eating the wrong things can cause yeast infections. Not getting enough fucking sleep can cause yeast infections. The list is neverending

Luckily, yeast infections are fairly easy to treat with OTC medicine that you can find at any Walmart. BUT! Even if all of your symptoms indicate that you have a yeast infection, you have to take a test first to confirm that it's a yeast infection (they do not sell the tests at Walmart) bc you might actually have the opposite of a yeast infection (bacterial vaginosis) which has the exact same symptoms as a yeast infection but is caused by an imbalance of different microorganisms. And if you use yeast infection medicine to treat a bacterial infection it will light your pussy on fire. So if you have a bacterial infection, you must instead visit your local witch doctor (gynecologist) and get prescribed special potions (antibiotics) to treat it

Antibiotics can also cause yeast infections

[pleaseletmeexist]

AJDAM

(Assigned joe doe at morgue)

[trans-axolotl]

my gendered experience growing up as an intersex person was overwhelmingly defined by my responses and resistance to everything that got me labeled as a failure: failure to quickly get a gender assigned at birth, failure to go through a normal puberty and grow up into a woman, failure at meeting the standards for "complete womanhood" because of my intersex sex traits, and yet simultaneously failing to ever be acknowledged as a "real man" and being treated as a threat when I expressed I wanted to transition.

before i realized i was a man and came out as trans, the ways that girlhood was denied to me was very often humiliating and painful. locker rooms filled with other girls were a frequent source of shame. there were many big and small ways that i was told that my intersex body made me insufficient, incomplete, broken. i was forced onto estrogen, forced into shaving my body hair, and was constantly being told to change myself to better fit this mystical idea of a "normal woman." and even though I ultimately ended up becoming a man, the denial of girlhood was painful.

but i think that these things would have been even more difficult to navigate as an intersex girl if on top of everything I already said, i was having to cope with the denial of my girlhood while i was forced into boys locker rooms. if my doctors were forcing me onto testosterone hrt and refusing to even discuss estrogen, if all my legal paperwork had "M" on it and was a logistical nightmare to change, if every support group for my intersex variation labeled it as a "men's support group," if the LGBTQ community spaces i tried to join were misogynistic towards me often to the point of exile, if my self determination as an intersex girl was denied in most spaces of my life, and on and on and on. while listing all these things out i also don't want to make it seem like it's all about suffering and pain--so much of transition for me has been about joy in my self determination and how much it feels like a reclamation of autonomy to decide what I want my body and self to be like--i know this is an experience i share with so many of my trans intersex friends.

as an person who was AFAB, although there were many ways that trying to grow up as an intersex girl were a painful, logistical nightmare, many times and places that i was excluded from woman's spaces, etc. however, there was a simultaneous affirmation that i was right to strive for that in the first place. which is logic rooted in some fucked up compulsory dyadism, but also which would have made some things slightly easier or even possible at all if i had wanted to embrace being an intersex girl within this fucked up system.

pretty much every time i've seen people on tumblr talking about "afab transfems" in an intersex context, people seem happy to collapse these experiences and act like there's no meaningful distinction or point in distinguishing between different types of intersex embodiment. it seems incredibly extractive, to be perfectly honest with you--taking terms already used by a community to make meaning of their experiences and to expand and dilute that term enough that it means something pretty different than the original.

it's making me think about the concept of epistemic injustice, which is a term coined by Miranda Fricker to describe oppression related to knowledge, communication, and making meaning of the world. There's two subtypes of epistemic injustice: testimonial injustice and hermeneutical injustice. Testimonial injustice refers to the dynamic where marginalized people are labeled as not credible, excluded from conversations, and their testimony and knowledge is labeled as unreliable, even when they're the ones who are experts and have first hand experience of what people are talking about. (this is why i probably won't make this post rebloggable--i've noticed this pattern on tumblr many times where trans men speaking about transmisogyny get lots of notes and are given a lot of grace, where trans women are silenced, attacked for not having perfect wording, and otherwise delegitimized.)

the second type is called hermeneutical injustice. it describes how marginalized people are denied the right to make sense of the experiences in their own lives. this can look like preventing people from building community, terminology, a political understanding of themselves, and the interpretive resources needed to process how you live in the world.

this is a form of injustice that I think almost all intersex people are very familiar with--we are denied community and interpretive resources to the point that we're told we don't even exist, that intersex isn't a real word, and so many more examples that leave us isolated and with very few options for understanding what we're collectively experiencing. as an intersex person i really intimately understand how frustrating, confusing, and painful it is to not have words for your experiences, your identity, your life.

so it makes me really sad and pissed off when it seems like intersex people seem to be replicating this exact same type of epistemic injustice towards transfems and specifically towards intersex transfems. pretty much every time recently i see people talking about "afab transfems" they're doing so in a way that seems to deny that trans women even have the right to make sense of their own experiences in the world. there seems to be this mindset that these political frameworks, these interpretive resources that transfems have built up are just up for grabs for anyone. and then on top of that has come with it a lot of cruel, hateful language and direct attacks towards many intersex transfems who are facing so much harassment right now.

an important value to me is this idea of reciprocity as a foundation for solidarity. to me reciprocity means that we're prioritizing the ways we care for each other, we're thinking about how we can uplift each other, and we're watching out for extractive or exploitative patterns where one group is constantly expected to be in "solidarity" with another group without getting the same respect and care back toward them. i think that there could be so many ways that intersex people of all genders could share our overlapping experiences and actually be in true, meaningful solidarity with each other, but i barely ever actually see that happen on tumblr. and that pisses me off, because i do think that there's so much we have in common that we could celebrate and support each other with. i feel so much kinship with so, so many of my trans intersex friends, and ways where i see our lives converge. but i don't think that can happen in an environment where there's no acknowledgment of the ways that our experiences will sometimes (often) differ from each other, and the ways that we have unique needs.

another frustration i've had based on this most recent couple months of transmisogynistic intersex posting on tumblr is how intersex people have been mostly ignoring intersex community resources and devaluing the existing intersex terminology that people created to try to meet our needs. so much of what i've seen people describing on tumblr seems to really line up with the term ipsogender. Ipsogender is a term coined by an intersex sociologist Cary Gabriel Costello, and is used to describe intersex people whose gender matches the gender they were medically assigned at birth, but who might not feel like cis or trans fits them, might experience dysphoria, and who might feel like they've ended up transitioning medically or socially in some ways. this is a word that exists that an intersex person put time into coining because they wanted other intersex people to feel seen, embraced, and have ways of understanding themselves and communicating to others, and that's something that's super meaningful to me! and yet, i've rarely seen anyone reference it, and also seen multiple people making fun of it in other spaces online.

there's also intergender, which is another intersex specific gender term used to describe when your gender is inseparable from your intersex traits, and that your intersex identity is intertwined with your gender identity in some way. some people just identify as intergender, others use it as an adjective and exist as an intergender man or woman. intersex terminology like this is really important to me, especially because we're so often denied the right to make sense of our own experiences.

i think ultimately what i wanted to say with this post is just that when i think about intersex community, some of the most important values of intersex community for me are solidarity, care for each other, and affirming our right to define our own existence. and i don't think that can happen in a community where people are acting in extractive ways, harassing and attacking their fellow community members, and being dismissive of the realities of other intersex people's lives.

[2worlds-colliding]

My gender is not your costume.

a great fucking point

@aliceoseman @heartstoppercentral @nnicknnelsonn @firstpersonnarrator @robmesheehan

Type "my gender is" on your phone and let your phone finish the sentence, then tag your moots to keep the chain going, I'll go first.

My gender is a little bit more intense than I thought I could have done

@mirukosbitchywife @get-junpeid