#this is in response to the ppl who think amab and afab nonbinary ppl are men and women Lite

[nerves-nebula]

I have recently seen some pushback against calling oneself afab and I dont fully get why tho? since im only at the fringes of queer discussion so I havent seen the full argument against. I also didnt really know how to get the idea across so I just used the most convenient label. Not saying the pushback is wrong, I'm just curious, I feel the language around this sort of thing has changed while i wasnt looking and idk where to start looking as to why without looking like an idiot

Fuck it sure I’ll give u an amateur crash course in dumb bullshit.

WARNING!! This is not an invitation! I will only care about ur input in this if we’re mutuals lmao !!! Under the cut for being long and annoying

I mean, it’s fine to say if you’re afab if it’s relevant its just. Like. It’s an acronym about a thing that happened? You can’t be AN assigned female at birth. That’s silly. at that point just say female or cis or perisex, or just specify what you’re talking about. Like if you are the same asker as before, I would just say perisex cis woman since that’s what was relevant to the medical history u were sharing

This is kind of a personal pet peeve of mine, but I really hate how a lot of these acronyms get used. Like people saying POC characters when they should say characters of color or something like. POC means person/people of color that’s not… ur basically just saying colored characters at that point but fucking up an acronym to do it you know.

Anyway, that last ask was about presuming one isn’t intersex and being prescribed hormones so it makes sense to specify ur assigned sex I guess. It’s just weird to me to phrase it that way. Tho I normally wouldn’t mention it because I don’t believe that everyone should always be on the same page as me about confusing constantly changing terminology shit and I’m willing to leave that alone usually. But now it’s almost 4 am lol

Also like your assigned sex isn’t something you usually super identify with if you’re trans but also trans people are the main ones using assigned sex language so it gets a little bit muddling. Which is fine because it’s anonymous but in a real conversation, that would be kind of weird.

Like I’m assuming you’re a cis woman who is presumed perisex from what you’ve said? But then why bother with assigned sex or gender at birth at all if you didn’t change that? If u say ur presumed perisex and thought it was weird that a doctor wanted put u on hormones like that gets the point across yknow. Since intersex ppl also have assigned genders most of the time.

Afab is also often just used to replace a woman in a way that is super unhelpful and sometimes transphobic lol. Smth will say “afab ppl need to know this!” And then it’s about like getting a pap smear. Which is not something that all people who were assigned female at birth will need for various reasons (intersex, bottom surgery, etc)

Also trans and nonbinary ppl get called “afabs” like it’s a noun by cis ppl (and other trans ppl of all kinds let’s be real here) the way you’d say woman/female. (This also happens with amab but that’s not my area of expertise and also this response is far too long as it is)

generally just a somewhat useful term that has really gotten away from its original point (I think idk I’m not caught up on the specific history of this word)

If I did a bad job explaining or repeated myself well. that’s not my fault I’m not being paid to do this and it’s almost 4 AM.

[askanonbinary]

About the afab/amab split - before identifying as nb and looking for communities, most of the nb people I knew of were contestants on rpdr, who are all amab. Just an example of how the split can be based on where you're looking. Also had a thought as I was writing - maybe amab tend to use gnc more than nb? I know 1 afab who identifies as gnc and quite a few amabs, but again that might be a matter of what parts of the population are visible to me.

thank you for offering your experience. context means a lot!

i think i would like the moral of the story to be, in part, that you while you might feel alone, you probably aren’t, you just might not be finding what you are looking for in the place you are looking!

I’m not sure about the gnc label but it’s an interesting point. if you are looking for a particular community, it might be helpful to look under multiple somewhat overlapping tags. people might tend to congregate under certain terms that are similar to what you personally use, but different. while you might not be comfortable with a certain label, it might help you find people with similar experiences.

i am sure everyone here would love to offer more amab support, but we personally are responsive to the asks we get, which, in part, accounts for our ratios.

(i wanted to add, as a little thing that i find slightly concerning in regard to this, that while some ppl might be willing to talk about their agabs, as i do for example, not all nonbinary people want to divulge that, and that’s also ok! i’m very open about mine, and a lot of nonbinary people seem to be online at least, but it’s easy to begin to expect people to divulge their agabs in conversations like this, and no one owes that. i talk about my agab because i find it easiest to relate to people or provide examples when i can pull from specific examples in my personal life but that doesn’t mean other people need to.)

-Danny