#we both have pcos and my sister has the no period-awful acne-struggling to lose weight version

[elluminis]

Feel free to let me know if my input is unwanted, but I had some thoughts that I wanted to share as a nonbinary woman with PCOS.

First. It is true that PCOS can affect the way that afab folks view their gender. For me, personally, I’ve found that the dichotomy between traditionally feminine and traditionally masculine traits in my body contributed significantly to my personal conception of gender. This, along with the strong sense of body neutrality that I actively fostered since puberty, has led to my more introspective ideas on gender and ambivalent attitude towards my own body.

That being said. I am, and will always be, afab. The biological shifts in my body that muddied the waters of binary sex occurred during puberty. And, quite honestly, I think erasing that fact a) does a disservice to the transfems who have a very, very different experience in their bodies and b) kind of does a disservice to us, by failing to acknowledge the formative years of our lives that we spent slotted neatly into the binary.

I do want to note that I haven’t personally witnessed any afab folks with PCOS trying to co-opt the term “transfem,” but it’s also entirely possible that I’m just running in very different online circles. I also will admit that I’ve only recently been venturing into and properly educating myself on intersex issues, and that I may not have all of the correct vocabulary. If I’m overstepping and full of shit, please feel free to let me know!

Really not so sure how I feel about the idea of redefining transfem to include people with PCOS if for no other reason than it muddies the water of what the term transfem is generally understood to mean and also totally crowds the kind of people that term was originally coined for out of their own identity.

I'm an """amab""" intersex transfem. I was surgically altered as an infant, I was assigned male at birth and while the records are inaccessible i have good reason to believe I was born with PMDS that was dishonestly characterized as a "congenital inguinal hernia repair" (the scars are way too big and in completely the wrong location for that to actually be true).

Anyways, this is not a matter of inclusion/exclusion. Its a matter of people with PCOS generally outnumbering "amab transfems" by over 10 to 1.

By redefining the term like this, you are turning "amab transfems" into an extreme minority within the identity their label was coined to describe. It's a total appropriation of an identity label by a group that massively outnumbers the original people that label has been used to describe.

And it absolutely is appropriation in the truest sense of the word, wherein a group takes over a label or practice such that the original people that term was for can no longer meaningfully be understood by that term.

Intersex transfems obviously do exist, I am one after all, but I find it endlessly frustrating how often the term "intersex transfem" isn't being used to refer to transfems like me, but instead to refer to people who are blatantly attempting to appropriate an identity label.

I also find it endlessly frustrating the way people seem to invoke the spectre of intersex transfems as a cudgel against other trans women in discussions about transmisogyny. Trans women/fems are my sisters and my community, the people trying to weaponize me against them are not.