There needs to be better understanding in trans circles that the terms AFAB and AMAB have shifted meanings over time, largely based on cis misuse of them, and their original meanings are still used by many of us.
The problem is that they tend to be used today to mean, let’s be blunt, “biological female” and “biological male”

But this isn’t what they originally meant and they aren’t even really terms about biology. They’re sociological terms, not biological or even medical ones
It makes no sense to say that I’m considered male by my society strictly because of an “M” on medical documents that most people never see. The assignation of maleness is a big, vast, ongoing thing, flowing not just from doctors but from names, rules, clothes, norms, violence
Being coerced into the category of “male” isn’t something that happens once but is continually happening, that occurs because of the whole system of there even being male and female boxes and sorting people into them.
I also describe this process as COMPULSORY MANHOOD. To say that compulsory manhood is reducible to a body type or a biological term, and thus that any reference to it must be biological essentialism, is not only ahistorical but a profound failure to look at how gender operates
I continue to argue that the original “CAMAB” terminology as used in trans female circles was an effort to put a name on the condition of being non-men who are subjected to the violence compulsory manhood.
This is an essential breakdown of the gender system that establishes the place and perspective of transfems without continually forcing us to be imagined in terms of other people, like “men who become women” “male socialized” “MTF” and all other ways of painting us with shadows
The notion that some people are traumatically and discordantly located within a gender system is still a powerful and important insight into how transness works, and which gender you’re so located in isn’t irrelevant and is not reducible to a body type
The fact that “AMAB” is even being parsed as “born with a penis” these days is reflective of a profound failure for the essential underlying view of this concept to be spread and understood.
This isn’t to say that the ASAB terminology doesn’t have other layers of meaning besides what I’m describing here, but that’s kind of my point. There’s so much that’s already been erased because the actual liberatory theory and insight are truncated out of tools like this
You get cis dyadic people saying stuff like “autism diagnosis favors AMAB children” as if this had anything to do trans girls or intersex kids or any of the people this language should serve. It just got picked up as a progressive way to say “male” and the meaning was eroded
So now we have people who were around for the inception of these terms, or close to it, who are using and even disseminating the thinking under them that are being told we’re biologically essentialist by others who only really known the cis-centric, dyadist version of the meaning
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