On the "AFAB transfem" thing, a while ago I used to have a lot of sympathy for their position because I hadn't quite thought about the subject deeply enough back then. And I think a lot of people still don't really understand why "AFAB transfems" are a problem, so I thought it might be worth going into a bit.
Superficially it seems totally analogous to trans womanhood itself. There is an identity ("woman"/"transfem") whose boundaries are policed on the basis of AGAB, and part of the project of queerness is to break those boundaries. "AFAB transfem" advocates can't understand why a trans woman who has had to fight against transphobic cis women saying "you can't be a woman if you weren't AFAB" would herself turn around and say "you can't be a transfem if you weren't AMAB". It seems totally hypocritical to them.
I think a lot of non-transfems mistakenly believe that transfems are able to exempt ourselves from misogyny by bringing up our AGAB. They imagine that, if some guy assumes I'm a cis woman and sexually harasses me, I can reveal my AGAB and he will say, "Oh, I am terribly sorry sir, I will treat you like a normal man from now on, because I am a transphobe who doesn't believe in gender identity but only the primacy of biol*gical sex," or whatever. They think the reason I don't say that is because I want to be treated like a woman and not like a man. But that is not what would happen: if I revealed my AGAB to this sexual harasser he would step up the sexual harassment, the level of misogyny I face would actually increase, and he would also be much more likely to get physically violent too, he would start to be transmisogynistic as well as regular misogynstic. I cannot exempt myself from misogyny at all, because misogyny is not something that misogynists dole out on the basis of AGAB, misogyny is not "AFAB oppression", it's a denigration of femaleness and femininity in a very broad sense. Even a cis man who wears "women's clothing" will face some amount of misogyny, and he will only be able to exempt himself from that by asserting that he was wearing those clothes insincerely, such as a comedy actor on stage, or a man at a stag/bachelor/bucks party. That is to say, your assigned sex is no defense when the criticism is of your sincere expression of womanhood, because misogyny is not about assigned sex.
Now imagine an alternate scenario where an "AFAB transfem" is presumed to be a trans woman by some guy who then starts chucking transmisogynistic abuse at her. She can reveal her AGAB and his abuse of her will actually reduce. His criticism will likely switch from calling her a T-slur, to saying she's an idiot for presenting in a manner that might be mistaken for a T-slur. Whatever clothes, make-up, hair, etc that made him read her as a T-slur immediately stop being disgusting to him when he discovers her AGAB. This is what it means to be able to exempt yourself from transmisogyny.
My very first post on this blog was a screenshot of a Reddit comment where a transmasc non-binary person said they discovered that the reason no one talked to them at first when they started a new school is because they were mistaken for a trans girl. The comment implied that this misapprehension was cleared up, and subsequently people spoke to them again. That is exemption in action. Unlike misogyny, transmisogyny is specifically about AGAB, because it is entirely about the direction of our transition being a supposedly disgusting and shameful one.
And that's the difference between "woman" and "transfem" as labels. People of any AGAB can be a woman, and will face misogyny even if their AGAB is known. Being known to be a trans woman grants you no privileges, no exemptions from that, on the contrary it only makes things worse. We could theoretically also allow people of any AGAB to call themselves "transfem", but if we did, we'd end up with a situation where "AFAB transfems" would be heavily privileged within the transfem community because of their ability to exempt themselves from the form of oppression that currently unites us. We would need to invent a new identity label for "transfems who cannot exempt themselves from transmisogyny", say "transfemΒ²", but even if we did that we would quickly find a small but determined movement of "AFAB transfemΒ²s". It is risky for a marginalised group to expand the definition of that group to include those who can exempt themselves from the oppression that unites that group. Oppressed groups deserve to have the language to refer to just themselves and not anyone else.
