Transmasc person here (and fully coming from a place of ignorance here), regarding your addendum to the really sweet post about how the world gets richer with transmen folks, what do you mean by amab transmen? Iâm hoping this question doesnât come off as rude, Iâm just generally confused by what that means.
âtrans men assigned maleâ can cover a few difference experiences:
Many intersex people have a complicated relationship both assigned sex and gender; there are men who were technically assigned male at some point, but then have that maleness denied throughout their life; for example, someone might be assigned male at birth, only to then be re-assigned female when it is decided that would be the âeasierâ assignment, forced to undergo IGM (intersex genital mutilation)* such as a clitorectomy/penectomy, and then raised as a girl. Alternatively, a man might be assigned male and raised as a boy, but goes through estrogenic puberty, grows breasts and develops hips, and thus experiences life as a man who is forcibly feminized and denied his gender identity as a man, and so feels his gender is more trans than cis.
Otherwise, many people who identify that way are nonbinary, genderqueer, and gender-non-conforming men who feel their manhood is trans, while also having been assigned male. This can be for a lot of reasons. I can say that I myself was raised as a âgirlâ (technically) but am multigender, have always felt any womanhood I possessed was inherently trans, and after having gone on testosterone HRT âtrans womanâ increasingly just made sense on every level. I am sexed by random strangers as male or female depending on the day and my presentation, and I am frequently read as a trans woman assigned male in public. My womanhood exists within the context of me also being a man, and agender and neutrois and maverique, and my body which has been reshaped by testosterone, and so there really is no context where my womanhood is cis (I am also intersex but it doesnât play as big a role in my womanhood as it may for others). Trans men assigned male can have similar experiences, although they can have many others! Some are be plural, some are be former trans women who now feel âman, but transâ better captures their identity, some are nonbinary people who are more âman-adjacentâ or have some connection to manhood (such as being gay men) while still being very much a nonbinary/genderqueer individual, etc etc.
Notably, if someone says âI am a trans man who was assigned male because xyz,â that doesnât mean they think that being a trans man assigned female requires xyz. When I point to my multigenderedness or my androgynous body as part of my identity as a trans woman, I am not saying âbeing a trans woman is defined by being partially male or physically androgynous.â Rather, I am a woman who has a trans body and a trans identity, and I am also transfeminized regularly in public, so on both a personal and social level it is something that makes sense to apply to myself, although I donât talk about it often because people have not historically been the chillest about it. But its gotten a lot more discussed as of late, and people have even started pushing away from using AGAB entirely, so Iâve decided to be a bit more open about it.
Anyways! Thatâs why I wanted to shout out trans men assigned male <3 I love my brothers in not being defined by what people thought of our genitals at birth, I love my brothers in transsexuality and genuinely for real changing your sex, I love my brothers in nonbinarity and genderqueerness and the experience of being binary in a nonbinary way, I love my brothers in being denied validity in the very category you were forced into because you were a weird little queer from childhood.
*AGAB language was originally coined for use in nonconsensual surgeries on intersex children, pioneered by notable monster John Money. so if this is surprising to anyone, It Really Should Not Be.
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