A word I'm a big fan of is positionality. As in, the way someone is treated by, perceived as, and moves through the world. It's closely linked to intersectionality in my mind.
A big problem in queer feminist theory in my opinion (in general, not just in the discourse) is a tendency to treat identity labels as positionality in and of themselves. This frequently goes hand in hand with gender essentialism and extremely deepseated cisnormativity. People will take two groups that share an identity, and then use that to transitively map a certain positionality onto one of those groups by comparison. And generally, the cis, binary perspective is the one being imposed on the other. And if you're not watching for it or familiar with the topic, you might not notice the switch, because of how common it is to treat the two concepts as interchangeable.
But they're not. For example, A cis man and a trans man and a bigender man all share the identity of "man," but they each occupy a different positionality in the world. As in, the way other people perceive them and treat them, and the way they act in response to the world, is different. They occupy a different material context.
A lot of theory by and for trans women has already explored and firmly established this idea, in regard to trans and cis women. We have words like transmisogyny to describe how the positionality of being a trans woman or transfem effects, for example, the misogyny a person experiences.
Many people don't extend this to its natural conclusion when it comes to trans men and non-binary people, though, and justify that with a misunderstood definition of intersectionality. Our shared identities with other groups are used to project experiences on to us that are not actually trueāand in doing so, to silence us.
This is what someone is doing when they say things like "of course trans men have male privilege, they're men," "trans men aren't the primary targets of misogyny, because they're men," or "as men, trans men are treated better than trans women." These ideas (setting aside for now the exorsexism of how transmascs who are not men get shoved into this categorization) rely on taking a person's identity, in this case, "man," and making it synonymous with the positionality of another group with an overlapping identity, cis men. "This is true of cis men," they say "so it must be true of all men." Identity (a fluid and internal thing that a person expresses via dialogue with society) is subsumed by positionality (the material conditions a person operates in).
And when you point out that none of those arguments are materially true, they meet you with "so you don't believe trans men are men?" Here, the argument is sort of a reverse motte-and-bailey (is there a word for this fallacy more specific than strawman? I'm not sure), taking one statement, that being "trans men do not occupy the same positionality as cis men" and treating it as synonymous with another, "trans men do not share the same identity as cis men." The strong, obviously hard to challenge argument is rhetorically swapped for a strawman that can easily be knocked down, and it's done by merging positionality and identity into interchangeable concepts with a meaning that they can move between as suits them.
Here, we get the "weaponizing your AFABness" and "misgendering yourself" strawmans too. When a trans man says he doesn't have the same experiences as a cis man, he is stating something material, such as "I need to access gynecological care and being a trans man makes that more difficult" or "I'm targeted by misogyny in my everday life because of how people perceive me." Note that the supposed rebuttals I listed are identity based again. To this argument, if you acknowledge a different positionality, you must be admitting to a different identity. In this way, unique transmasculine struggles are erased by folding the entirety of transmasculinity into, and making it subservient to, cis masculinity. Our experiences must be judged first to see if they apply to cis men before we are allowed to talk about them applying to trans men.
This affects non-binary people too in both similar and different ways. In the overlap, you see people taking the existence of non-binary people who also identify as cis to justify the idea that a certain kind of non-binary person is "cissexual" or "has cis privilege," or something to that affect. Similarly, they might isolate a part of a non-binary person's experience (such as using the pronouns associated with the gender enforced on you) and use it to say the same. An overlap, or even a perceived overlap in identity with a binary cis person is seized on to impose a binary cis person's positionality. Again, the purpose is to erase them, to silence discussion of their unique struggles, and to exclude them from community.
Another way this manifests against non-binary people is in forced binarization. A very, very common non-binary experience is the questions that amount to "are you a boy enby, or a girl enby?" and "are you an enby I will assume to have a penis, or an enby I will assume to have a vulva?" People will assign, or at least try to "figure out," which binary identity you're supposedly closest to. And once they've assigned you one, they will map a positionality onto you based on that (typically either that of a binary cis person or a binary trans person). The experiences that are distinct to being non-binary get erased in this collapse of the venn diagram.
A lot of this, I think, stems from oppositional sexism and overconfident assumptions. A member of one group, lacking insider knowledge on another group, takes the shortcut of simply making their best guess based on overlapping or "opposite" groups they assume they already understand. And then, when members of the group they confidently spoke over say "this is not true about us," the person retreats into that overlap to justify themselves. A binary trans man assumes a non-binary transmasc has basically equivalent experiences to his own, or a trans woman assumes trans men are treated better than her because cis men are.
That's where it often starts, at least, but if someone doubles down on this fallacy when confronted, they may start to believe (or act like they believe) in more and more absurd ideas based in positionality and identity as interchangeable concepts. I think this is the stage you see nonsensical arguments like "trans men have privilege over cis women," "trans women are overall more impacted by abortion bans than trans men," and "non-binary people are cis trenders pretending for attention."
This impacts other groups of queer people too, like bisexuals and asexuals for example. This post is already long and I wanted to focus on gender in particular, though. Intersex people as well, but I don't feel personally equipped to explore the examples there, and I'd welcome elaboration from anyone who does.
I feel like we might benefit from a word for this rhetoric. I'm not sure what it would be, and "positionality" is a bit of a mouthful to make affixes out of. It's also closely tied to intersectionality (as it's essentially a denial and replacement of the particular intersection a person occupies with an allegedly-similar one), but that concept is...poorly used, in queer discourse, as it is. I'm a big proponent of the utility of very specific terminology, and feel like especially as people who face so much erasure that we could use more of it.
Positional collapse, maybe? I need to chew on it more.