no goals

let's be real. was i wrong about anything i said. transfems and trans women can be whatever they want just like us transmascs and trans men and other afab people want but it is literally just real life that they aren't biologically female and don't experience the same sex-based oppression that we do.

like i said. i'm not transfem so i don't want to dictate or be the ultimate voice (or any voice) what they do or do not experience. but i AM female and they are not so they don't get to dictate what we experience. there is a type of oppression that affects all people born female, just like there is a type of oppression that affects all people who are not white. it is that simple. don't try to erase or silence our experiences and nobody will have any problems with you. if you think it's bigotry to say that transfems are not biologically female and that transmascs are biologically female, you are out of touch with reality and are suppressing our only way to talk about the experiences we face at the hands of our oppressors: people born male. you are perpetuating the oppression.

Sex-based oppression isn't real. That's not how oppression works. People oppress one another based on identity. The kind of oppression a trans man faces is not the same as what a cis woman faces, because the cis woman doesn't experience the transphobia the trans man experiences, and the trans man can be impacted by misogyny but isn't targeted by it the way a cis woman is.

All trans women and most transfems are women and female, so it would make sense to say that they're included in your original statement. People wanted to call that out explicitly, but you then clarified that you think trans women and most transfems don't count as women or female, which is incorrect.

AFAB does not mean biologically female. It only means one thing, that the person in question was assigned female at birth, by a doctor assuming they were female based on the shape of their genitals.

AFAB isn't a term originally created by and for the intersex community. The original term was 'coercively assigned male at birth' and it was coined by trans women. After being adopted by the rest of the trans community, it was also shared with the intersex community and is a celebrated point of commonality between all of us.

Biological sex is a social construct that doesn't describe the biological reality of humans. Being born with a penis doesn't make you biologically male and being born with a vagina doesn't make you biologically female. Those ideas are just prevalent because most people are cis men or cis women and their gender and sex traits all line up in a typical pattern. Biological sex is a social construct that isn't based on biological reality, because it doesn't account for trans people or intersex people.

You can prove the previous by looking at how people will discard anyone who doesn't fit their preconceived notion of biological sex, in order to justify their need to deny that a trans person is the gender they say they are. See: People who claim any woman who can't give birth isn't a real woman, that people only have XX or XY chromosomes, that intersex variation doesn't matter, etc.

If you're talking about actual biological fact, trans women are biologically female because our gender is female and we just happen to have other sex traits that are not typical for biologically female people. Same goes for trans men, who are biologically male, because they have a male gender with some atypical sex traits, and intersex people as well, who can be cis or trans and have atypical sex traits.

Something that's important to understand about trans people in particular is that we are the gender we say we are. The only real difference is that our bodies came out shaped a little different than what you expect. It's not a mental condition, we are just rare examples of what men, women, and non-binary people look like in the human population.

Many people who are transphobic or gender critical or whatever kind of name they're giving to their prejudice these days think that trans people merely 'think' we are the gender we say we are. These people think that we're wrong and that we're either mentally ill or are literally evil.

In reality, we are the gender we say we are, and these kinds of people just hate us because we look different from them. This is the exact same kind of attitude you find in proud racists who believe that anyone who isn't white is a lesser form of human, and in some cases, not human at all. People hating other people because of how they look, not some actual true thing.

When you argue that women are not actually women because they don't meet your definition of female, that's misogyny talking.

When the women you're talking about are intersex, that is intersexism because you're denying that they're biologically female because they may have been born with TAIS and have testes instead of ovaries.

When the women you're talking about are trans, that's transmisogyny because you're arguing that trans women are biologically male and thus are not Actual Real Women.

And finally, when you argue that trans men are female, you're engaging in transphobia by denying that they're Actual Real Men. You may feel a sense of solidarity with someone who the doctor also claimed was a girl at birth, but if he's not a woman you are doing him a great disservice by acting like he is one.

let me reiterate:

swaggy let me answer the points for you as best i can 🫡 (don’t feel compelled to read since you, yourself, are sane)

1. Are you crazy? Tell that to all of the female people in Afghanistan. If their oppression has nothing to do with their biological sex, but rather their identity/how inclined they are toward performing the feminine gender role as dictated by their culture, why are they all being oppressed? Or are only some of them oppressed? Are the women and girls in Afghanistan who risk their lives leaving their homes unescorted by men or by removing their coverings (or any other number of things they’re not allowed to do as female people) all some flavor of trans or nonbinary and that’s why they’re persecuted (often to death)?

How about the female people in war-torn areas who experience rape as a weapon of war? If they simply felt more masculine, would they be safe?

How about the female people forced into servitude at brothels for American soldiers during the Korean War? Do you think the fact that they all had vaginas was just a coincidence?

I could go on, and on, and on, because this trend literally stretches back to the earliest ancient texts/records we as humanity have.

2. “Female” is a biological category that applies to pretty much every species that reproduces sexually. Lots of things can be female. Trees, flowers, grasses, ants, bees, butterflies, fish, frogs, lizards, moles, mice, and so on and so forth. “Female” means nothing more than having a reproductive system that follows the design for making large gametes — seeds, eggs, ovum. Even if a being (are plants beings?) has some issue that causes sterility, it can still be sexed (according to its species, some sexually reproductive species have true hermaphroditism that does not occur in humans/any mammals) based on physical and genetic makeup.

However, in humans, the presence of an SRY-gene and lack of Swyer Syndrome/46XY-DSD indicates a male (not excluding intersex folk! Swyer Syndrome is just the only DSD that includes an inactive or non-present SRY-gene in XY individuals and completely prevents gonadal development). Therefore a human with an active SRY-gene cannot be female.

Regardless of whether a person with an active SRY-gene is also intersex is irrelevant to their biological status as a male — an active SRY-gene is the determining sex marker for humans. Even XX individuals with an active translocated SRY-gene (de la Chapelle Syndrome/46XX-DSD) are typically male, despite typically experiencing infertility… although some individuals with de la Chapelle syndrome may also experience OT-DSD and have some combination of ovarian and testicular tissues.

People with OT-DSD are the only people who cannot be reliably sexed as either female or male and who are able to be considered hermaphroditic (although they may sometimes be categorized as one sex or the other based on if they have reproductive function in one type of gonad and not the other, though fertility in OT-DSD individuals is rare and fertility in both ovarian and testicular tissue is even rarer — so much so that there has never been a recorded case of autofertilization in humans despite rare cases being recorded in other mammalian species… unless we perhaps consider Mary, mother of Jesus, as possibly having experienced autofertilization… though I would consider that just about as likely as the Biblical interpretation of God-induced pregnancy).

Aside from de la Chapelle Syndrome, other causes of OT-DSD are mostly sex mosaicism/chimerism (46XX/46XY-DSD — sorry, this one doesn’t have a more colloquial name) and genetic mutations (not listing all the known gene mutations that can cause OT-DSD bc I’m pretty the exact gene codes don’t mean much to most people). The XY “equivalent” of de la Chapelle Syndrome is actually Swyer Syndrome, which as already covered, causes total lack of gonadal development and therefore cannot cause OT-DSD.

Given that most transwomen are not intersex/most women who are biologically male but have an intersex disorder that caused external female development and require surgical removal of internal testes don’t refer to themselves as transwomen, DSDs/intersex conditions aren’t super relevant, but I figured since you didn’t seem to learn about biological sex classification in school and clearly haven’t had access to reliable, reputable resources on the matter I figured I’d cover as much as possible.

Transwomen certainly can experience some misdirected misogyny (which is a term I’m using to mean hatred of the female sex) if they pass convincingly, no one is questioning that. Personally, I also have very little issue with males who experience gender dysphoria socially identifying as women so long as they don’t go around making ridiculous claims that sex classification in humans is based on the ratio of estrogens and androgens in the body, or even worse, whether your soul (an inherently spiritual concept that not everyone believes in) is female or male. Because that’s simply untrue.

We apply the same sex classification rules to humans as we apply to every other sexually reproductive species on this earth: by whether a being produces large (female) or small (male) gametes, or if that being is infertile/sterile, by the genetic and phenotypic structures indicating what gametes it would produce if it were not infertile/sterile. In humans, the presence of an SRY-gene and even partially developed testes indicates a male. A human person simply cannot be biologically female if they have testes. Those are the rules of biology.

3. The definitional meaning of “AFAB” is somewhat irrelevant because people use it in place of “female” because “female” is apparently a transphobic dogwhistle to a lot of people, and they don’t want to be called TERFs for caring about/having thoughts about female oppression or experiences that only female people can have due to their biology or even just social norms between females.

“Women and femmes” doesn’t exactly cover it — transmasculine people are still female and are or have formerly been subject to female oppression and experiences, while transfeminine people are still male and only experience misdirected misogynistic discrimination (which has its place in discussions, dgmw, but is far from the whole picture). Well, and transphobia, obviously… but transmasculine people also experience transphobia and that wasn’t the topic at hand.

4. LOL this is literally the google AI overview when you look up “origins of the terms AFAB AMAB”?

Please don’t trust AI overview for serious topics. There are so many examples of it accidentally creating misinformation based off of joking/nonsense tumblr posts alone… you should take literally everything said by generative AI/any LLM with several grains of salt.

Since the gen AI results tend to change from search to search after the first sentence, I’m not sure if you also got linked to the creator of the term “intersex” who was a German entomologist breeding moths and noticing that some of the moths were not clearly identifiable as male or female in 1917. That’s not relevant, I just thought it was fun. It also appears the term didn’t really make its way to being popularly applied to humans until around 1993 with the publication of The Five Sexes by Anne Fausto-Sterling [1], which certainly has a different view on gender/sex identity than we do today… and outside of advocating for “herm, merm, and ferm” inclusion in sex categorization, largely seems to focus on the childhood medicalization of intersex individuals and advocates against it due to the obvious ethical issue of children receiving hormonal and surgical treatments they didn’t consent to and the roots of homophobia in the practice of forcing intersex individuals to conform to the stereotypical appearance of one sex or the other.

BTW, this 2018 comment from a Medium user [2] is the source for your claim that transwomen first invented the term CAMAB. The source for THAT comment is this 2017 reddit thread [3].

Confusion over whether AMAB/AFAB are terms created by trans or intersex individuals has existed for a long time and this 2011 blog post [4] seems to propose that it was a collaborative effort to create a term inclusive of both trans and intersex individuals.

However, this 2009 publication called Race To Justice by NYC Health [5] only refers to the terms “AMAB/AFAB” as something intersex people use due to male and female being the only legal sex categories. This is the oldest source I could find defining the terms. Make of that what you will.

5. I think I pretty thoroughly addressed sex categorization in point number 2. Of course it’s more complicated than vagina = female and penis = male (although actually, unless we’re counting a clitoris with cliteromegaly as a penis — which we shouldn’t, because an enlarged clitoris is… still a clitoris and as such is not a penis — penis = male is pretty much correct), but that doesn’t mean we don’t have actual biological parameters for sex determination in humans. We do, it’s based off of the presence or absence of an active SRY-gene/which gametes the body is programmed to be able to make (whether or not that body actually possesses the ability to produce those gametes), and only one very rare DSD is unidentifiable as clearly male or female by these parameters.

Of course these parameters are also a construct, literally all human knowledge is a construct. But no one is arguing that chimps are actually basically people and should be subject to human law because we share ~98.8% of our genetic code with them and species are just a construct. Scientific constructs are an important way for humans to verify material reality, since we are only inherently capable of experiential reality.

6. Again, I very thoroughly went over sex determination in humans in point 2. I won’t deny that people who claim infertile/sterile women aren’t “real” women exist, nor people who are unaware of intersex disorders and/or believe that intersex acceptance isn’t important and/or that intersex people should just undergo medically unnecessary surgical procedures and hormonal treatments to fit in with the typical male/female binary (which of course is made even worse by gender roles that affect even cisgendered perisex people like it being taboo for women to have facial/body hair despite hair growth distribution being a natural variation among cis- perisex woman).

Anyone who thinks any of the above things sucks as a human being, and these are not ideas commonly held by radical or radical-leaning (?) feminists. (sorry tommy idk if you label yourself as radical but obvi your ideas are rad-leaning enough to upset people LOL)

7. Again, unless we’re just throwing away the entire concept of sex categorization for all sexually reproductive beings or making some special anthropocentric exception for humans, this just isn’t how biology or sex determination in humans works. Based on the percentage of intersex individuals and the percentage of those individuals with OT-DSD, only 0.0018% of the human population (at most, I used the 10% out of 3-10% estimated for the percentage of intersex people with OT-DSD) cannot be reliably sexed as either male or female. That means humans are 99.9982% likely to be categorically male or female, including everyone with any intersex condition besides OT-DSD.

Rough bibliography in case the hyperlinks don’t work:

1. https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Anne-Fausto-Sterling/publication/368714235_The_Five_Sexes_Why_Male_and_Female_are_not_Enough/links/63f69c77574950594536cb5e/The-Five-Sexes-Why-Male-and-Female-are-not-Enough.pdf

2. https://medium.com/p/fb8447cffdee/responses/show

3. https://www.reddit.com/r/asktransgender/comments/7glz6x/does_anyone_know_the_origin_of_the_terms_amab_and/

4. https://mixosaurus.co.uk/2011/10/