CW: transmisogyny, intersexism, q slur, transphobia
If you spend a lot of time in trans/nonbinary circles, you'll probably hear a lot about something called afab privilege, which is essentially the idea that trans/nonbinary/non-cis people who were assigned female at birth can oppress our counterparts who were assigned male at birth.
If you spend a lot of time in trans/nonbinary circles, you'll probably hear a lot about something called afab privilege, which is essentially the idea that trans/nonbinary/non-cis people who were assigned female at birth can oppress our counterparts who were assigned male at birth.
Now, in my case, that's actually kind of true. Even though I'm nonbinary, even though I use he/they pronouns and a gender neutral name and bind and am visibly gender variant, people don't usually guess that I'm trans.
Part of that is cissexism. Part of it is that, as a woman-aligned nonbinary person, I'm not always 100% uncomfortable being perceived as a woman. Part of it - and part of the reason that I'm not always uncomfortable being perceived as a woman, I'm almost 20 years old and have known I wasn't cis since I was five and honestly I'm just kind of quietly resigned to the unfortunate reality that most people will never take any facet of my gender seriously - is that I'm closeted as trans.
In any case, my assigned-male-at-birth counterpart would be transfeminine nonbinary. And assuming everything else about them was the same as it was with me? Closeted, butch but kind of flowery and effeminate, white, questioning between lesbian and bisexual, using he/they pronouns?
Like...they'd internalize the same messages about gender and sexuality as I would, but would likely have an even harder time coming out and being accepted into the LGBT community because trans women and transfems are incredibly hypervisible both in and out of the LGBT community, thanks to transmisogynistic tropes/jokes like "man in a dress" and "trap queen" and cishet men waking up comically horrified to discover that the woman they slept with has a penis. They're more likely to be murdered than I am because of how those jokes and stereotypes and portrayals influence people to act (though this mostly applies to trans women of color). They're also more often targeted by TERFs than I am and have a harder time accessing women's resources and LGBT resources that they might need.
That's a lot to be confronted with, and on top of it? For a sapphic transfeminine person, coming out as trans and coming out as sapphic are a package deal. When I first came out as sapphic, I was able to hide my gender. And while my sexuality was actually used to discredit me when I came out as trans (i.e. "you already like women, why can't you just be a butch lesbian?"), it wouldn't be used to stop me from medically transitioning - depending on how I phrase it, that is (I would have to use an informed consent hormone clinic if I were going to describe myself as sapphic, since most cis doctors either don't understand or don't respect nonbinary people, but just saying "I like women"? That wouldn't stop a doctor from giving me hormones, and if it did it wouldn't be based on my assigned sex).
But even my ability to benefit from transmisogyny is conditional. Like, I know that most cis people think afab nonbinary women are just quirky cis teenage girls playing a game, but I actually feel as much common ground with trans women as I do with cis women. Like, we both are affected by TERFs and truscum, we're both considered sinners and deviants for our gender by evangelicals, we're both stereotyped by cis women as misogynistic sexually predatory crossdressers who don't know anything about womanhood, and we're both fetishized and harassed based on our gender performance and expression and have a complicated relationship with womanhood, femininity, sexuality, and our bodies and dysphoria.
Also, if I ever actually get a chance to come out and transition, chances are I'll be perceived much the same way many trans women are, since my body won't look as "feminine" and I'll likely have a flat chest, but I'll still be identifying as woman-aligned, wlw, and sapphic. And transphobes aren't going to make absolutely sure of my assigned sex before harassing and committing violence against someone who is visibly trans and identifies as such, who says he isn't a man, whose body doesn't look like how they expect a woman's body to look, but who calls himself terms that are culturally coded as gender neutral or as feminine.
The reason I don't believe in AFAB privilege, though, isn't because of that. It's because the concept states that I benefit from the oppression of all trans and nonbinary people who are assigned male at birth, not just transfeminine people, specifically because they're assigned male at birth, which I think is bullshit.
Like, I'm a visibly gender nonconforming, gender variant, and nonbinary person, which can put me in danger of harassment and physical violence. And not all nonbinary people present that way.
This means there can be amab nonbinary people who are read as men who perform masculinity, and are relatively okay with that. There are amab nonbinary people who are men or male-aligned. There are amab nonbinary people who aren't sga and whose relationships are not incorrectly read as such.
This puts them in less danger than, and often gives them privilege over, me. Sorry to burst the bubble of every ignorant fuck who thinks that "AFAB masculine-of-center genderqueers", as a lot of you will call us, are apparently a monolith and also the most privileged people in the nonbinary community and, like, practically cis or whatever, but as a nonbinary butch (butch being a gender expression and experience exclusive to gnc wlw), I have no privilege over a straight amab demiboy.
My body is also stigmatized and policed due to misogyny in a way that theirs isn't. Yes, amab trans people can also be stigmatized for their bodies, but that mostly results from cissexism (something I experience), ableism, intersexism, and racism (things not all nonbinary people experience), and also mostly affects trans women. And unless they're woman-aligned or perceived as such, misogyny doesn't directly affect or materially harm amab nonbinary people at all, but even after coming out, afab trans people often face challenges regarding reproductive justice, pressure to cover themselves, and stigmatization of periods.
It's not directed misogyny and nonwomen have no place speaking over women or inserting themselves into woman-specific spaces and discussions about patriarchy and misogyny, but that also applies if you're assigned male at birth. Don't act like experiencing misdirected transmisogyny makes all afab nonbinary people your oppressors.
The final reason that AFAB privilege is fucked up as a concept is that there are intersex variations that result in someone being assigned female at birth, like Complete Androgen Insensitivity. And a lot of intersex people are assigned at female birth because doctors mutilated their newborn bodies, then decided assigning them female at birth was "easier". Why not cut off part of someone's phallus if doing so makes them look like a "normal" dyadic cis girl? Who gives a fuck about intersex people's bodily autonomy or women's right to sexual pleasure anyway? What do doctors care if that baby ends up not even being a girl, or only partially being one?
And dyadic people have the fucking nerve to say that intersex nonbinary people are privileged if they're assigned female at birth? Right. Sure. Not intersexist at all.
So I mean. Feel free to completely disregard this as the ramblings of a nasty AFAB Masculine Of Center Genderqueer^(TM). Feel free to still believe that I have no idea what I'm talking about and that afab privilege still exists. Just know you're throwing a lot of vulnerable trans/nb people under the bus in the process.
Like...they'd internalize the same messages about gender and sexuality as I would, but would likely have an even harder time coming out and being accepted into the LGBT community because trans women and transfems are incredibly hypervisible both in and out of the LGBT community, thanks to transmisogynistic tropes/jokes like "man in a dress" and "trap queen" and cishet men waking up comically horrified to discover that the woman they slept with has a penis. They're more likely to be murdered than I am because of how those jokes and stereotypes and portrayals influence people to act (though this mostly applies to trans women of color). They're also more often targeted by TERFs than I am and have a harder time accessing women's resources and LGBT resources that they might need.
That's a lot to be confronted with, and on top of it? For a sapphic transfeminine person, coming out as trans and coming out as sapphic are a package deal. When I first came out as sapphic, I was able to hide my gender. And while my sexuality was actually used to discredit me when I came out as trans (i.e. "you already like women, why can't you just be a butch lesbian?"), it wouldn't be used to stop me from medically transitioning - depending on how I phrase it, that is (I would have to use an informed consent hormone clinic if I were going to describe myself as sapphic, since most cis doctors either don't understand or don't respect nonbinary people, but just saying "I like women"? That wouldn't stop a doctor from giving me hormones, and if it did it wouldn't be based on my assigned sex).
But even my ability to benefit from transmisogyny is conditional. Like, I know that most cis people think afab nonbinary women are just quirky cis teenage girls playing a game, but I actually feel as much common ground with trans women as I do with cis women. Like, we both are affected by TERFs and truscum, we're both considered sinners and deviants for our gender by evangelicals, we're both stereotyped by cis women as misogynistic sexually predatory crossdressers who don't know anything about womanhood, and we're both fetishized and harassed based on our gender performance and expression and have a complicated relationship with womanhood, femininity, sexuality, and our bodies and dysphoria.
Also, if I ever actually get a chance to come out and transition, chances are I'll be perceived much the same way many trans women are, since my body won't look as "feminine" and I'll likely have a flat chest, but I'll still be identifying as woman-aligned, wlw, and sapphic. And transphobes aren't going to make absolutely sure of my assigned sex before harassing and committing violence against someone who is visibly trans and identifies as such, who says he isn't a man, whose body doesn't look like how they expect a woman's body to look, but who calls himself terms that are culturally coded as gender neutral or as feminine.
The reason I don't believe in AFAB privilege, though, isn't because of that. It's because the concept states that I benefit from the oppression of all trans and nonbinary people who are assigned male at birth, not just transfeminine people, specifically because they're assigned male at birth, which I think is bullshit.
Like, I'm a visibly gender nonconforming, gender variant, and nonbinary person, which can put me in danger of harassment and physical violence. And not all nonbinary people present that way.
This means there can be amab nonbinary people who are read as men who perform masculinity, and are relatively okay with that. There are amab nonbinary people who are men or male-aligned. There are amab nonbinary people who aren't sga and whose relationships are not incorrectly read as such.
This puts them in less danger than, and often gives them privilege over, me. Sorry to burst the bubble of every ignorant fuck who thinks that "AFAB masculine-of-center genderqueers", as a lot of you will call us, are apparently a monolith and also the most privileged people in the nonbinary community and, like, practically cis or whatever, but as a nonbinary butch (butch being a gender expression and experience exclusive to gnc wlw), I have no privilege over a straight amab demiboy.
My body is also stigmatized and policed due to misogyny in a way that theirs isn't. Yes, amab trans people can also be stigmatized for their bodies, but that mostly results from cissexism (something I experience), ableism, intersexism, and racism (things not all nonbinary people experience), and also mostly affects trans women. And unless they're woman-aligned or perceived as such, misogyny doesn't directly affect or materially harm amab nonbinary people at all, but even after coming out, afab trans people often face challenges regarding reproductive justice, pressure to cover themselves, and stigmatization of periods.
It's not directed misogyny and nonwomen have no place speaking over women or inserting themselves into woman-specific spaces and discussions about patriarchy and misogyny, but that also applies if you're assigned male at birth. Don't act like experiencing misdirected transmisogyny makes all afab nonbinary people your oppressors.
The final reason that AFAB privilege is fucked up as a concept is that there are intersex variations that result in someone being assigned female at birth, like Complete Androgen Insensitivity. And a lot of intersex people are assigned at female birth because doctors mutilated their newborn bodies, then decided assigning them female at birth was "easier". Why not cut off part of someone's phallus if doing so makes them look like a "normal" dyadic cis girl? Who gives a fuck about intersex people's bodily autonomy or women's right to sexual pleasure anyway? What do doctors care if that baby ends up not even being a girl, or only partially being one?
And dyadic people have the fucking nerve to say that intersex nonbinary people are privileged if they're assigned female at birth? Right. Sure. Not intersexist at all.
So I mean. Feel free to completely disregard this as the ramblings of a nasty AFAB Masculine Of Center Genderqueer^(TM). Feel free to still believe that I have no idea what I'm talking about and that afab privilege still exists. Just know you're throwing a lot of vulnerable trans/nb people under the bus in the process.
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