agab is incorrect terminology

[binary suns]

taking a infant and looking at its genitals and saying "this one is a baby boy" is not assigning gender. it has nothing to do with gender. gender used to be interchangeable with sex. All it is doing to call it a baby boy instead o f "it" is denoting that it has a penis. 

 

the whole gender reveal thing is a cultural phenomenon, not the medical assessment of what the baby is equiped with. 

 

 

the fact that I was born a baby boy makes me trans. 

 

I was not assigned to be a baby boy. I literally was a baby boy. 

 

"AGAB terminology is only gaslighting people who don't understand or buy into gender theory. If we want them to accept gender theory we can start by giving them basic human dignity and telling them that a baby boy is a gender is literally gaslighting them. they don't even accept what we say as a gender. and that isn't transphobic to not understand something, and in not understanding it refuting it as an idea because it doesn't fit into your world view. they're allowed to do that and any extremist who labels someone calling a transwoman a man as inherently transphobic, again, is gaslighting them. They literally don't understand our dogma. they aren't forced to buy into it.

 

If we want to disallow them from calling a transwoman a "man" plain and simple, we need to give them some nomenclature to specify that I once was a baby boy.

[Philip027]

I wondered about this ever since learning about what gender really is.  It didn't make sense to me, because everyone was saying only you can determine your own gender.

 

This almost certainly had a part in why I thought for the longest time that sex and gender were interchangeable terms.  To lots of people, they ~are~

[Snao Cone]

The gender is "assigned" though, and people need to understand that it's on the basis of a few superficial physical characteristics that we from the get-go start treating a child differently, whether by intention or not. Children of different assigned genders are highly, HIGHLY likely to be raised differently according to that.

 

 

...though I don't really understand the overall message of your post, so I may be way off base here. It's just odd to me to read that saying "this newborn is a boy" or "this newborn is a girl" has nothing to do with how we will experience gender and gendered treatment (though it seems maybe you're saying that gendered treatment isn't a real thing?)

[binary suns]

1 hour ago, Philip027 said:

I wondered about this ever since learning about what gender really is.  It didn't make sense to me, because everyone was saying only you can determine your own gender.

 

This almost certainly had a part in why I thought for the longest time that sex and gender were interchangeable terms.  To lots of people, they ~are~

in terms of determining one's own gender, personally I didn't really have a gender to identify. I embraced the agender or genderless lable. When I started to present as a woman, that was when I first really had an experience of self-identity as a gender. 

 

 

 

 

1 hour ago, Snao Cone said:

The gender is "assigned" though, and people need to understand that it's on the basis of a few superficial physical characteristics that we from the get-go start treating a child differently, whether by intention or not. Children of different assigned genders are highly, HIGHLY likely to be raised differently according to that.

 

 

...though I don't really understand the overall message of your post, so I may be way off base here. It's just odd to me to read that saying "this newborn is a boy" or "this newborn is a girl" has nothing to do with how we will experience gender and gendered treatment (though it seems maybe you're saying that gendered treatment isn't a real thing?)

saying a sword-weilder is a baby boy is simplly medical observation. That observation is not inherently assignment. it is the family and friends and the culture the child is reared in that assigns the gender.

[Qiri]

If I'm understanding correctly, you would prefer something like sex at birth, or natal sex, or birth sex, or biological sex in place of AxAB? Discarding the notion of 'assigning' a sex?

[Sarah-Sylvia]

I really disagree. Because society, family especially, DOES assign gender based on the external  sex traits. Just because it's not just the doctor marking down the 'sex' doesn't make it true.

Sex is assigned (to the person) too. Because no I was not my sex, that was something marked about a certain part of my body, it's not 'me'.

[Snao Cone]

40 minutes ago, binary suns said:

saying a sword-weilder is a baby boy is simplly medical observation. That observation is not inherently assignment. it is the family and friends and the culture the child is reared in that assigns the gender.

As soon as it's communicated, it is assignment, and even neonatal medical professionals act differently around babies based on that.

[Philip027]

Gender roles are what's assigned, if anything.  Nobody other than yourself can determine, assign, whatever... your own gender.

[Snao Cone]

10 minutes ago, Philip027 said:

Gender roles are what's assigned, if anything.  Nobody other than yourself can determine, assign, whatever... your own gender.

So is the point that we should call it AGRAB? They're still assigned assuming the gender identity of the screaming ball of recently evacuated flesh is going to match the roles to be prescribed to them.

 

This is like splitting hairs between homework being assigned and class curriculum being assigned.

[Lilihierax]

2 hours ago, Qiri said:

If I'm understanding correctly, you would prefer something like sex at birth, or natal sex, or birth sex, or biological sex in place of AxAB? Discarding the notion of 'assigning' a sex?

honestly this is what I prefer. It's less debatable - I was born female. Simple as that. As I have not changed my sex, I say I am FFB = Female From Birth.  As opposed to  'born as female but then transitioned to male' or something like that.  It's a bit different than trans/cis, because that refers to gender as well. And gender is just too wild and confusing.

This might not work for everyone but for me there's no issue here.

[Missing]

40 minutes ago, Philip027 said:

Nobody other than yourself can determine, assign, whatever... your own gender.

Only you can determine your gender, but other people can assign you a gender. Like a job title someone else assigns you that changes how everyone treats you. And similar to that, what you were assigned may not have been the right choice for you. But by socially transitioning, you'd be able to self-assign your social gender to be consistent with the true gender only you determined yourself to be.

[Snao Cone]

2 minutes ago, Missing said:

Only you can determine your gender, but other people can assign you a gender

Or as we often abbreviate on AVEN, OYCDYGBOPCAYAG

[Missing]

Just now, Snao Cone said:

Or as we often abbreviate on AVEN, OYCDYGBOPCAYAG

Abbreviating it saves us typing, but not much.

[Fraggle Underdark]

Personally, I just dropped the concept of sex, as in male or female or anything else.

 

Does this person have a penis? A Y chromosome? A uterus? A functioning uterus? Testicles? You can just answer those questions directly, if you need to ask them. But there's very few times this needs to be asked, and most of those times are when dealing with medicine. Nobody cares or can genuinely tell whether you have a Y chromosome, not directly. It's a general goal of clothing that you can't see whether someone has a penis under it, and certainly not whether they have a uterus or testicles. As for breasts, you can either see them or you can't, and either you can't and don't know and it's not your business to ask, or you can see them and don't need to ask.

 

The *vast* majority of what actually matters to people is gender, the roles and expectations. (People often care about these things when looking for partners which is just fine, people don't need to be pan, but outside of a formal dating environment you can figure this out or ask about parts later.)

 

Even aside from the arguments people made above about how male and female are in fact assigned, to get rid of that you'd have to make an exception or some other contortion for intersex people. It's not like society just said "oh, this person is inbetween, let's give them a name like Pat and make sure they don't dress in a way that makes them look one way or the other, since they don't 'actually' have male or female sex". Rather, they were quite clearly assigned a gender.

 

Also that quoted section is really genuinely poor. Disagreements are not gaslighting.

[verily-forsooth-egads]

30 minutes ago, Lilihierax said:

honestly this is what I prefer. It's less debatable - I was born female. Simple as that. As I have not changed my sex, I say I am FFB = Female From Birth.  As opposed to  'born as female but then transitioned to male' or something like that.  It's a bit different than trans/cis, because that refers to gender as well. And gender is just too wild and confusing.

This might not work for everyone but for me there's no issue here.

How is that supposed to replace the concept of gender assigned at birth? The benefit of AGAB is that it specifies exactly that, the gender someone was designated when they were born based on their genitals, and nothing else. Terms that specify combinations of things, like your "FFB" (how is that any different from "cis female"?), have their uses, but you can't just say "why don't we use this instead?" when you're not actually covering all the uses of the thing you're proposing to replace.

[verily-forsooth-egads]

Let's not leave intersex people out of this conversation. Most of the time they are assigned a sex at birth. A nurse isn't allowed to write "I" or "N" or "?" on a birth certificate so they pick one, sometimes with accompanying "corrective" surgery. The baby is then raised as male or female, treated by doctors as male or female, and may not know otherwise until years later, if ever. That's one of the advantages of the terminology, because we can have conversations about what it means to go through life with these assumptions made about us, without making assumptions ourselves. I thought everyone knew this.

[Frameshift07]

10 minutes ago, verily-forsooth-egads said:

That's one of the advantages of the terminology, because we can have conversations about what it means to go through life with these assumptions made about us, without making assumptions ourselves. I thought everyone knew this.

Being assigned male at birth over a dick I never plan on using was the worst thing to happen in my life. I'd rather have lived life never going for any particular gender than having to actively remove the "male" label from myself.

[verily-forsooth-egads]

7 minutes ago, Frameshift07 said:

Being assigned male at birth over a dick I never plan on using was the worst thing to happen in my life. I'd rather have lived life never going for any particular gender than having to actively remove the "male" label from myself.

Is that somehow an argument against having the words to talk about it?

[Frameshift07]

Just now, verily-forsooth-egads said:

Is that somehow an argument against having the words to talk about it?

How would sex characteristics being considered largely inconsequential have negatively impacted society?

[verily-forsooth-egads]

Just now, Frameshift07 said:

How would sex characteristics being considered largely inconsequential have negatively impacted society?

No one said that. The problem is that's not the society we live in, so we might as well have the tools to criticize it. Is that wrong?

[Frameshift07]

1 minute ago, verily-forsooth-egads said:

The problem is that's not the society we live in, so we might as well have the tools to criticize it.

Right, I've got you.

[Luftschlosseule]

But exactly that is the issue, isn't it? That medical professionals make, what they assume to be, an educated guess and still wind up being wrong.
There is a long history of intersex people having been assigned shortly after birth their anatomy depending on what was easier to build.

 

The whole point about agab is that while it appears to be right a lot of the time, it can be wrong and have disastrous consequences for the individual.
It also doesn't change that if you have organs, you need taken care of them. Went to the gynecologist last week. Am I a woman? No. Do I have an uterus that potentially could develope cancer, whether I like it or not? Yes. If it helps me getting fast out of medical appointments, so be it. I use it as a tool. The issue is when other people try to use this tool on me, but never the tool as such.

[Janus the Fox]

I just think that the maternity nurse just assigns the sex of the baby just by looking to me.

[Snao Cone]

2 hours ago, Janus the Fox said:

I just think that the maternity nurse just assigns the sex of the baby just by looking to me.

Which impacted how people treated you from that moment on, on the assumption of gender, right?

[nickolekuebler]

I am to an extent intersex, I was raised as male and on my birth certificate it used to say male. I would have never chosen this had I been given the chance to choose. I know that my situation is not the same as everyone else's and that we are all different and that the doctors back then only did what they thought was right and so on and so forth. I do not hold a grudge against anyone for my past or for doing what they thought was right. I just think that we as a society need to try and evolve from where we were and do things differently to be more open and fair to everyone. I will not try to say that I know everything or that we will all want the same thing. 

[Lilihierax]

22 hours ago, verily-forsooth-egads said:

How is that supposed to replace the concept of gender assigned at birth? The benefit of AGAB is that it specifies exactly that, the gender someone was designated when they were born based on their genitals, and nothing else. Terms that specify combinations of things, like your "FFB" (how is that any different from "cis female"?), have their uses, but you can't just say "why don't we use this instead?" when you're not actually covering all the uses of the thing you're proposing to replace.

I wasn't considering that it could be a replacement for 'AGAB'.   As sex and gender are different things, female-from-birth, as I said, only refers to my sex.  A female-from-birth person might identify as a woman, as non-binary, as a man, as something else, or use no gender labels at all.  A cis-woman would be a female person who identifies as woman. I wasn't actually proposing to replace anything, I just said it works for me and my personal use.  I don't mind specifying my sex but I am less sure about specifying any gender ID that i might have.  I'm choosing to only cover one base, not both.

 

need to add: i'm not telling anyone what to do here, i'm just adding my two cents by saying what works for me. Yes I was assigned as a girl at birth, and people assume I identify as a woman because I am still female, but I guess I prefer to describe myself by my sex before any gender label.