As a non-binary person, I often get asked, upon stating my gender identity, this question: “Are you AMAB or AFAB?”, and quite frankly, I hate it, and I think it reeks of bad intentions. Now, I don’t think anyone who asks this is explicitly enbyphobic. There’s a good chance that they just simply might not understand, but to me, at the end of the day, it reeks of the toxic mentality that assigned sex at birth is a “trait” or a “state of being”. I don’t see it that way. As someone who is 23 years old, my assigned sex at birth is an event that happened 23 years ago and has no bearing on any inherent part of who I am in the present moment.
This is also why I always speak in past tense for these matters. For example, I never say things like “I’m AMAB”, and I feel repulsed in those insane contexts where AMAB and AFAB are used as nouns (like someone saying “I have a question for all the AFABs here” just disgusts me). I always explicitly say, in my context, “I WAS assigned male at birth”, and I leave it at that. If you’re non-binary yourself and prefer to handle these matters differently, that’s okay, as long as you’re not projecting that I should go along with your view of this subject. I just like to emphasize that, for me, it’s really contingent on context when it comes to how willing I am to state my assigned sex at birth.
The caveat is that, in most of these instances, people are not directly asking me what sex I was assigned at birth. Let me give you a few examples:
- I take hormones, right? If someone wants to ask me about my experiences for whatever good faith reason like relating to it or just wanting more information in order to be supportive of my transition journey, then that’s totally fine. With this in mind, people won’t ask me things like “Are you AMAB or AFAB?”, but instead, will ask me things like “Are you taking estrogen, or are you taking testosterone?” which I find significantly more acceptable.
- If you’re my doctor, and you need to know something that pertains to my reproductive system, reproductive capacity, general anatomy/physiology, or any other thing that makes knowing my assigned sex at birth crucial to know, then I don’t mind the doctor asking obviously. Like I said, though, often times, a doctor won’t ask me things like “Are you AMAB or AFAB?”, obviously. They will ask me things like “Do you have a prostate? Can you get pregnant? Can you impregnate others?” and all that stuff that makes the contextual aspect of it all the more sensible.
- For people interested in me in a sexual context who find it hard to assume my assigned sex at birth because of my androgynous gender presentation, asking me “Do you have a penis or a vagina?” makes sense, especially if I indicated reciprocating sexual interest here. In these contexts, knowing my genital configuration would be important to know how to proceed with me in a sexual manner. However, let me clarify that not all non-binary people who were assigned male at birth have penises and not all non-binary people who were assigned female at birth have vaginas.
- The last point I’d state is to make sense of some more niche contexts here. For example, I talk about how short I am all the time, right? I stand at a height of 5’5", which by the standard of an adult cisgender woman, is generally not considered short. If I claim I am short at my height of 5’5", sometimes I like to clarify that, even though I’m non-binary, I was assigned male at birth to make it make sense when I’m on a forum or community for vertically challenged individuals like myself.
At the end of the day, I just like to sniff out context. I hate to be pedantic, but whenever someone asks me things like “AMAB or AFAB?” and leads it on with the fact that they’re “just curious”, I question the “why” of their curiosity. As I see it, unless the context indicates it being relevant, it shouldn’t be taken as an important matter. It seems like a fishy tactic incorporated by those with a bioessentialist mindset to tie my assigned sex as a trait and pick out what my “true gender” is rather than accepting me as non-binary at face value. Like I said to start, many people who ask this are not doing so in bad faith. Often times, they’re just misinformed, so I try to explain to them some of the more problematic aspects of said questions being asked in unnecessary, irrelevant contexts.
I’d like to touch on the non-binary AGAB thing. in general I refer to myself as a non binary woman. my identity, how I feel inside, is genderless. but I was AFAB and I present feminine. I use she/they pronouns and my body doesn’t make my dysphoric. my identity may be that of a non binary person, but my positionality is that of a white woman. I may not feel like a woman, but society see me and treats me as a woman. it’s hard for me to separate the way I see myself and the way I am treated by society. I understand that isn’t the case for a lot of non binary people, but it is for me and I don’t really feel like people labels and identities should really be up for debate.
That’s another thing, though. Someone could have been assigned male at birth and be a non-binary woman too. You don’t need to make it a point to mention your assigned sex at birth to emphasize how you are a non-binary woman, as the label is applicable to non-binary people regardless of assigned sex at birth. Also, how society treats you, once again, is not explicitly because you were assigned female at birth. It’s because you present in a way that indicates to society that you are a woman in their eyes. Like, I understand what you’re coming from, but, in my view, it’s incredibly problematic to conflate the factor of you being “AFAB” with things that are not particularly relevant to it.