#it's just advocating for the advantages of defining it via the crafting transmasculine definition

[cyrsed]

i think about how much i love this definition of transmasculine like all the time lol TTwTT

Any person who was assigned female at birth but feels that is an incomplete or incorrect description of their gender.

- What’s in a Word?: Crafting Transmasculine (2006)

i wish it were a more widely understood definition bc as far as i’ve ever heard, there’s no other word that describes both binary and nonbinary afab people (and vice versa for transfem obvs) without referencing their agab. that’s something i think we sorely need! and while i def think “transmasculine” as a term has issues: bc it has “masculine” in it, it’s often used to actually refer to how masc someone is, which is alright on a personal level ofc, but becomes problematic if you’re trying to describe an entire group of people with it.

like, i identify as transmasc, but i don’t identify with any definition of it that is something like “ transgender person [...] whose gender is masculine and/or who express themselves in a masculine way.” (from the nonbinary wiki) bc for me personally that feels reductive and limiting; i don’t like to define my gender by how masc or fem i am.

without a word like transmasc to mean “anyone afab who feels that is an incomplete/incorrect description of their gender”, we can’t talk about our collective experiences as afab trans/nonbinary people without prefacing it with what our assigned sex is, and that feels like a cis-centric (in the sense that people often frame transness around that “female-to-male”/”male-to-female”, genitalia-centric view of our identity), outdated framing that defines us by our agab rather than our actual identity.

i don’t feel that my transness is defined by my agab, & i personally think it’s really important to trans liberation to reject any framing that chains us to the birth assignment framework. being trans can be so much more than that! community, shared history, self-creation, liberation, love, solidarity, self-expression, etc., all of which are more important to me than what sex i was assigned.

(besides that, there are also trans people who feel dysphoria being reminded of their agab, and i’d rather not unnecessarily bring it up if i can help it)

it’s probably cheesy to say but i’m fine with being an embarrassing millennial on social media, so i’ll say that transmasc is genuinely such a powerful word when used this way! it could represent solidarity and agency where we’re so often denied it! i mean we gay/trans/neurodivergent/disabled/etc people know how powerful it is to find the language/tools to describe our positions and experiences. realizing i was autistic was literally so life changing, and then before that, realizing i was trans completely changed my life from feeling like i must be a terrible person, being an isolated kid who was sure i must be the only person on earth who felt like this because i’d never heard anyone talk about these experiences before, to realizing that there’s language to describe how i feel, and there’s a community of people who share those experiences!

that’s why i feel so strongly about this definition of transmasculine, bc right now i don’t think there’s any other word that describes the particular group of people with the experience of being an afab trans/nb person (and vice versa for amab trans/nb people!). i would love if there were another one, esp if it didn’t include the “masculine” part just bc i think it gives the wrong impression that it’s something to do with gender presentation or manhood,, but until there is i’ll keep using transmasc.

it’s so important to have the language to describe our experiences, and name the people affected by certain experiences rather than keeping them separate and isolated and less capable of bridging that gap to form solidarity with others, eg. on twitter i see a lot of references to how g*nder cr*tical people and other right wingers target trans men specifically, but they leave out nb afab people from that description even tho we share those experiences. instead of changing it to “trans men and afab nb people” or “afab trans and nb people” i personally think that saying “transmasculine people” gets the job done better and faster and is more inclusive when we’re using the above definition!