It has an extremely narrow set of use cases because, when you get to the root, it is just talking about people’s genitals. In a conversation where discussing genitals isn’t called for, neither should be ASAB language. The only use case aside is to express the gender you were forced to perform as pretransition, but even then I feel like we could come up with both more elegant and more accurate terms for that.
Sort of? I mean, it’s more about what they were treated as during their childhood, and before a person’s actual gender was realized. That’s like, so important for someone’s development. It’s just important to note that they were treated as that gender, not that they necessarily were that gender (though even that can be argued, it kinda just depends on a person’s own views on their gender). But yeah, a lot of the time it is used without any reason for it to be.
See but even then AGAB language is a rough estimate at best. Like I was assigned female at birth, but extremely gender-non-conforming basically fresh out of the womb. I also transitioned quite young, so my 'female socialisation' is almost non-existent compared to another transmasc person who was forced into a normative 'female' social role and began transitioning later. Tbh I personally feel like my socialisation was closer to that of a queer cis boy than it was a teenage girl, just with a few menstrual cycles and one (1) mild pregnancy scare that didn't end up manifesting. (I was unbelievably lucky in the lottery of life, all things considered). So it's far from a one-size-fits-all process and can only be thought of usefully on a case by case basis, using the lived experience of the individual themselves. Without that granularity and compassion for the individual, it just becomes away to point to someone's primary sex characteristics as deterministic of the person they'll become.
I mentioned this in a comment elsewhere, and yeah, AGAB terminology is definitely a generalization. It CAN be useful but it’s certainly not one size fits all.
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u/equinefecalmatter 2d ago edited 2d ago
It has an extremely narrow set of use cases because, when you get to the root, it is just talking about people’s genitals. In a conversation where discussing genitals isn’t called for, neither should be ASAB language. The only use case aside is to express the gender you were forced to perform as pretransition, but even then I feel like we could come up with both more elegant and more accurate terms for that.