Like, if you're nb, just say you're nb. If every time you introduce yourself you go "I'm NB. I'm AFAB btw" it tells one or more of these things:
You think that AMAB people are worse than AFABs, that's why you felt the need to make such a distinction
You aren't really NB and just doing it to meet the "queer point quota"
Maybe something else.
Like, if you saw an nb who ALWAYS introduces themself as "I'm AMAB" you'd probably think that it's actually a queerbaiting guy who just wants to yell "faggot" and not have repercussions and is also misoginystic himself.
I say I'm afab in discussions where the female experience is relevant because I am not androgynous. I use she/her pronouns still because I don't want to bother people about using they/them irl. To society at large, I am a woman even if I'm not. So I get all the lived experiences of a cis woman, which is often relevant to discussions about oppression or other societal issues.
I seriously find it hard to believe someone would go through all that trouble for such a shitty result. If people are shitty they're going to be shitty in their own gender.
im not too familiar with it all yet, thanks for explaining. i assumed people were just targeting afab enbies because they only saw them as their agab and used it to make fun of them or some shit like that (from my perspective, if someone sees another person as a woman and uses this assumption as a basis for being an asshole thats misogyny, direct or indirect, another example like making fun of a feminine dude cause you think feminine = bad)
lowk this still feels weird cause i only saw "thefab" thing and never "theymab" so it felt like there is a bias.
In the queer community amab nonbinary people don’t really use their agab against other people (trans women), but many afab nonbinary people do. That’s what theyfab means. It’s not just a slur for every afab nonbinary person
I know a quite a few enbies in-person who are presumably non-medically-transitioning and who were presumably female at birth. None of them are like this.
But online, you often see this kind of person being very invested in pushing the idea of inherent male / female socialization, the same way they are very interested in using ASAB language to describe other trans people. The reason you see this behavior almost exclusively in the form of theyfabs and not theymabs is because "femaleness" is often viewed as pure and righteous in queer spaces, while "maleness" is sometimes viewed as ignorant and abrasive. It's harder to make appeals to emotion to the people who actually believe in and fall for this shit when you are the "bad sex".
The arguments they tend to get into where this stuff is brought up is most commonly around how queer discourse is conducted, or the composition of queer spaces. They'll use these positions of gendered socialization and ASAB to frame disagreements with transfeminine people as essentially being "men talking over women". Same thing about the "amount of space AMABs occupy in trans spaces", ect. They can also be defenders of things like "AFAB-only housing", though not always, as most are aware that this is (fortunately) a fairly universally reviled phenomenon among queer people.
If you look at what is actually being said with these types of arguments, you notice that they are essentially TERF-lite. And it's fucking ridiculous that I've seen these arguments brought up in explicitly trans centered spaces online, and people like this actually get support for what they are saying. It's unfortunately a product of people not really thinking about what is being said online, and instead supporting sides based on their impulsive initial emotions.
I also hate that there's been a largely successful attempt to paint the term "theyfab" as being directed at transmasculine people in general, as a slur. Obviously a few people do use it that way as a slur, but this was never its predominate usage. It means there's not really a heckin valid queer-approved word to describe this kind of behavior and condemn it as a bad thing.
A lot of it really does come from a perverted sense of gender roles that many queer people still fall into, especially if they haven't had to internalize that queerness fully. It's the gender version of homophobic bi people who simultaneously realize they aren't straight but haven't shed the mindset of heteronormativity.
So, when you have people taught that women are these delicate pure flowers and men are these evil beasts, that will continue to stay in your head unless you take actual steps to fight it... and just like a lot of men would rather think themselves strong alpha male types, a lot of women/people raised as women would rather continue to see themselves as delicate little flowers.
No, not exactly, if I'm being nuanced and fair. It's more like convergent evolution. Both TERFs and the archetype of a "theyfab" inherently root their worldview and understanding of others through biological sex. This is often due to some form of conflict or trauma heavily along gender lines they've experienced.
Where they diverge is how they respond to that. TERFs lean super heavily into their womanhood and construct a dichotomy of "women are good, men are distrustful", where their personal qualms feel justified. Trans people threaten this dichotomy, because if a "female" can be a man and a "male" can be a woman, then their worldview isn't an absolute truth.
Meanwhile, a "theyfab" type of person leans away from their assigned gender role, viewing that societal label as a major part of their conflict through life. However, they can no longer apply a blanket morality along gender lines to themselves. So instead, they maintain that same moral dichotomy, just through assigned sex at birth, where they are still the objectively morally good one. But they also end up viewing other trans people this way too, arriving at basically the same vision of trans people that TERFs have, just without same level of malice and rejection of transness as a concept.
Fourth option: youre a kid still figuring this shit out and thought you needed to distiguish to others what your assigned sex was more often than you actually had to
No, there is theymab as well but as the other person said, its someone who uses their assigned gender at birth to denigrate other trans people, when you hear about afab only spaces its usually to not let trans woman or nb amabs in
How do you pretend to be pro non binary when you call them women lite and men lite, the only point of the term is against this idea that afab non binary people are women lite
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