So What Are You REALLY?

"get "amab" and "afab" out of your dictionary you are whatever you want to be and remembering your gender at birth will just make accepting yourself harder for you" - @fidgepee on Twitter^[1]

For about 2 years now I've been using he/they pronouns. This hasn't been some secret I've been hiding either, I have pronouns on my Instagram account my parents follow set to he/they, I have it set on Discord, I don't have it set on YouTube because for some reason I can't set my YouTube pronouns, but anywhere I can add he/they, I do. The reason for this is because I don't mind what gender you call me. The older I get, the less I care about being "a man."

Not a good transition, but some people rightfully aren't happy with the gender identity they're born with. Some people aren't happy with the concept of gender identity in the first place. Considering you're deep enough into the internet to not only be visiting an IndieWeb blog, yet alone mine, you're probably at the very least familiar with the concepts of transgenderism and being nonbinary.

This article is mostly going to be focused on an issue I've noticed a lot recently that greatly affects nonbinary people, but it does also affect transgender individuals too. This is mostly about the following question I see asked a lot:

Are you amab or afab?

If you're unaware, here's what these terms mean:

• amab - assigned male at birth
• afab - assigned female at birth

Some people might not have a problem with being asked this question, and that's completely fine! However, whenever I see this question asked, this is what I interpret it as:

So what are you really?

The whole point of someone deciding to become nonbinary is that they don't want to be apart of the binary. By asking this question, you're just asking "are you a boy or a girl?" And yes, I understand that being nonbinary is much more complex than that, it can mean different things for different people. This is meant to be a simplification.

This also hurts trans people, too. For instance, instead of seeing someone as just a "woman", they're seen as a "man who became a woman."

I don't know, maybe I'm thinking too hard about this.