No. When I was born a doctor looked at me and made an (understandable) error. AMAB and MTF both center that error - the thing I'm not and honestly never was. I am a woman who happens to be trans. I happen to be a lot of other things too!
there does exist a too-online subset of us who are wallowing in a misread of transmisogyny that positions afab people as somehow privileged but i don't spend a lot of time listening to them
thats actually not even what im interested in, i dont really think we need to bring up privilege when speaking abt transmasc exps but the insistence on using AFAB as a descriptor is incredibly demoralizing
The only situation I can see myself using it is specifically referring to transfems AND non-binary AMAB people who explicitly aren't women or woman adjacent and like, how often do I need to do that?
There's this hallmark of tumblr social ontologies in that they prize some kind of notional descriptive completeness over any kind of reference to how identities and communities actually relate.
I've found it a useful term for niche cases like others here have noted. The widespread use of ASAB language disturbs me though. Can't ever imagine identifying with it or using it to identify groups, especially when much better alternatives exist.
I don't like calling myself that, I usually just say formerly male or 'when I had to be male' kind of thing, but to refer to myself now I just say trans, transfem, or trans woman/lady depending on the flow of my words
it can useful to talk about the specific category of people assigned to live life as a boy (us and cis men)
but that is a rare situation and i would rather be understood as a woman, a trans woman, or a nonbinary person because that's what i'm experiencing now
one of my mutuals is insisting that the correct term is AMAB and not TMA since TME/TMA was invented by a trans man and therefore im being transmisogynist and honestly i was just fucking trying to say that transmascs need to stop misgendering ourselves like im just fucking exhausted
there's a pattern i see in a lot of intra-trans discourse where people try to defuse conflicts (in this case, the objection to "tme" and the idea that not everyone faces transmisogyny) by pretending the conflict is purely because the words are bad
similarly, people calling out the shitty cissexist use of "afab" or "amab" always seem to conclude with loads of people going "trans people stole these terms from intersex people anyway, use 'designated' or 'observed' instead please" or weird concessions like the idea that it's medical terminology
i seriously dont know what would make anyone happy. okay we're all girls now. just silly little dumb girls! im so mad because im on the bad hormone tee hee, dont you know testosterone makes you big and mean and aggressive? you were always meant to be a girl! its in the name!!! aFab!!!
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Whether you WERE (PAST TENSE!) amab or afab isn't something we can change but it's not something you can call people in the present tense.
Even when someone calls themself afab in the present tense it implies "this distinction matters" 🚩
Joe Blow off the street saying I'm AMAB? Nah fuck that. They're just trying to use a roundabout way to misgender me.
but that is a rare situation and i would rather be understood as a woman, a trans woman, or a nonbinary person because that's what i'm experiencing now
There is no coherent AMAB cohort. I mistrust anyone calling me that. It's pretty clear anyone who does so badly wants to just call me a man