AGAB

While no one is required to disclose their AGAB online, least of all intersex people like our system, we have a perspective on the concept of our AGAB, "birth sex", or "biological gender" that is different from what a lot of people would expect it to be.

Namely, we are an adoptee with PAIS (Partial Androgen Insensitiviy Syndrome) who, as an adult, met their biological family and then discovered their intersex condition, and has concluded that, if they were raised by their biological family, would not have been forcibly surgically altered in the same way that we were by our adoptive family and would have been raised as a different gender than what their adoptive family raised them as.

Furthermore, while "biological gender" is a misnomer at best and "birth sex" usually doesn't include an intersex option, transgender and intersex people are allowed to perceive themselves as having a biological gender or that their birth sex was something other than what they were assigned at birth. We perceive ourselves as having a biological gender that partly does and partly doesn't match with our actual gender, which is part of why we identify as cistrans.

Firstly, an explanation of why we are so confident we are intersex.

We were raised as a girl and believed ourselves to be a perisex trans man. However, our adoptive family were transphobic and would not have allowed us to transition, so we did not get to go on testosterone until we were around 26 or so.

Shortly before the time I left my adoptive family to live with the queer man I was dating at the time, I had had a doctor's appointment in which I was asked about surgeries or procedures I had had in the past. I explained that I knew I had had two sinus surgeries as a child, as well as a tonsilectomy, but I had had at least one other procedure or surgery as a child, and I couldn't remember what it was for.

I asked my adoptive family about the surgery, including the recollection that my first sinus surgery had been at the age of six. This made them very defensive, however, and they denied that they "would do surgery on a kindergartener". Mind you, I had not alleged that the unexplained procedure had been when I was in kindergarten; I thought the surgery from that age was necessary for my health, but they were reacting like I had questioned them about something unnecessary. They asserted that my first sinus surgery was at an older age than I remember and that there was no mysterious procedures or surgeries at all.

However, I am positive that I had a surgery or procedure of some kind when I was in kindergarten, because I remember sitting in my kindergarten class and being scared of going under anesthesia in the near future. At the time, I wasn't sure what the surgery or procedure would have been for if not to correct a sinus problem that required surgical intervention. I also didn't understand why my adoptive family were so scandalized by the idea that a kindergartener underwent surgery.

While it's often said by the queer community that one major sign that you're intersex is that you had unexplained childhood surgeries, I didn't connect the dots until I went on testosterone in 2020 and, by the end of the year, felt that my body had not undergone the changes I would have expected it to by that time on that dose of testosterone. I did some research into intersex conditions, and I discovered that that could be a possible explanation, but I wanted to wait to transition more before making the final call on that.

I waited for about five years to revisit the idea that I was intersex, and this time it was because I was asking fellow trans people online why my body did not seem to process testosterone correctly. It made me feel like I was failing at transitioning or being trans.

While most people questioned if my dose was too low, and it later turned out that it was, they also suggested it was possible that I had Androgen Insenstivity Syndrome (AIS). However, they didn't tell me a lot about that condition, so I didn't know there were different severities, that it can be accompanied by ambiguous genitalia, and that people with the condition have XY chromosomes even if they were raised as a girl.

Later, I went on a higher dose of T, and I was pleased with the changes, but the changes also did not feel as pronounced as they should be on this dose. Furthermore, I noticed that one half of my body was more affected by the testosterone than the other, and some parts of my body (e.g. genitals) were virtually completely unaffected at all.

Given that this is an atypical response to a sex hormone, and that some sexual parts of my body are not developing the way you would expect them to given the hormones that I am on, this would be intersex by definition.

The more research I did, I discovered that some people with AIS are born with ambiguous genitalia but are given surgeries to make them look "female" and are raised as girls. The condition develops in utero as well as during puberty. I believe I was assumed to be a perisex AFAB child when they took the ultrasound, but given that my birth mother was only allowed two minutes to hold me when I was born, I feel it is likely that my genitals developed in an ambiguous way in utero, and the nurses detected that when I was born.

If I was born with ovotestes, which is possible for a person with PAIS (Partial Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome), it is possible that the surgery from when I was six was to remove the testes. However, because I misremembered what the surgery at that age was for, and because I was not really certain how many surgeries or procedures I had had, I have no way of knowing if I did or didn't have other corrective operations besides the surgery my adoptive family refuse to acknowledge happen.

It also became clear to me the more research I did that people with AIS have XY chromosomes. While no one has to define their identity by their chromosomes, this is the chromosome arrangement that cis men usually have. This is notable to us as a trans man, because chromosomes are a part of your body that you cannot change through transitioning, and it is therefore a part of being male that everyone would say was impossible for us as a trans man. Nevertheless, we discovered we had XY chromosomes and could thus be considered genetically male.

As a result of our intersex condition, including our chromosomes and our ambiguous genitalia, we consider our "biological gender" or "natural sex" to be androgynous male. We were not raised as a boy, but we feel that we likely would have been if we were raised by our biological family, or perhaps as gender neutral. We feel we would have gone through "both" puberties if we had not been surgically altered.

We believe we were given estrogen pills as a child to make us start puberty early, as we have memories of our adoptive parents giving us pills that they either didn't tell us what they were or told us they were hard drugs when they likely weren't. The reason we were made to start puberty early was due to sexual abuse our adoptive father was subjecting us to; he would have been more attracted to us with more adult features, and it was a way of making us understand from an early age that our body was "supposed" to be a certain way. We remember that, at the age at which people normally go through puberty, we did not experience any dramatic changes other than our breasts getting very slightly larger, so in hindsight and knowing we are intersex, it stands to reason we went through some kind of puberty before that time.

Therefore, we're unsure if we would have pursued physical transition if our body had been allowed to develop naturally. However, it is possible we would have, so there is a possibility we would have grounds to consider ourselves transmasculine even if we had been raised as a boy.

As an individual with XY chromosomes who was born with testes and identifies as a man, we consider ourselves cis male due to our intersex condition. However, due to the way we were raised, we also consider ourselves trans male. We also feel removed from the cis/trans binary altogether, and we don't take it extremely seriously when we describe ourselves as transgender OR cisgender. Our identification as intersex or genderqueer as separate from trans or cis are more accurate to what we feel our gender actually is.

With regards to the androgynous part of our birth sex, we partly identify with it, in that many members of the system are androgyne or bigender, and androgyny as a gender presentation separate from a gender identity is incredibly common throughout the system. However, the collective gender of the system is agender demiguy, not androgyne or bigender. Therefore, our presentation as androgynous could be considered akin to transgender people who are non-conforming because they present in a way that is consistent with the gender they were assigned at birth.

We still think that our general identification as genderqueer and our tendency towards gender non-conformity is influenced or represented by being intersex, however. We also consider it congruous with our demigender identity that one half our body reacts more strongly to testosterone than the other half. Therefore, our identification as genderqueer has things in common with cisgender experiences.

While our intersex is the primary reason we have a complicated concept of our birth sex, plurality is also related to why we do not feel we have a standard transmasculine experience and have some experiences in common with cis men that trans men normally do not have.

Due to an incident in childhood in which a fictive split and wanted to be treated as their source, our adoptive parents were aware that we had DID. They, and particular our adoptive father, proceeded to abuse us in a way that was intended to alter our identity to be more outwardly conformant but that involved getting to know our headmates and treating different headmates differently.

Some of these headmates split as men, and they have memories of being treated as men by our abusers. Not all of them knew we were in a body that was being raised as a girl, due to amnesia and being treated like themselves when they fronted. Eventually, they were pressured to be more non-conformant to their internal identities but more conformant to the identity the body was being raised with, which is not a typical cis male experience, but we don't feel it erases what they remember before then.

Furthermore, we were born at the dawn of the era where the internet became more widespread in people's homes. We used computers and even the internet from a very early age. On the internet, you can say you're anyone, and you have more control over how people see you.

Male members of the system, who had varying levels of awareness of how they were being raised, made accounts on the internet in which they self-identified as male and made male self-insert OCs. Their gender was never called into question, and many of their experiences, they feel a woman or a trans man would not have been treated the same way as a cis man who was presenting himself the way some headmates presented themselves online.

While it's possible that many trans people may have this experience too, we've never really heard about a trans person who did this, so we don't consider it a common transgender experience. Additionally, a lot of the headmates who had this experience were ones who only fronted online or were not aware of our general upbringing, so unlike most trans people who had had this experience but who would remember being treated as their AGAB offline, many parts of the system didn't feel that they were treated as a girl at any time.

Thanks to our intersex condition and our experience with gender due to plurality, we consider ourselves, as an androgynous agender demiguy with PAIS and DID, to be intersex, genderqueer, transgender, cisgender, isogender, and GNC, all of these as gender modalities.

Many people would consider it impossible to be all of these things at once, but most of these words were not created with our experiences in mind, meaning that most existing language is insufficient to describe our experiences. This is the fault of existent language, not of the people with non-conformant experiences.

At the end of the day, though, we prefer to be perceived as intersex or genderqueer over being transgender or cisgender. We would actually prefer to be categorized by our orientation rather than our gender modality if possible - that is, we'd rather be seen as a GAY man than a trans man or cis man.

We have a certain amount of patience for the ignorant, but we have no patience for the rude. For example, saying we cannot be cis and trans at the same time, or that intersex conditions are inherently transgender, is rude. It is invalidating to our identities and it treats words and labels as more rigid than they really are. Furthermore, if you have even remotely scratched the surface of the intersex community, just to look up what intersex even means, you will know that it is incredibly common for intersex people to be cisgender, or to categorize themselves outside of the cis/trans binary, so if you come to us with incredibly basic misconceptions, you will be assumed to be wilfully ignorant and likely blocked if you misspeak too badly.

However, if you have respectful questions, we are happy to answer them, and if you spend time looking at our posts or talking to us, you will likely learn a lot about how it feels to be intersex, raised with a certain experience, and transitioning away not from what nature has done to us but what intersexist and queerphobic abusers have done to us.