AGAB

While nobody is required to say what their AGAB is online - least of all intersex people like we now know our system to be - we also realize the way that some of us talk about our "assigned gender" is highly unusual. This is because, in addition to discovering we are likely intersex, plurality affects our gender, our perception of how we were raised, and what it would have meant to go through life with our natural body.

Furthermore, we also have what we consider a highly unusual experience, unrelated to being intersex, and while some details we want to keep private, we tend to like sharing when we have an experience we consider out of the ordinary.

While we are not positive beyond a shadow of a doubt of our intersex status or abuse history, we DO have very very odd memories, and everyone we've talked to says that our interpretation of events makes the most sense. And even if our interpretations were wrong, we would still have grounds for saying some of the things we say about ourselves.

However, if you read this page, you should be aware that our story includes non-consensual medical procedures done on intersex children (namely to genitals), discussions of corrective child sexual abuse related to gender and plurality, and general discussions about genitals. However, the language used is somewhat vague and not intended to be graphic or overly upsetting.

Where it comes to our intersex status, we prefer to use vague terms to describe some of what our body was like and what our exact condition was, because some details are unknown, and the entire situation requires us to talk about a child's genitals, which makes us uncomfortable since there was also trauma surrounding said genitals.

However, we can explain what our body is like, what we believe our body used to be like, what makes us think we're intersex, and what we think happened to us, in language that we find tactful and comfortable while still being informative.

We were assigned female at birth, and we were expected to be "born a girl" by our biological and adoptive families. We are unsure what exactly our body was like when we were born, but we do have very very early memories that are difficult to place or describe but involve some kind of a medical setting and a sense that I was being violated in some way, so it's possible there were "abnormalities" of some kind. We also have odd memories of being given certain medications, and we don't know what they were, but we now wonder if they were intended to make us start puberty.

One odd thing that we DID know was off even before we knew we had hidden memories or questioned our intersex status: We distinctly recall having some kind of surgery or something similar when we were around 5 or 6 years old. However, we didn't remember what it was for.

When thinking about it as an adult, we tried to ask our adoptive family what the surgery was for. However, they fully denied that anything like that happened that early, and seemed oddly scandalized that I suggested it had happened. This may be a coincidence, but it is also known that my adoptive mother's dislike for my biological mother intensified around the time the surgery would have happened. My biological mother likely did not know if I had began to display an intersex condition, since she wasn't raising me, but if she WAS raising me, she would have likely been supportive in a way my adoptive family were not, and my adoptive mother knew this.

In 2025, I began asking questions of friends, in Discord servers, and on Tumblr, with regards to my atypical experience with testosterone HRT. I had been on it since 2020, having come out as transmasc (at least online) in roughly 2012. I had never really seen myself as having a strong sense of gender growing up - if anything, I either related to not being any gender or to having traits of both a boy and a girl - but I started considering myself more specifically agender masculine/demiguy in my late teens, and the collective gender of the system does now involve being male.

My concerns were based around a seeming inability for my body to be properly affected by testosterone, including virtually no bottom growth whatsoever, especially in comparison to other changes. I was suggested I might have an intersex condition and to look into an androgen insensitivity.

Later along the line, after moving and switching doctors, I found out that I had been given too low a dose of testosterone for someone wanting the effects I wanted and was put on a proper dose. However, after getting on a higher dose, I still noticed a surprising lack of bottom growth, even for someone on my previous dose for as long as I had been on it.

I started asking some questions of an intersex friend of mine. I have a blood relative of the same AGAB as both me and the friend and who has the same intersex condition as that friend, and I was able to ask some questions about it.

The condition can cause an AFAB person's body to develop naturally in a way that is normally associated with the effects of testosterone HRT. Not all of the associated effects of testosterone will necessarily occur, however.

This can include characteristics like development of certain body features, but also an overall appearance that might be considered more gender neutral, masculine, or ambiguous-looking. I was often perceived as another gender as a child or teen, especially if intentionally presenting masculine or ambiguously.

You do not necessarily need to have my relative's specific condition to have a body that experiences a SIMILAR intersex condition, though, and having a blood relative who has this condition will indicate you are more likely to have a similar condition, even if not the exact same one.

I then put two and two together about the mysterious surgery that my adoptive family doesn't want me to think happened.

While it was an upsetting revelation in some respects, it also answered a lot of questions, alleviated some of my dysphoria (since I knew why my body was so atypical to other transmasc people's), and made a few things make sense in hindsight, such as why, when I was a kid and first learned that some boys are raised as girls after botched circumcisions, I had this moment where I went "Oh! That explains it!" only for me to ask myself "Wait, explains WHAT?" and being unable to answer.

However, something else may explain why I had such a reaction to those cases, and it involves a very odd experience I had related to my plurality and my adoptive father's awareness of it.

While we are still in the process of uncovering the details, we are beginning to realize we had a very atypical experience as a child in which our adoptive father was aware of our system - due to a childhood incident in which a fictive insisted on being treated on their source - and decided to intentionally influence what headmates we split in order to alter certain things about our identity.

For the sake of privacy, we dislike always publicly explaining exactly what happened and what our adoptive father's methods or end goal were. However, it did involve him giving us a large number of headmates who were men, intended to be seen as men, and treated as men by Adam. This includes Bryan, one of the core selves.

Later, when these headmates discovered the internet and started posting as themselves, they were, by all recollection, universally treated as the gender they said they were, i.e. a man. Due to the amnesia our system had at the time, some of them were not really aware that they were in a "girl body". So, from their perspectives, they started out as men, were intended to be men, were treated as men, and never had anyone question that they were men.

However, some of these parts experienced gender-related abuse basically as soon as it was clear they understood they were boys/men, mostly from our adoptive father but also later from an additional abuser from the internet. With our adoptive father, he was attempting a form of corrective sexual abuse in which he intentionally created alters who were men and were meant to be men but were forced to "be" women or girls under some circumstances.

There were also abusive relationships that some of these headmates got into online that, in their opinion, only really make sense if you think of them as a cis man. While any kind of abuse can happen to any gender, the connotations or expectations of certain things are different for different genders. They feel that the expectations and perceptions placed on them in these situations are the ones placed on cis men rather than other identities, and they feel the reasons certain things happened or didn't happen make the most sense if you assume they were cis men who were treated like cis men.

While we were not assigned male at BIRTH, there are definitely headmates - an entire purposely-formed supercluster - who formed as men, were intended to be men, were treated as men, and then experienced things where their male gender was relevant. In all respects but physical, they are cis men.

Given that the gender a headmate was at formation can influence their sense of what "feels" cis and trans to them, there are even a few headmates who feel that being trans is cis, because it is the identity closer to the one that they had when they formed.

Blixa's Supercluster/Central Voidelia formed in 2013 following the sudden death of our adoptive mother. At the time, we were presenting as an agender transmasculine person - i.e. not a woman - but also not as a binary trans man. We were also not on testosterone yet.

As a result, wanting to be seen as a masculine genderqueer person is what that supercluster started out knowing, and that is still basically the system's collective gender, although we are collectively somewhat more male-aligned than "just" masculine-aligned.

However, because being masculine-but-not-male was the "original" gender of Blixa's Supercluster, being a man seems transgender to Blixa's Supercluster in a way that "masculine" in combination with genderqueer genders does not necessarily seem all the time.

Furthermore, transfem members of Blixa's Supercluster are even more likely to relate to the actual experience of being a woman who had to figure out they were a woman, since a lot of them split into a body that was collectively presenting as a man and, at certain points, genuinely typically treated as a man online and even offline.

While they don't tend to label their experience with AGAB language, some of them don't really consider them cisgender OR transgender, because being trans feels cis to them. However, if a transmasc member of that part of the system identifies as a trans MAN, they DO consider it trans to be a man per se, even if it is not trans to have a masculine gender.

Where it comes to the language our system uses to describe our gender, it varies depending on the part of the system you're talking to or about.

All of us understand that the body we are in was assigned female at birth and is currently voluntarily and intentionally undergoing transmasculine transition. Therefore, we consider the words "AFAB" and "transmasculine" to apply to the system's body. However, we do not use "transmasculine" as a gender word in this sense, but a transition word, or even a word to describe our sex.

However, some members of the system consider themselves cis men or AMAB due to their history of being seen and treated as a man. While we avoid describing this in a way that gives the wrong impression, we feel that "AMAB" is more similar to their experiences than not. Some members of the system could therefore be seen as "AFAB cis men" or "AFAB AMAB", if such a label were to exist.

We're aware of Assigned Gender At Formation terms, and those are pretty applicable to Blixa's Supercluster, but we feel Bryan's Supercluster goes beyond just forming as a certain gender. While it's valid for a headmate to consider themselves transgender if they turn out to be a different gender than how they formed, we have such a profoundly different lived experience with gender than a lot of systems do or talk about having - genuinely being treated by a parent from a young age as a different AGAB or gender modality due to their plurality - so we consider AGAF (Assigned Gender At Formation) language insufficient for our experiences some of the time.

Some members of our system use the word "intersex" the way you would "cis" or "trans". e.g. "I'm an intersex man". This is because we feel that, if we had not experienced corrective medical intervention, we would have naturally had a body that is more ambiguous than the one we ended up with prior to voluntarily transitioning. While we did not get to have the experience associated with the body we were born into, we feel it is our right to be able to use that language. Given that many of our headmates have long felt a disconnect from the very concept of AGAB and that some intersex people do treat the word "intersex" this way, many of us use it ourselves, and generally do use the phrase "intersex man" to describe the body's identity.

However, some members of our system also use the word "genderqueer" the way you would "trans" or "cis". For example, Mori from Silent Hedges is a "genderqueer man" or an "AMAB genderqueer person". This particularly applies if the person in question has transitioned - either bodily or in headspace - in a way that would be typically considered with one gender modality, but they don't see it that way. For example, in headspace, Mori is a (presumably) perisex AMAB person who is conditionally a man, but he has had bottom surgery of the kind trans women normally have. However, he is not a woman at all, and he does not consider himself transfem, because he is not transitioning to femininity. Rather, he is genderqueer and has transitioned to that.

We tend not to use the term AFAB for ourselves, because it doesn't seem accurate in describing our intersex status. We're aware the term was originally intended for clarity in discussing intersex experiences, but transgender people have started using the word in a way that muddies the waters and makes it hard for us to clarify what we mean when we say that about ourselves.

While we occasionally say "AFAB" if referring to the actual gender on our birth certificate or how we were born the way we were expected to be born, as well as sometimes in reference to headspace AGAB when relevant, we normally prefer to say we were "raised a girl". This phrasing centers the expectations we were raised with, which is the main use we found in describing ourselves as AFAB in the past. However, it feels more inclusive of our intersex experience - the procedure happened because we were being raised as a girl, not as a boy - and it also feels more inclusive of the cis male members of the system.

While we are in the process of figuring out the particulars, some members of the system do know their intersex status affects their gender, e.g. their feelings towards our transition in regards to the ways past medical procedures affect our ability to ever have a "typical" transmasculine body.

There are also headmates who feel that our treatment for our intersex condition is emblematic of the general way in which our trauma involves a lack of autonomy, bigoted concepts of queerness, and a forceful attempt to control somebody's identity, and they relate to our intersex status in a way that feels historical, in terms of our personal history.

While we're unsure if we collectively identify this way, there are therefore definitely parts of the system that are intergender. Sometimes, this has to do with a specific gender alignment - e.g. feeling that their being a man is affected by being intersex, or that their being androynous is affected by it, etc. Other times, it has to do with identifying with the trauma associated with being intersex, and relating to it in a gendered way.

Either way, while being intersex is a recent revelation, it does not surprise us in some respects. While knowing how our body was altered is upsetting, it does answer a lot of questions, and it also means we no longer have to hold our transition to the same standards as a perisex transmasculine transition. It affects our identity and our gender, and while we don't use this language for others by default, we use language to describe some of our AGAB in a way that may be different than usual (e.g. "raised a girl") but that we feel is accurate and only gives as much information as is necessary.