I just saw the most Galaxy Brain gender take ever, from a cis man on reddit
[ID: a screenshot of a comment from reddit, with no username visible. The commend reads: This doesn’t make a ton of sense to me either. Setting aside the question of whether gender/sex is assigned or observed at birth, the gender I was assigned at birth was ‘boy.’ The gender I have now is ‘man’. Boys and men have different gender roles, and few adults identify as boys anymore. From this standpoint, every adult has a different gender than the one they had at birth. End ID]
Framing “girl” and “boy” as separate genders from “woman” and “man” is such an amazing take. it’s a framework that accommodates and explains so many trans experiences. Some trans people never were their AGAB. Some feel like they were their AGAB, but that that changed (usually when puberty hits, which is when you start “becoming a man/woman”. The accepted societal path is that girls grow up to into women, and boys grow up into men. But some girls grow up into men, and some boys grow up into women. This guy was a boy who grew up into a man, which generally works out pretty well for people. Some boys and girls grow up into people who aren’t men or women, even! It’s like this random cis guy skipped right over transgender 101, 102, 201, etc. and stumbled directly into Transgender Nirvana.
This is why I will continue to say “i used to be a girl”
Plus, there is something SO SPECIFIC when it comes to the intersectionality between race and gender, particularly for Black individuals... Like, I was raised as a Black girl, I can't say that I am now a Black man when I'm just...not??? I might become one some day but I have had zero experience living as a Black man, I cannot claim an identity that isn't my own... We have to start viewing gender outside of a white and binary lens because it is in reality SO MUCH more complicated than that
