I read the article "Do Trans Men Experience Womanhood" by Alexander Avila (who I used to be a fan of on YouTube a couple of years ago), and while I thought it was, like ... fine, I guess... I felt like he didn't really engage with the main issue at all.
He claims to be a believer in the idea that the way you describe your own identity has no impact on the legitimacy of other people's identities. I can't believe someone as clearly thoughtful as him genuinely believes this, there is such an obvious counterexample in the "biologically female" identity which is distressingly popular, and obviously is a political position disguised as a neutral statement. There is a long line joining e.g. "biologically female" to "AFAB lesbian" to "lesbian trans man" and presumably somewhere on this line he imagines the identity goes from political to apolitical, but he should articulate where that point is - when does identifying with your AGAB stop being a statement about other people and start being a statement purely about yourself?
He also draws a distinction between transmasc lesbians who define lesbianism as essentially "AFAB4AFAB" and those who are theoretically transfem-inclusive, in order to absolve the large majority of transmasc lesbians from accusations of transmisogyny (a word he never uses in the article btw), but this is really a strawman argument. The vast majority of transmasc lesbians do not explicitly exclude transfems but they also do absolutely nothing to include us either. It's the difference between "passive allyship" (not allyship at all imo) and "active allyship". They do not even acknowledge that they are in a privileged position over us, they don't think of themselves as "allies" at all. They can go to a lesbian event that's purely a mixture of cis women and transmascs and call it trans-inclusive, not even noticing the total absence of transfems. You are not really inclusive of a group that is oppressed by you if you can't even acknowledge that that oppression exists.
But the main thing that bugged me was when he brought up the argument that transmascs might associate themselves with womanhood because oppressed groups are privileged in progressive spaces. This point is just absurd. We all know from long experience whose voices are privileged in e.g. queer spaces and it's white men as it is everywhere else. So what is gained by a man associating himself with womanhood in such a space?
I think the key is the context of who that man is talking to. You do not generally see transmascs referring to their "connection to womanhood" when they are in the company of cis men. In fact, that is a context where most transmascs would (reasonably) resent that being brought up at all. That is because it's an assertion that reduces their social positioning as soon as it is said.
On the other hand, if transmascs are in trans spaces (especially non-binary spaces), or mixed cis woman + trans spaces (like lesbian spaces), they are much more likely to bring up AGAB-related issues. That is because these are the only spaces where having been AFAB definitely places you higher on the hierarchy. If it's already known that you are trans, a "connection to womanhood" statement is a stealthy way to bring up that you are not the "scary" type of trans.
To say that transmascs bring up AGAB in trans or lesbian spaces because those spaces invert the ordinary hierarchies of privilege is to say that in the wider world trans women are privileged by our AGAB, which is absurd. Progressive spaces famously replicate all the same oppressive dynamics that you see everywhere else. If it were true that they reversed the ordinary hierarchy, transmascs would be far better off obfuscating their AGAB and we would be announcing ours at every queer event because in that hypothetical world transfems would be at the top of the tree in progressive spaces, rather than routinely kicked out of them for speaking slightly too loud one time.
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