Problems with CAGAB’s Epistemology
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The (trans)gender of who coined CAGAB is irrelevant, it doesn't exempt the terms from critique, especially when the foundational theoretical framing is flawed.
According to Mahdialynn, the trans woman who came forward to dispute false claims about its origins in 2015 (link), the coining was focused on “trying to find a way to talk about gendered experience,” continuing with how she was “trying to make sense of trans ppl’s relationships to birth assignment.” She explained that “[what began as] ‘non-consensually assigned X at birth' became 'coercively assigned X at birth', probably just for the sake of an easier-to-pronounce acronym,” prioritising linguistic convenience over theoretical accuracy.
The issue lies not in authorship but in epistemology: the way CAGAB was conceptualized reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of the language it draws from, a language born out of a system in which coercion is not conditional or occasional, but inherent and structural. The concept of sex assignment at birth originates from intersex contexts, where it names a specific regime of biopolitical control often enshrined into law. This regime is defined first and foremost by violations of bodily autonomy, where consent is structurally impossible and harm is retroactively justified as medical necessity. Including, but not limited to, irreversible, non-consensual medical interventions, prescribed rape, and mutilation, rather than the medical neglect, gatekeeping, coercive control, and social conditioning trans people also face.
Framing coercion as a way to make sense of trans experiences isolates trans trauma as uniquely coercive, suggesting that non-coercive assignment exists. It overlooks how gender roles are forced onto everyone (especially queer individuals) and that perisex trans people face the enforcement of gender throughout their lives, whereas intersex individuals face both the enforcement of gender and the construction of the sexed body itself from birth. The phrase claims to address gender, yet conflates it by re-encoding sex categories as if they were gendered experiences. The terms originated from a conceptual misunderstanding of AGAB that equated multiple distinct axes of gendered experience, and their meanings have long since collapsed through perisex misuse. The conflation of coercive control, Socially Imposed Gender (SIG - link), rearing, and birth assignment into a single concept seen as indistinguishable and one and the same is driven by the majority perspective.
It is not just misuse—it reflects a broader pattern: a majority misapprehends a framework originally shaped around minority experiences, repurposes it for themselves, and erases its original connotations in the process. A member of the relative majority took an inherently coercive system, misunderstanding and unaware of its depth; treated it as something that needed changing, and reshaped it to fit her own experience because she didn’t grasp what it meant in the first place. I can’t help but be reminded of the similar phenomena regarding "racist Karen"—as if "Karen" didn’t originally mean a racist white woman weaponizing her white privilege against racialized (particularly Black) people. The terms have been appropriated to such a degree that their original meaning has been obscured—so much so that people now treat what was already inherent as if it were a distinct, additional feature. For these and further reasons, many intersex individuals consider the terms inherently intersexist. On a separate note, as a species, we are required to eat to sustain ourselves, but we understand being "forced to eat" to live is different from someone being forced to eat by being force-fed.
She didn’t develop it from a place of reckoning with the medical system’s coercive control over bodies; she borrowed the language of intersex trauma and reformatted it to describe her own, without grasping its original weight. Her goal didn't seem to be about illuminating systemic violence, but to make describing trans experiences linguistically convenient.
When used by perisex trans individuals, these terms function as misnomers, category errors, and forms of conceptual appropriation (borrowing a concept and applying it to another context in a way that changes and distorts its meaning). Under this framing, “coercively assigned” misrepresents a system in which coercion is not incidental, but both foundational and systematic—a rule, not an exception—by portraying coercive assignment as unique to trans individuals, rather than acknowledging how coercion disproportionately targets them. Perisex trans people are not coerced into "correcting" their sex characteristics to be assigned a sex systematically in the same way that intersex people are coercively subjected to nonconsensual sex characteristic manipulation. Medical intersexism is rarely used to impose sexual characteristics onto perisex individuals—cases such as botched circumcisions resulting in vaginoplasty are nearly unheard of outside of David Reimer cited as the sole example. There have been perisex trans individuals with developed uterovaginal structures—particularly those transmasculinized—forced to take birth control in an attempt to feminize them, however, such events occur after infancy and target the enforcement of characteristics rather than the erasure of sexual characteristic nonconformity.
While the experiences are very real, more often than not the abuse described aligns with established patterns of coercive control. Using CAFAB/CAMAB to convey violence that occurs later in life and unrelated to nonconsensual sex characteristic manipulation obscures the specific language needed to describe distinct forms of violence intersex individuals face, such as forced, coercive, or "corrective" manipulation of their sex characteristics. If these terms are generalized, what remains—“surgically assigned”—leaves behind those who were subjected to forced exogenous hormone treatments to explain their trauma in explicit detail rather than having a colloquial shorthand. For some survivors, the shortest is: medicalized violence, medicalized rape, prescribed rape, being raped with medication, and legalized incest.
These conceptual failures and problems with CAGAB’s epistemology underscore why more precise terminology is needed to describe experiences of enforced gender, which I refer to as a “coercively controlled gender”—a framework I’ll explain in detail in the following discussion (link). The Tumblr post can be accessed here (link).
