If I were AMAB…

[KeirSpoutsTwaddle]

It’s a thought experiment really as I don’t think this can happen, but…

If I were assigned male at birth, and brought up as a boy, everyone would assume I was a boy (a bit like The Wasp Factory, must reread it.).

When I hit my teens and puberty started, I’d start to get curves, and eventually menstruate. I wouldn’t follow the pattern my male peers did and see my voice drop, testicles and penis grow, hair on my face and that whole brow and jaw thing.

Would the world continue to treat me as male despite being quite petite and rather curvy as blokes go? Would I be defended as a man who hadn’t ever become butch and indeed menstruates?

I’m intrigued by the way no one seems to be able to process being incorrectly assigned female at birth and then maleness becoming apparent at puberty. They are seen as women who fail to meet western beauty standards and are exceptionally good at sport.

So this isn’t about specific athletes, or the over representation of athletes with specific DSDs in high level sports.

It’s about whether a curvy, menstruating boy can be considered a man, without taking testosterone and all the massive health issues that brings.

Am I being unreasonable to think everyone would point out there’d been a mistake and I’m actually a girl?

If you presented as female and were female bodied, the world would treat you as a woman. People who knew you already would continue to treat you as you indicated you wanted, I imagine.

You wouldn’t be a “curvy menstruating boy”, you’d be female with a DSD.

Your sex is not “assigned” at birth; it is observed and noted.

Yes. I can’t imagine any amount of mentioning my birth certificate would stop men pinching my bum.
Even in typical men’s wear of jeans T-shirt and trainers.

Be hard to tell chaps that shout at you when you’re jogging that they’ve misunderstood and I’m actually a bloke just like them.

Yes, but in my thought experiment it was observed and recorded, as it turned out incorrectly.

The word would probably treat you as female. It’s hard to know what you would feel you are. I was observed female at birth and had a typical female puberty. If I’d unexpectedly had a male puberty it’s hard to know whether I would suddenly accept that I wasn’t female and would accept myself as male. I know many disagree with the idea of ‘feeling’ female but I grew up in the knowledge I was a girl and if at 13/14 suddenly I found out I wasn’t I don’t think I would have just been happy to call myself a boy, I suspect I would have continued to assert that I was female, in which case maybe others would have gone along with the same.

Yes you would be regarded as a woman. The men/boys would treat you as a woman the minute you developed breasts.

Women/girls would accept you as “one of us” and sympathise with your plight in having grown up thinking you were one sex when you were the other.

i think it’s clear from examples like transmen in gay saunas and the Hampstead swimming pools fiasco that men have no difficulty at all in identifying women and no guilt about protecting their single sex spaces - not that they should feel guilty, all power to them, but it’s not reciprocated for women’s single sex spaces.

YANBU because in a rational society people might feel sorry for you and the difficulties that your unusual genetics had caused you but that wouldn't stop them recognising that you were a woman. Regardless of whether you knew or believed that you were. Material reality is what is.

What we have is an identity focused society where some say you are exactly what you claim you are. Weirdly, people on both sides have tried to make points about whether individuals of uncertain sex currently wear or previously wore dresses, hijabs, trousers - as if any of that that has anything to do with what sex they are. In that society, pointing out that actually you were mistaken when you believed you were male would be seen as unkind, if not outright inaccurate.

I've even seen the argument that 'person X doesn't identify as intersex, therefore they aren't, they're a woman' which is ludicrous, and not just because the term is outdated.

I think that the problem of establishing external attitude is also largely to do with stereotypes of male virility and how males should present, particularly in conservative, religious countries like Algeria. Not having a penis will, for many people in those cultures, continue to = woman or at least “not a proper man” regardless of what any test might say about chromosomes. That will ultimately make it far more difficult for an individual mid-assigned and raised as female to accept that they are male and particularly for others to accept that they are male.

@ComtesseDeSpair excellent point. OP I thought no one else had read The Wasp Factory. It's a really good segue into this 😊

Ok, but if I were born in Algeria, raised as a boy, then suddenly developed breast and menstruation, I suspect they’d be pretty damn quick to downgrade me to female status and remove any male privileges I may have been enjoying.

And in many other patriarchal countries or indeed anywhere there are traditionally different roles for men and women. Almost everywhere.

I loved it, but read it years ago! I can’t remember how it resolves and what happened in puberty so I need to reread.

There’s a programme coming on R4 I think. I need to look it up!

Interesting thought experiment. I think underlying so much of the debate around athletes with DSDs and also the trans rights activism, is a tendency to protect the category of 'man'. So in effect the two sex categories are 'real man' and 'non-man'. It is why babies born with ambiguous genitalia are generally recorded as female, and I suspect it is why so many men are happy to declare that transwomen are women.
So in your hypothetical case, you wouldn't 'cut it ' as a man, so would be regarded as a woman.

“Assigned at birth” has been wrongly hi-jacked by trans activists to suggest the recorded sex of babies is arbitrary, and essentially meaningless, based on the social prejudices of parents and doctors. Only the child can ‘know’ its gender, its sex does not matter.

But originally, “assigned” was used in a fair way, referring to what had happened to children born with DSDs whose sex later during puberty turned out to be different from the sex they had originally been thought to have been at birth. (This is less likely to happen now I think.)