"Uhh AFAB transfem people could be intersex-"
Without looking it up, tell me what types of intersex people would be assigned female at birth and simultaneously need to transition to being female. I don't think you know, because most of you were just using intersex people as a rhetorical shield for your real audience - cis women who aestheticize and objectify trans women.
I'm intersex, so I'll tell you.
- Sometimes intersex people have a complicated experience with being "assigned" a sex. Sometimes an intersex person is assigned female at birth and then coercively or even forcefully reassigned male later, usually during puberty. So in order to identify as a women they would need to subvert their assigned male status.
- People born with a micropenis or other forms of ambiguous genitalia pretty much have a 50/50 chance of being assigned male or female, it's kind of up to the doctor or ever how that doctor is feeling that day. What this means is that someone who was assigned female can have an identical body to someone who was assigned male. This means that an afab person can be born with a penis and go through a fully masculinizing puberty. Even if they're afab, they may feel the need to go on hrt, get bottom surgery, and go through a transition process that is identical to that of an amab trans women.
- Some intersex people don't consider their physical sex to be either female or male and may feel the need to transition to a body that they feel is female/male, regardless of what their agab is.
Essentially: Afab doesn't mean "fully recognized and viewed by society as female" nor does it mean someone with a typical female body/experience. It describes an event that happened at the beginning of a person's life. This event can have an effect on the experiences of people later in life but for intersex people specifically this event is often either traumatic or just plain inaccurate and doesn't describe how we actually live.
Many intersex people, regardless of agab, feel as though they have to transition (both socially and medically) into their gender. Sometimes this takes the form of people who were assigned female and have transitioned into being women.
And before anyone says it: No. Often times afab intersex people are not seen as women or even remotely female. There's a lot of people who believe that ALL intersex people, regardless of agab, are "males with DSDs". I myself have been told that I'm not female and there's nothing I could do to be female.
And since you all clearly want our trauma rather than "because our identities matter even if you don't get it" as a response, here are some examples of intersex people being forcibly feminized later in life than most of you all pretend happens to us:
As for "cis women who aestheticize and objectify trans women" - just say you don't see hormone disorders as intersex. Fun fact - for most of my life, I was diagnosed with PCOS. For all of my life, I had parents and doctors neglecting heart issues. Parents who got angry when I wanted to see a doctor.
Then I found out I had CAH this entire fucking time. Which looks like PCOS in certain aspects, but isn't. CAH comes with critical heart issues and is often met with cosmetic surgery on infant genitalia to reduce clitoral size, despite this not impacting the heart.
I didn't know I had that fucking surgery until this year despite being sexually active for nearly 20 years and always having complications and weird looking labia! :) My lifelong heart issues never even got medicated until I was 28!! My parents intentionally medically neglected me to avoid me finding out I was intersex!!
I'm saying this, not because I consider myself a trans woman (I don't), but because intersex people with hormone disorders are OFTEN who you bigots are referring to when you're talking about "cis women who aestheticize and objectify trans women" or "cis women fetishizing intersex people" or anything else in that fucking horrible, obnoxious, intersexist realm. Hormone disorders are called hormone disorders because doctors want intersex traits to be a fucking disorder. Not because of the heart issues or other actually treatable issues that ARE DISORDERED! And y'all aligning with this mentality is so fucking horribly bioessentialist and nasty.
Your limited understanding of natural human sex diversity does not give you the right to define transness for other perisex trans people, much less intersex trans people. Your inability to understand that intersex children and teens are ALSO reassigned and mutilated is YOUR ignorance, and demanding OUR trauma to educate your ignorant fucking ass is some nasty, pathetic bullshit. The fucking backbone on people like this who pretend to give a shit about marginalized people while directly harming us being made of pure fucking goop. Cowardice.