In Butler’s vision, then, medical professionals make children male or female by classifying them, and children are shaped into boys or girls, and later men or women, as they adopt the gender performance associated with their assigned sex/gender. It is now standard in transactivism to refer to people as AMAB or AFAB – assigned male/female at birth. Being trans is what happens when a person’s emerging understanding of themselves conflicts with the assignation made by the doctor or midwife – who, in effect, guessed wrong.
