The Machine

Dissecting my transmasculine relation to my natal body.

12 April 2025

Preface: Recently, a lot of online discussion about transmascs is about how many of us, unfortunately, have a vulgar attachment to our natal body, birth sex, assigned gender however you want to state it. The examples brought forth in these discussions are usually very extreme, heinous displays of transmisogyny. Bratty, teasing statements about being "glad to have this body and not the gross other one", and housing ads taunting “Queer friendly but AFABs only” are most commonly shared, and for good reason. The people doing these things, and worse, sharing them on their online platforms are doing themselves but more importantly, transfemmes a disservice. They’re being disgusting and exclusionary and bigoted no matter their intent or internality. However, as many things on the internet do, the discussion about this phenomenon has been washed through rounds of telephone and created new threads of discourse, now removed from previous context. And I don’t really want to get into the process of internet discourse. But, in the more tangential discussions, the ones that become standalone statements about how “theyfabs don’t experience dysphoria” or “non-transitioning transmasc enbies are the weakest link” or “cissexual transmascs weaponize their agab” there’s a growing sense of hatred toward the general demographic of what is essentially “feminine transmasc”. And especially someone who appears this way and is unafraid to discuss the troubles they face in relation to their physical body, whichever of various forms they have. I think unfortunately, discussions of reproductive dysphoria, discrimination, abuse, and misogyny have been “feminized” in a strange way, especially in relation to transmasculine people. It becomes a sort of “nono” topic in our communities. Something we all know to be true but are afraid, or maybe ashamed to discuss. And I think this growing tangential hatred is making the issue of silence worse. And, even, in some cases has resulted in a similarly growing ideology that we, as a group, do not face any issues on the basis of our natal bodies, and that to say so is to be bigoted. Bigoted against ourselves as transmasculine people (“You misgender yourself when you discuss your AGAB”), and bigoted against other groups, namely women (“You steal attention from the voices of women. You obfuscate and confuse the issues of women when you speak up about yourself.”). Honestly, I don’t know why I’m writing this preface. I think because I feel like I have to account for this broader cultural context that this piece is being written in. That I have to tell you, reader, that I’m aware there are transmascs that will use some of the things I say in this essay to hurt others and that I am not one of those people. But perhaps it’s just better to say:

TERFS FUCK OFF AND DIE

Sometimes online, I see a transmasc sloppily trying to explain something specific. Tripping and stumbling over “AFAB” and “Socialization” and being shit on for these foolish indiscretions. And even more sometimes, I can see past these mistakes to see the root of their claim. It's usually an expression of solidarity directed at folks who share a similar trauma-induced body connection that I've seen in myself and most of the transmascs I know and interact with. A connection built usually upon body horror and abuse. A connection (most dysphorically) shared by some cis women and also unfortunately assigned a gender of its own as a concept. In this piece, I write about what I feel those people are trying to say, and throwing my hat in the ring for how I think it should be said, from a transmasculine perspective.

The Defining of a Body

It's long been stated and discussed by people older and wiser than I that the "female body"* is uniquely surveilled, scrutinized, abused, taxonomied and policed under patriarchy. This reality also lends itself to the existence of transmisogyny, in large part due to these usual affronts being magnified for trans women and transfemmes whose bodies are scrutinized against impossible, ever changing expectations and definitions that cis women are often bestowed grace when navigating.

*when i use this term i mean bodies that society at large has deemed female in appearance and/or assumed function (but most notably reproduction, in the case of this essay)*

As a transmasc my connection to my body is, of course, fairly negative. I think a common story among the demographic. I know some cis women could relate to this as well, but the layered aspect for many of us transmascs is the Gender of it all. The seemingly unwavering association between my organs and femininity that harms our sisters too. I can’t know but I'm so sure I wouldn't be so afraid of my insides if they didn't scream at me when I tried to converse. If their depiction were sterile and truly clinical and devoid of anthropomorphism of any kind, I believe I'd still be childless but not clawing at my torso, imagining my own funeral while menstruating, and calling it a bezoar in poems. If only the parts of my body were not defined by someone else as genderful. In some ways, a distillation of the gender, even, an essence. A concept I hate both for its harm of myself and for those who seek this essential definition but cannot have it. This definition functions as a kind of double sided sword, that pierces the ones most likely to wield it. But yet it persists. It persists inside and out the trans community. And it certainly persists inside our cis families, coworkers, friends, neighbors. It lays at the center of their gender beliefs, collecting dust maybe, but in the way a macguffin does. Ever important, ever looming, essentially true to those who keep it. And often it feels like there’s nothing I can do to change that.

Many of us were born with bodies The Man called female. And even though we'd later come to disagree with The Man, it couldn't be stopped. Before we popped out, our mothers were discussing how many of our own children we'd birth and when we popped out, we were asked what type of mothers we'd like to be. and then something happens when one first gets a sense this is wrong. For me, this was very young, I believe I was 5 and I had my first crush. She was a girl and I remember thinking, how could we have kids? 5 years old and denying myself love because I could not populate my womb with it.

I naively told my mom about this crush and, of course, her response was that this was abnormal and wrong, but notably, she said "you need to marry a rich man and make a family". It stuck with me that she felt the need to bring up my potential to incubate when I expressed gender wrong (because the hegemony of heterosexuality makes it tied to “correct” presentation of gender). It stuck with me even more that I had policed myself in this same way before she ever did. Her intent for me and my gender and my womb, so deeply soaked through my being that my child brain adopted it before I understood what it meant.

It made me feel like one day I HAD to become pregnant to a man because this was right and good. I so wanted to be right and good and if I'm being punished, then I must be wrong. It became moral for me to populate my womb, especially by and for a Man. This, by design, also functioned to strongly link femininity with birthing and child rearing, as most of my gender wrongs were met with some mention of my future family.

As I grew up, life was a constant state of grooming me to incubate and often using my body's ability to do so as a punishment. I was given baby dolls and instructed on how to care for them properly. I was punished when I expressed more interest in toys of animals than humans, and I was punished when I expressed anxiety around birthing. I was denied certain activities because of their unsafety but would watch my boy best friends take part. I came to understand the protection of young “girls” was also tied to our reproductive abilities. When I was 6, older boys at daycare asked me what kind of genitals I had and lifted up my skirts, one said I had "birthing hips", something my mom would regularly say to me as well, which made me believe this was a neutral or even positive statement for older boys to be saying to me. When I was 7, my best friend exposed his penis to me and pinned me down, saying "I want to make a baby with you". When I reached 10, my parents began to lament that I didn't "show off my figure" enough, "boys dont like that", they'd say, to me a reference to my duty to marry and create. At 12, I got my period and my family celebrated a milestone of gender and birthing "you're a woman now!" they announced, while I played RuneScape on the family computer.

Puberty began and the hips the boys told me were for birthing grew and grew until I felt as wide as the house I was. Boobs grew and my mom was excited I had big ones as "they're easier to breastfeed with" and also "all men like big ones". I started to grow a sense of abject fear that I WOULD birth, that my body was made to do so and I couldn't stop it and it would be done unto me if I didn't do it to myself. It felt truly inevitable as I watched my body make a home for an imaginary child I hated and then shit that out onto my cool jeans, my hello kitty blanket, the chair at school. I became afraid of and disgusted by sex, as it was the activity that would kill me with its produce. I directed rapists to other holes to at least avoid the spawn. Funnily, I sought solace in medical textbooks, where the clinical, dry depiction of reproduction soothed me. The diagrams didn't say if she was a wife, if she liked pink, if she liked to collect pocket knives. She was just there, and naked and pregnant. Untouched by the gendered marketing my parents preached to me like the bible. By the divine feminine bullshit my mother had latched onto to deal with her own prescribed purpose. There were no moon goddesses or pink and blue balloons.

The Machine

When I was young, like very young, just a couple dozen cells, my mother and her crew pulled out schematics of the new machine she was growing. The machine was not unlike hers, but newer and younger, and more full of possibility. She created mood boards, fantasizing about what could be made with this machine - doctors, lawyers, big money makers. About what she would have made if sent back to her fetal state. She decorated the moodboard with images of the sorts of people she’d love to run her baby’s machine. Big strong men with chiseled jaws and do-nothing attitudes. She imagines her baby will be spunky and plucky, but not so unusual that it would deny its true form and purpose. That it would deny entry.

The crew and family delight in this process and contribute their hopes for the machine. The types of products they hopes it creates. Wishes for the machine to mature quickly so that we can see it come to its true fruition.

When the machine is born, the adults swarm it, cooing into its half conscious face about its future uses. About its purpose. And as the machine grows, this cooing becomes more imperative, more stern. In part because it’s no longer just the machine and its avatar anymore, is it? The avatar has grown a personhood that we have to pretend to respect in order to best actualize the machine and its purpose. Statements and requirements. Reminders. Friends at school remind you of your machine. Rapey young boys leer at the parts built around your machine. Compliments relate directly to the machine.

As the machine takes form, and runs its first test run, spilling blood onto my hello kitty blanket, those around the machine celebrate. Excited by this first hint that the machine is working properly. That it will soon Produce. My center widened along with my hips to make room for the machine and its Products, and now my favorite clothes didn’t fit, and I had to sit on my scooter differently. I run my hands along my flesh and feel new portions I didn’t used to. When I ask why they’re here, I’m told they serve the machine and its operators. I try to starve myself to stop these parts from growing, and I’m screamed at by my petrified parents who are not concerned about my possible death, but instead their terrified pleas state, “you’ll ruin your machine.”

Finally, I grow up old enough to leave these people behind. But when I go to the doctor, all they ask about is my machine. When I direct their prying eyes to other ailments, they tell me I could not possibly be aware something is wrong with me, machine vessels never are. They charge me for tests on my machine, when I beg them not to.

Finally, I grow up old enough to see myself for who I really am, but when I try to tell people, I notice they’re speaking directly to my stomach, or the chest that feeds it, when they say, “Oh, really? Are you sure you’re not just a machine?”

Finally, I get a doctor to agree that my machine is dysfunctional, that it’s harming me, but when I ask to remove it the doctor speaks passed me to an invisible, unreal operator, “do you intend to use this machine, sir?”. I ask a different doctor what I can do to assuage the machine, what research has been done about my disease and I am told all research is about maintaining the integrity of the machine, that they’re sorry to not have any answers about my comfort or well being.

But the machine is too loud, it’s too broken, I hate it too much, I fear deeply its produce. So I force it to submit to me with chemicals. The funny thing is, the chemicals trick it into believing it's fulfilling its purpose. The solution to my problem with the machine is still a mere capitulation. When I want nothing more than to fucking kill it. Pull it out, eat it. Consume it so it’s inside of me the way I choose for it to be.

But you won’t let me. No one will. The machine rules everything around me.

The Attempt to Redefine

When I became an adult and recognized my transness, I thought I could tailor and edit the constant bombardment of gendered birth I received. I thought if I got trans community, if I stopped pretending to be a woman, I could escape this label of broodmare. But I was foolish for this. It never goes away, not for me anyway. I keep my boobs to be my globs of goo and society tells me feed some kids. I try to get this awful organ removed from my body and the doctor misgenders my wife, he fully invents a husband to steal my agency. I look for a new obgyn and get blasted by information on how to birth, venus symbols up at the office. I try to buy tampons to not be as reminded of how this monthly thing makes me feel, and the aisle is called "feminine products" and it's all pink and the condoms across the way are black and blue.

I've tried to fully dissociate from my birth sex or whatever but, no matter how hard I try, everyone else wont allow it. They've gendered my organs to hell and back, they've seen my physical form and graded it on its ability to bring them new shapes to play with. I want to be brand new but I feel like every time I open my eyes there it is, in mundane places. The corner behind the bed, the toilet, the grocery store, the doctor, television, moms generally, family gatherings, endometriosis treatment. I’ve tried to sit down and write theory that ignores this background, but I can’t. It seeps into everything. It’s driving me Edgar Allen Poe crazy. And then I get online and see folks saying “just drop your agab, leave it behind! We’re trans after all!” and I want to scream from the rooftops HOW!!! “Am I doing something wrong”, I wonder in my lowest moments. Am I not being trans properly if I’m still being misgendered this much. If forced gendering of my body bothers me this much. If I can’t just ignore it. If I can’t accept that the way I’ve been treated as a result of my physical body is irrelevant. I don’t think so.

Unfortunately, I'm still a broodmare, and I still get misgendered the most when being told about my birthing potential. So it feels I'm chained to my body, forever attached until maybe when I get the organs out. Maybe then things will be different, I tell myself. But I also know it's not just them. It's the aforementioned boobs, the birthing hips, the way my face looks - it reminds you all of my ability to incubate. And you can't help but tell me. Even trans people. And I often wonder where this leaves me, and the other folks who experience this, in conversations of leaving your ASAB behind. Of shedding yourself of its influence and existence. It makes me realize what folks usually mean when they say that is something about passing. Because they're interlinked. Your ability to ignore what people decide you are is directly related to what they're currently deciding you are. But then there's the organs again. Are you really free if you look like a man but your uterus still screams at you. If when you Google, amidst tears, relief for your endometriosis and the results display: WOMAN FEMININE WOMAN DISEASE FEMALE DISEASE DISEASE OF FEMALES FEMALES WOMEN WOMEN FEMALE FERTILITY.

In times like these I think of my brothers who choose to carry children. I think they have truly left their asab behind and I admire them. I like the idea of abandoning your ASAB while using the parts it gave you. Recontextualizing. But they seem stronger than I feel capable of, which is funny because the biggest difference between us is that I don't want children. For whatever reason, maybe trans ones, the thought of growing a person inside me makes me want to do awful things to myself. And I have yet to square if this is wholly because of my transness but I assume it is because in my most scared moments, my mom's words ring in my ear. The soft flip of anatomy book pages soothes me at the doctor's office. Maybe, if shit had been different I'd feel something like love, or even apathy, for my uterus. I try to sometimes, I imagine it as a goo factory. But it feels like playing with dolls. Empty and wistful.

The Solution

So what do we do? Well I tell you what we don’t do. We don’t fall down some TERF pipeline just because some folks in the trans community are a bit reactive to poor wording in discussions of ASAB. We also shouldn’t pretend like this shit doesn’t shape our existence. I think in some ways, this kind of incongruence, that sort of constant denial of the forced gendering, is the essence of transness. I think most of us are doing this all the time, constantly. And I think this process can look different for different people, even inside demographics. So we shouldn’t be trying to one-size-fits-all our theory and ideas, especially the practical sort.

But, I do think we should and need to talk about this. I think the fear inside transmasc spaces to discuss the unique experience of this birth grooming makes sense, and I understand how it formed. Both out of dysphoria and a kind of misguided respect for folks who cannot birth. But it will remain this heavy, this loaded, until we take it and beat it out and get all that gunk out of it. There can and MUST be real, productive, helpful discussions of forced body sexing/gendering that don’t shove intersex people aside, and that don’t moralize a type of body or a set of social circumstances.

When I discuss how this grooming shaped me as a person, I don’t do it do be a fucking doomer. I don’t write this to say “and so I lay down and die and let everyone call me a broodmare woman”, I write it to say people do this to me and say this about me near daily and I continue to consciously reject that as a trans person. I continue to reject the idea that “Women make babies” because it’s harmful not just to me, but to anyone and everyone in the Woman Class. And I believe it to be the foundation for much of misogyny, this erroneous categorization.

I also think that reproductive rights and realities have always been a bit derided in more modern feminist spaces (and not wrongly). I think that people got fatigued by the period blood art of the 2000s and the pussy hats of the 2010s. And I think this is true in part because those groups of people had malformed, underdeveloped feminism that continued to uphold these as totems of The Woman, rather than realities that were first attributed to women by The Man, in order to subjugate them. There was this sort of confusion about reclamation. This concept that men think periods are gross, and so the feminist concept is to think they’re beautiful. And while I find a kind of naive kindness in that, I also think it is useless politically. Instead, I want period blood art made by transmascs that is actually horrific. That tells the reality of expressing blood and pain every month in service to a process you may or may not give any shits about, but is 110% gendered despite your protests. And that while this is happening, not only are you more gendered than usual, but everyone shits on you for being moody or gross, or smelling bad or something. Or I want more objective, clinical depictions of these things, like a nail polish I saw the other day based on how menstrual blood looks under a microscope. Or a deeply personal essay from a trans woman about what her cycle means to her. I think the path forward is personalized. And, I know, my mogai is showing, but truly I think that the more we diffuse the concept of The Period or The Uterus, the less power they can even hold as concepts. The urethra is a wildly important body part, we’d die without it, but it is not so spiritually defined as the uterus. I believe we can make the uterus the urethra. And I believe that should be the goal, the same as the goal for sex at the moment is to itemize its definition until it’s impossible to ignore its conceptual unreality.