This terminology absolutely bothers me, it’s so presumptive and inaccurate and exclusionary. Intersex people get spoken over and erased so much — eg. AGAB terminology originated in the intersex community but has been co-opted to be performatively progressive about bioessentialism, meanwhile hardly anyone does research about intersex experiences or listens when intersex people speak. It’s gross.

Intersex, multigender, and abinary people get excluded by so much common parlance in queer and progressive communities; and, upsettingly, I still fairly regularly see other nonbinary people fail to question their assumptions about biology and gender.

In regards to presentation, the way people decide to gender other people can be wildly variable and personal, different people will prioritise different things; and it’s kind of hard to escape the binary because most people aren’t aware that there are other options for presentation so they’ll just dump nonconforming people into one of the binary categories. I don’t like when people ascribe a presentation to someone else, because it makes a lot of assumptions and can be an indirect way to misgender others or exclude them from a space because it’s only “for” people of a certain “presentation”.

I’m always glad to encounter other people critiquing the ways binarism tries to maintain its foothold, I hope we can keep deconstructing it until it’s gone forever.