FTM

FTM stands for female to male. It is shorthand for a trans man, or for the direction of his transition, and it comes out of medical and community writing from a period when transition was described as a journey between two fixed points.

It is still widely used, especially in medical contexts, in older communities and in the names of forums and support groups that have been running for decades. Plenty of trans men use it about themselves without a second thought.

It is also going out of fashion, and the reason is in the words. Female to male frames a trans man as having started as female, which is not how most trans men describe their own history. Transmasculine has largely replaced it, because it describes a direction without conceding a starting point.

The mirror term is MTF, male to female. Both are commonly written as FtM and MtF, and both belong to the same generation of vocabulary.

The practical rule is the usual one: it is fine as a self-description and a poor choice as a description of someone else. If a trans man calls himself FTM, use it. If he has not, transmasculine or simply trans man is safer and says the same thing.

FTM does not mean someone was ever female

Read literally, female to male describes a change of category, and that reading is what has made the term fall out of favour. Most trans men would say they were always male and were assigned female, which is a different sentence with a different subject.

The abbreviation survives because it was useful when the only writing on the subject was medical, and because it is embedded in the names of communities that predate the current vocabulary. Understanding it that way is more accurate than treating it as a claim about anyone's history.

Saying it well