When my online handles became more traditionally feminine, I started getting an awful lot more unsolicited instruction from men. I hadn’t forgotten what I knew, and I wasn’t asking to have the basics explained. I was still contributing to conversations, only now somebody else seemed much more comfortable assuming I needed help. The irritating part wasn’t disagreement. People had disagreed with me before, and sometimes they’d been right. It was the feeling that we now had to establish whether I understood the subject before we could talk about the point I’d made.
I can’t tell you what every stranger was thinking, or attribute every irritating reply to the name attached to my comment. There were condescending people on the internet before I changed anything about my profile. But the change in how often I noticed it was difficult to ignore, especially when the explanation didn’t seem to respond to what I’d actually said. I’d find myself being talked down to about something I understood, wondering what in my contribution had suggested otherwise. The name was different. The knowledge behind it hadn’t suddenly become less reliable.
Being corrected is something I can do something with. I can reconsider an argument, learn something I missed, or admit I’ve got it wrong. Being treated as though I probably don’t understand before we’ve got that far is harder to respond to. I start wondering how much explanation I’m supposed to supply before my contribution gets read on its own terms. It’s exhausting to anticipate that extra work, and it makes me angry partly because I remember not expecting quite so much of it. I liked being able to get straight into the subject. I hadn’t appreciated how much that ease depended on what people assumed about me.
My partner and I have had a lot of conversations about these differences, including some that are almost ridiculous enough to be funny. Pockets are one of them. They’ve had years of dealing with clothes that don’t give them a useful place to put things, while I’d been accustomed to having one without giving it much thought. I didn’t regard a pocket large enough to hold something as a favour the clothing manufacturer had done me. Now I’m looking at that missing bit of usefulness and wondering why I’m supposed to accept it as part of buying clothes I like. Wanting a different shape or cut hasn’t done anything to reduce my need to carry my fucking phone.
Other conversations are much harder to laugh about. My partner has described having medical concerns dismissed, and I listen with anger at treatment they’ve had to deal with that I hadn’t encountered in the same way. Those are their experiences, and hearing about them doesn’t give me their history. It does leave me asking why having to push to be taken seriously should become something a person learns to expect. I understand that being accustomed to it isn’t the same as accepting it. But I struggle with the idea that I should become accustomed to it too, as though lowering my expectations would be a sensible part of adjusting to my life.
There’s something uncomfortable about being the person who’s still surprised. My partner isn’t describing a world that started behaving this way when I began noticing it. I need to hear what they’ve been saying, not just announce how unreasonable it is. We could share a life and still have very different expectations about the reception our concerns would get, and my astonishment is mostly telling me how much I hadn’t had to think about.
That’s what I mean when I talk about having benefited from being perceived as male. It doesn’t mean my earlier life was easy, or that being mistaken for a man felt good. It means there were situations in which that assumption appeared to spare me a kind of resistance I’m more aware of now. The difficulty I had understanding myself didn’t stop someone else from giving me the benefit of the doubt. I’m talking about my experience of particular advantages, not handing every trans woman a past she may not recognise. I also haven’t lost everything that helps me get through the world simply because some of its responses have changed.
The word privilege can sound like something I should have noticed receiving. In practice, the things I’m describing often felt too unremarkable to examine. I expected to have my point considered, and I expected ordinary practical things to accommodate me. When that happened, I didn’t necessarily wonder whether somebody else would’ve had to work harder for it. Recognising that now doesn’t require declaring every good thing in my life undeserved. It does require being less confident that whatever went smoothly for me was simply how things worked for everybody.
I’ve described transition as swapping teams in the patriarchy, although that makes it sound much more orderly than it’s been. I didn’t sign up to exchange credibility for the right to be myself, and the people responding to me don’t all make the same assumptions. A feminine name can change an interaction without the other person knowing anything else about me. In another situation, being known to be trans may be part of the reaction, and I can’t always separate that from being treated as a woman. There hasn’t been a single clean transfer from one experience to another. I’ve just started finding that some expectations I carried with me aren’t being met.
I resent losing those things without wishing I’d stayed where I was. Being taken seriously was pleasant, and I’m not going to pretend it was worthless now that I notice its absence more often. The problem is that it could depend on a stranger’s guess about my gender. I wanted to change how I lived, not agree that my judgement deserved less consideration. There’s no reason to treat these frustrations as proof that transition was a bad decision, but there’s also no reason to call them an acceptable price for making it. I can want this life and object to how people behave towards me in it.
Sometimes I wonder whether part of the hostility from men towards trans women has something to do with perceived betrayal. I don’t know how often that applies, and I’m not pretending it’s an explanation for every person who is transphobic, but suppose someone believes being a man is inherently the better position. A person they assumed belonged in that category now living openly as a woman might trouble more than their expectations about appearance. It could look to them like a rejection of something they think everyone should want, particularly when she doesn’t describe the change as a loss. From inside that belief, her happiness might be difficult to account for without questioning the value they’ve attached to being a man.
Add the willingness to talk about differences in treatment, and I can imagine that looking like disloyalty too. Someone they might once have assumed would agree with them is now saying that an advantage was real, that it wasn’t distributed evenly, and that women weren’t inventing the problem. I don’t mean that men possess some shared secret I’ve brought across with me. Plenty of them recognise inequality, and women have been describing their own experiences without needing me to arrive and provide the sermon on the mount, as it were. I’m interested in whether someone invested in that inequality could resent me for refusing both the position they assigned me and the silence they might have preferred. That’s a possibility I keep thinking about, not a motive I can read off somebody’s face.
The betrayal framing belongs to that imagined observer, anyway. I haven’t developed a new moral position simply because a different name is attached to what I say, nor do I owe loyalty to an unfair arrangement because I happened to receive something useful from it. What feels new is the immediacy of the comparison. I can remember how an interaction felt before and notice how it feels now, while listening to people for whom my new frustration is already familiar. That makes me less willing to let my former comfort stand as evidence that the arrangement was fair.
It’s also why I get stuck on the claim that feminism has made men unhappy. I hear that and want to know what, specifically, the person making the accusation thinks should be restored. The accusation alone doesn’t answer that question. Someone might be struggling with loneliness, expectations they can’t meet, or a life that hasn’t given them the connection they wanted. I’d like them to have support with those things. But I need more than the fact of their unhappiness to accept that women’s freedom caused it, and I’d want to know how reducing that freedom is supposed to help.
If the answer is that women should have fewer choices about leaving a relationship, less independence, or more obligation to arrange their lives around men’s needs, then the proposed comfort has a cost somebody else is being asked to pay. That’s when I want to ask whether the happiness being mourned depended on women’s subordination. I don’t think every unhappy man wants that, and I wouldn’t make the accusation just because someone was hurting. But when those are the conditions being offered as the solution, I can’t treat the result as a return to something harmless. Being able to refuse an arrangement is part of what makes agreement mean anything to me.
I know enough about feeling out of place to have no interest in laughing at men who are lonely. Being expected to cope without much help can be miserable, and I don’t want misery to become a competition over who deserves attention. What I can’t accept is turning that need into a claim on another person’s affection, time, or obedience. I want the men I care about to have relationships they can depend on, with people who genuinely want to be there. I can’t imagine feeling secure in love I had to make harder to withdraw, and I wouldn’t want someone else made less free so I could feel less afraid.
Thinking about this has made me examine my own irritation more closely too. My first response is often that I didn’t have to put up with this before, so why the fuck should I now? That’s an understandable place to start, but it would be a piss poor place to stop. I don’t want an exception based on my having once been treated differently. A woman who’s never had that comparison shouldn’t have to find somebody else’s history to justify wanting the same consideration. My memory can help me recognise what’s happening. It doesn’t make my objection more deserving than hers.
I don’t want to spend every conversation defending my right to have it. I’d rather disagree about the actual subject, be corrected when I need correcting, and learn something without an assumption of incompetence being built into the exchange. I’m still going to use the names that feel like mine and speak about the things I understand. Some days I’ll have the patience to deal with a patronising response and some days I won’t, but I don’t need to become comfortable with it to prove I’m comfortable being a woman. I want the ordinary consideration I remember, and I want it for the people who didn’t get to take it for granted alongside me.
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