Men Have Become So Much Worse Now That I’ve Transitioned

Photo by Vinicius “amnx” Amano on Unsplash

One of the things that anti-trans people tell me over and over again is that I am not a woman. That because of my chromosomes or genitalia or some erroneous evolutionary biology, my feelings and experiences should be discredited.

And yet, I have lived as a femme person for years. I am gendered correctly by strangers. I get read as a woman at restaurants, and banks, and on dating apps. In truth, I have received few complaints about my womanhood from the people around me.

And most prevalently, I am treated by men like a femme. I am catcalled and harassed. I am degraded and humiliated, just like the countless other women around me.

It’s different now

Since I’ve transitioned, men have terrified me. This past year, a man has followed me on their motorbike, asking for my number. A man has trailed me outside a cafe door, asking what my plans are for the rest of the day. A man has struck a conversation with me in the middle of dinner at a restaurant, inappropriately touching my thigh.

Men weren’t great before my transition, either. I had experienced harassment in predominantly gay spaces (see The Case for Queer People to Talk About Sexual Violence), but not at this ubiquity. Men will message me on social media apps, and they will bring a level of obsession to their comments that was not as prevalent before my transition.

They will tell me they are driving 75 miles to see me. That I’m hotter than their wives. That I need to commit to a relationship with them before ever meeting.

Women used to tell me how bad men were to them, and I nodded, but I’m not sure I emotionally “got it.” I didn’t understand the entitlement.

Since transitioning, I have been shocked by the constant nagging and harassment men do when they don’t get their way. I wouldn’t respond in time to a comment and get called an “ugly bitch.” I would pick up my phone and find men angry that I didn’t reply to them, sometimes within seconds of their messaging.

I was not treated this way before.

Granted, I wasn’t treated well as an effeminate gay man, but there was a level of respect that has just vanished from many (though not all of) the men around me. I am treated like a nonperson more. Men don’t include me as much. They hear me less, and I find it can take several tries to impart what I am trying to say to some.

Unless, of course, I offer up my body, and then their fixations become so intense I worry sometimes what will happen if I say no. I have done it several times, and it’s completely different from when I was a man. I could tell men no during sex, and they mostly listened, but now it’s often a negotiation. I tell men no, and they try to argue. They make little promises they do not intend to keep and must be reminded of my humanity before agreeing to stop.

“You respect my choices, don’t you,” I’ve asked.

That usually works, though sometimes more begging is required. I need to make them realize they aren’t bad people, and that work makes me wonder if their goodness is just a story they tell themselves.

My sisters and friends tell me that eventually, I won’t have this problem as I will become invisible instead. I will go unheard and unseen in my old age as I find a secluded place on the margins. And that would be almost okay if I did not need the tools and resources men control to exist there, too. I fear I’ll still be begging for resources as a secluded spinster in the woods.

I never got why women put up with terrible men. “Leave his ass,” was the first thing I would say as a man. Because there are half-decent men out there, but as a woman, I know that half-decent men don’t run the world. There aren’t even that many of them.

I get it now. I cannot hide away because the margins are not a sanctuary but a tightrope — one too many women fall off of.

A gendered conclusion

It makes me so angry when anti-trans advocates call my feminity into question and tell me my gender isn’t valid because I experience sexism. I experience misogyny. If women have a shared trauma over men — so much so that many would rather come across a random bear in the woods than a random man — then it is a trauma I share.

I get the mistreatment of women so much more than I ever did as a man because I directly experience it. I have the before and after receipts to prove it.

I wish I didn’t have to to prove my femininity.