We who are transgendered: we are not the same as those around us. We are fortunate, in that we can see both sides of the fence; many people cannot.
Transwomen say: we can see how men interact with women when those men interact with us. At the same time, we can still remember how as men we used to interact with women. We can remember, too, how our hormones drove us to focus on sex.
Transmen say (I’m projecting now…): we can see how women respond to our advances, and we can remember how men used to interact with us. Now that we have our own testosterone, we can begin to understand the insistent drive for sex that made men always seem so crazy.
How we interact with our peer sex is behavior that is just as important to both transmen and transwomen as interacting with the now-opposite sex. When I was a man talking and interacting with other men, I didn’t do a very good job of it, just enough to keep myself from being beaten up; I was never “one of the boys” though I wasn’t often judged to be a sissy, either. Projecting again, I can guess that transmen mostly didn’t do too well when they were women among women.
To a large extent, how we relate to members of the same sex defines our own sex. A man defines himself by how well he stands up to and competes with other men. Head-to-head competition is male. I am still trying to figure out how women relate to each other.
For me as transwoman, though, it’s important that I learn how to be a woman among women — and neither dominate a conversation nor introduce maleness to it. I say this to transmen: I wish you good luck dealing as men among men. No matter how much iron you pump, and how much testosterone you take, you cannot fight every male you see. Yet you must learn how to hold your own among competitive males. I gave up trying to learn that.