MtoF and FtoM are part of the little ironies of life. As a MtoF I find it hard to and difficult to be male even though I tried for a great deal of my life. I am just female. However I can understand how FtoM find it just as hard and difficult to be female because they feel that they just don't fit. Being a female is no better than being a male and being a male is no better than being a female. Being female is just more natural to me even thought I was born with a male's body. Feeling and acting male is just more natural for some people born with a woman's body. So what!!!
The more effeminate I feel the better I feel about my life. This doesn't necessarily make my life easier or settle all of my emotional problems, it just means that as a female I am better able to cope with life. Emotionally my life makes more sense to me as a female. In a way as I realize that in general I was dealing with life emotionally as female while presenting as a male. So I just didn't fit in.
As to rather I really fit in now as a MtoF transgender that is open to question, but emotionally I know where I am coming from, even if many people in my world do not accept me as a female. They deal with the fact that I dress female and much of the time react to my world emotionally like a female. I am now Michelle (Michael) because the legal world I deal with has me labeled as a male. In my own mine I know that some women use the name Michael and I could pronounce it as Mishelle because ch can stand for /k/, /ch/, or /sh/.
These are just the mental adjustments I make for myself at 66 years old with children and grandchildren and brothers and sisters and nieces and nephews who now see me as female on Facebook, but who have lived with my male presentation.
Can I understand what FtoM experience, in broad outline yes. It's the reverse of what I am going through. Emotionally they thrive better as males and have to deal with the people around them as such. I have to deal with other females knowing my body is basically different from theirs. I am not interested in having sexual relationships with them as a male. In what ever sexual relationships I have I am a woman. I will never have male emotional sexual relationships. In fact I probably never had male emotional relationships in any of my sexual encounters with other women. Physically maybe yes, because of my male part, emotionally not really.
Many FtoM are basically emotionally males. Now some people maybe can switch between male and female emotional roles, but I can't. Because everybody is emotionally unique all I can do is share myself in hopes that it helps increase understanding, that's all.
For myself I am not a shapeshifter, nor am I a predator, so that when I am in what has been in what has been exclusively women's spaces, I am just one more woman sharing that space and I respect the privacy and the desire for safety that any other woman does. The truth is that in what space we share with others we have to accept that somebody may be lusting after us and seeking to exploit us sexually even to the point of physically assaulting us by some means or other. On the other hand we just might be a turn off to everyone around us. So what should it matter that I would rather share many activities with other females.
Either that or public facilities will have to adopt to all gender varieties. Maybe having male, female, and family or have more private spaces in locker rooms where people can shower, dress, and undress privately. Children could have children's spaces and everyone who has been a parent and had to change diapers that withing families everyone these days are familiar with male and female genitals in non sexual situations. In fact females who have the role of care takers, many from a very young age, have probably seen more male genitals, than boys who traditionally have never changed diapers have seen female genitals. Now with more equality of the sexes. Many boys and men are also having to change diapers these days.
All I am saying is that life is not all that simple in today's world as it was in the 1950s and 1960s when I was growing up. It wasn't that simple then, but most of us didn't know that.
So on a general level MtoF I feel can kinda understand what FtoM are going to have to go through in diving into the male world. And FtoM can kinda understand what MtoF are going to go through as females.
Both changes involve struggles as does all of life, its just as some of us deal better as females and others deal better as males. This doesn't mean that all troubles disappear, but we are better suited to the context in which we deal with them.
