Here's my parallel story, just so you can know that I'm coming from a point where I could be equally as bitter about the male experience.
Through my entire childhood, I was picked on and teased and made to feel like an outsider because I was weak, and emotional, and actually cared about women rather than being nothing but a walking sex-drive. (Yes, I actually did get teased for that.)
In 7th and 8th grade, those were the last years that I was openly myself. My voice hadn't changed, I had barely even started going through puberty, and I didn't want to. I loved singing soprano, I loved wearing short shorts, I was still watching cartoons and having 'secret clubs' with friends, I was shaving my legs as the hair started growing in, and you better believe I got teased a million times that year for being "gay" and a "->-bleeped-<-got" and wearing "daisy-dukes." Even my own friends teased me about that. And I was bullied like there was no tomorrow... people intentionally blocked me from getting into my locker every single day, stole my stuff and played "keep-away" with it, I got beaten up, and had to endure near-constant nasty treatment from people.
And when I asked my own therapist and my own Mom about it, how to end the teasing, the response was always something along the lines of "man up." So I was basically taught that the only way to stop people making fun of me, was to stop being different, and to become just as mean, uncaring, masculine, and tough as them.
And, well, unfortunately, I reached a point where I felt like I had no options but to listen. In high school, I stifled myself. I stopped wearing the clothes that I wanted. My voice changed, and I was devastated. I had to stop shaving my legs to avoid teasing, stop being open about my love of Pokemon and Sailor Moon to avoid teasing, hide any and every sign of gender conflict in my head, hide my true emotions, and basically just willfully stopped showing any signs of my internal gender conflict even though by this point I was absolutely screaming on the inside, to the point where I was failing classes because I felt so horrible about myself.
And every single day, I had to look at all of the guys around me playing this macho game, and I just HATED them. I hated how they acted tough, I hated how they used stupid stunts as some kind of proof of their manliness, I hated how they had to act completely emotionless, I HATED HATED HATED how they treated women like s*** and treated them like objects to be screwed and then dumped. I wanted to freaking strangle every single one of them and be like "you're a complete and total A**HOLE!!! I'm embarrassed to be considered a member of the same gender as you, you inconsiderate jerk!" And I was so bitter about how men had no right to express themselves, and niceness in them wasn't even rewarded, it was jerkiness that was rewarded, while girls could at least be tomboys in addition to being a stereotypical girl, while there was no male equivalent whatsoever. I seriously thought, how could ANYONE want to be a man? How the hell do they live with themselves?"
Basically, I was the equivalent of a man-hating radical feminist at that point.
And am I still bitter about this? Yes! Do I still seriously not understand how people could actually enjoy being male? To some degree, yes. I still have a bit of a hard time looking at the FtM "Before and After" thread, because I see people turning from a gender I admire into a gender I'm still bitter about. And every single damned time I heard my male co-workers at the Horseshoe bragging about their Vegas sex-escapades last year, I just wanted to scream.
The thing is, though, over time, I have mostly learned to get over it. I learned to filter out comments from people who I realized I hated anyway. Why was I letting these opinions and these expectations get to me if I didn't want to? I finally learned that I had the freedom to define my own self worth, and that I should quit letting others' expectations get to me so much. I started hanging out with my own kind... nerdy tomboyish girls who didn't care about society's standards of beauty and defined themselves by their talents and ideas, and guys who still enjoyed "childish" things and really didn't care about living up to some dudebro standard of masculinity. They do exist. And although I still remained in denial about my gender identity for years after that, getting in with that more neutral nerdy crowd who don't give two s***s about their popularity really helped me.
So again. We've both been hurt and disenfranchised by the societal expectations of our birth genders. I just feel a very strong activist-like sense of "It doesn't have to be this way. We can change this. I learned to define my own self-worth, so surely I can help others do the same."
I know I'm not completely over this either, though. I have so many emotional breakdowns in my blog it's ridiculous. And you've seen it.
