As to whether I understand less or more I have no way of knowing. I may be completely mistaken as to my degree of understanding.
All I can say is that I have never been made aware of any shortcomings in my comprehension of either group, and as anyone who has ever tried teaching anyone will know, and I think this is similar to what Tekla was alluding to, the real difficulty isn't in teaching them new stuff. The real trouble comes when you have to get them to UNLEARN things which they had previously wrongly thought were the truth.
It's like many peoples view of being trans, is really heavily influenced by the things they see on the internet. Unfortunately if you search on the net for Transsexual, in amongst the factual sites like this one, you will find a good assortment of naughty picture sites which deal with people who, to my mind, are somewhat physically half and half by nature.
Nothing wrong with that of course, but its not what I am about at all, and that can sometimes create some really difficult misunderstandings, if I tell someone that I have a trans past, because the sort of man who gets his information entirely from the net then often assumes that I still have male bits down below, which I of course I haven't. And of course if I mentioned anything as complex as Androgyne that would get a million times worse, because they simply wouldn't understand that, in my case, I would simply be talking of a psychological ability to act as a gender chameleon rather than any sort of physical androgyny.
Now the thing is with some of these people, it doesn't seem to matter how much you explain to them that reality isn't like that. They simply can't get the internet images out of their heads.
On one occasion I had a particularly cretinous individual, whom for some reason I had decide to be open with. He proceeded to grope me and then angrily accused me. In his words "As I thought, you aren't really a tanssexual. You can't be, because you've got a vagina!" (the actual word he used was somewhat cruder though). He then had the gall to ask if I fancied a quickie! I honestly felt like banging my head on the desk! Although in some ways I suppose if it wasn't all so darned offensive it would have been quite funny...
When you come up against incurable and willful ignorance like that you start to realise that it really is not what you don't know that does the damage in life. It is what you don't understand that you don't know! He honestly thought he had it all figured. All transsexuals would always have boobs and a penis, and no amount of explaining to him about operations would penetrate his skull, because he had assumed that postoperative simply meant someone who had undergone silicone breast augmentation.
In other words as Tekla says, it's what we understand wrong.
So I fear I am going to wimp out on this topic and say that when it comes to assessing my own understanding of others, I simply don't know the answer.
