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"Life experience" is a brutal and punishing demand to put on trans women (by design), but I haven't seen people talk about how meaningless and weird it can seem as a requirement for trans men.
An AMAB person wearing women's clothing (and doing other presentation things to signify 'woman') is not culturally equivalent to an AFAB person wearing men's clothing. They're so different, in fact, that requiring "life experience" for trans men becomes near meaningless.
An adult AFAB person could easily wear boys' clothing from the age of 3 and never once be perceived as anything but 'sporty', With a short haircut maybe he'll have been seen as a butch lesbian, but even that depends on how feminine his features are and local style.
Instead of brutal and degrading (BY DESIGN!), for trans men a life experience requirement becomes pointless. It can even feel like lying is being demanded by the system to make it seem like a useless concept has relevance to our lives.
Depending on the femininity of one's features and the local style, the idea that you would be perceived male OR EVEN GENDER NONCONFORMING can be laughable.
For myself, I wore men's clothes for 5+ years before I transitioned and there were people in my life who had no idea- people who said they'd never even thought of me as gender nonconforming. Was that life experience?
Did life experience start when I told a few extremely close friends and family members I was planning to transition (about a year before I started hrt)? Should I have done some extra thing for another year to make it count as "life experience" in a male gender?
What could you even do? Wear a he/him nametag everywhere you go? Have a pronoun conversation with each and every waiter/cab driver/grocery clerk? It's meaningless. So trans men fudge the truth a bit, to flatter the docs that their dumb requirements are meaningful.
These requirements were developed to make things as difficult and humiliating as possible for trans women- a punishment to shows you're "serious" before the docs will help you. And they're just not applicable to trans men. We can't be punished that way. We're too invisible.
Even if you're pro-gatekeeping (I'm not), a professional w a solid understanding of gender and trans life shouldn't need an arbitrary length of lived experience to answer the question of whether this is a longstanding desire & the patient understands what they're in for.
I'm speaking mostly from the experience of those not seen as masculine even wearing clothing from the men's section, but of course the opposite is true as well. There are AFAB people who will be perceived as gender nonconforming regardless of how femme their presentation is.
It's not true that women aren't punished for being gender non-conforming. However, the gender nonconforming things they're punished for are more often masculine features they're born with and have no control over, less often clothing choices.
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