"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.
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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.
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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?
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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?
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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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I'm feeling this whole thread. My 'life experience' was age 15 to 40, and I made damn sure I made that clear. I never dressed female, not since 4th grade. I claimed 'hippy' status, easy in the 70s. Engineer boots, leather jackets, and blue jeans. long hair still.
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YUP. I had a span of trying to present femme in my 20s, but from 16-22 and 28 and up I shopped exclusively in the men's department. Long hair sometimes (shaved head in college, men's haircut 33 to present).
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I started wearing men's clothing from I don't even know probably jr high at least? Grade 6 I finally got to cut my hair short. I lived like idk, 10-12 years in an amorphous state of "guess my gender", it's made transitioning to full-time male treatment very surreal.
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