Evan Urquhart

"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.