I see this get brought up a lot in discussions about gender, usually with a slant that emphasis male privilege. So I decided to see I if I could find anything where transgender people discuss some of disadvantages of being a man.

In this article, transgender men report having more authority as a man, but a plethora of downsides as well:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/local/wp/2018/07/20/feature/crossing-the-divide-do-men-really-have-it-easier-these-transgender-guys-found-the-truth-was-more-complex/

There are four different men who wrote short essays for this. And while the question of which gender might have things better isn't really asked, it seems like the first two see things as being overall negative for men, with the third one seeing things as being neutral (an equal amount of give / take), and the last one as being positive. I think it paints a pretty fair picture and is closer to what I imagined it would be.

While a few examples might be trivial, these ones stand out:

  • The first guy is a black trans man and his experiences cut pretty close to issues that MRAs already talk about concerning police violence and the intersectionality of being a man and also being black. The experiences of black men are probably closer to that of white men than they are even to black women (given how surprised he was with how the police and other people behave, despite having already been black his whole life as a woman).
  • One thing he noticed was how nervous people were around him, especially white women, who would look at him and clutch their purses. At one point he even had the police called on him, and noted that he understands why black men run away in those situations.
  • The same guy had a very real fear of false allegations, especially from a younger woman who stalked and harassed him for over a year (if he turned her down, would she make it into another #MeToo incident?)

  • Something similar happened to him when he was a woman, and he felt that his complaints of sexual harassment were taken much more seriously then. When he was harassed as a woman, he felt safe and protected. But as a man, he was fearful. He couldn't get anyone to take him seriously, the police would probably cause more harm than good, and he was afraid that people would believe a story that she made up over his.

  • The second guy mentioned that your opinions as a man get invalidated because of feminist rhetoric and words like "mansplaining" (something that, having once been a woman, and a feminist, he now sees as sexist).

  • He mentions that men are discriminated against in female dominated fields.

  • There are other examples of double standards surrounding sexism, including the general attitude that men are "assholes". It's considered OK for a woman to voice that opinion. And if you speak up as a man, you're seen as the bad guy for daring to question it.

  • Of course women generally expect men to be nicer to them and open doors and things like that. But it's not just men; other women are also nicer to women than they are to men, which is something he never realized until he switched genders. At one point he even had a woman basically shut a door in his face instead of holding it open for him (an accident on her part, but she would have expected him to hold the door for her, so it shows how blatantly unaware and inconsiderate of other people she is in comparison to how she expects to be treated in return).

  • There are also double standards towards mental health. A woman who misbehaves is said to "have a problem" that needs fixed, whereas a man who misbehaves is simply assumed to be a bad person and is not deserving of any sympathy.

Despite the wide range of "negative" social attitudes that trans men experience, the positive aspects really just circle around to having more authority. One man talks about how he was more confident at his job (in part because he now identified as the correct gender). And the other talked about how he noticed that women in meetings are listened to less, which is something he remembered happening to him when he was a woman. I don't want to brush over this as being trivial -- certainly I can see this as being a very clear example of male privilege. But it is interesting that this is the only example of male privilege that they discovered. Whereas examples of discrimination and sexism against them crosses a very wide range of topics. Including at least a couple of incidents that were very serious and life threatening.

There are a few limitations of this kind of logic though. Mainly that trans men don't grow up as a man, and in general don't have as many years of experience being a man.

The experiences of trans women are probably about the same, but I will point out one additional caveat here. Trans women sometimes have a harder time "passing" as a woman, even after surgery.

One other related resource on this is a book written by a feminist who pretended to be a man for a year. She did this in order to "prove" that men had things easier than women. But she actually found that men have things a lot harder. The book is called Self-made man: One woman's year disguised as a man by Norah Vincent if you want to look it up.