My previous post about competitive victimhood got me thinking about my reasons for being here.

I've heard it mentioned that many of the men in this movement are here because they have been personally burnt by the system. They are the men who have been raped and ignored, been falsely accused of rape or seen the dark side of the family court. I don't know how true that is but I am not one of those men. I have been fortunate enough to never personally be on the receiving end of any of the serious injustices we discuss here.

Since subscribing to /r/MensRights I've noticed that there's a few trans women posting here and I did send one of them a private message discussing basically what I'm about to say/copy-paste here. I have also dealt with some pretty serious gender dysphoria. I decided against transitioning for a number of reasons and now accept living as a male. If I let myself, I still feel pain that my body and the role I'm expected to play in society don't match how I feel but overall I'm happy with my choice. I have a wonderful wife and we have a baby on the way.

This is a part of my life that, until now, I've tended to avoid mentioning using this account. ParanoidAgnostic is a name I've used for over a decade on multiple discussion sites. It was even my MSN messenger account name. So plenty of people I know in real life will recognize it. I now realize that, given the reaction many have to the men's right's movement, this revelation will probably be less damaging to my personal life than the fact I posted it in /r/MensRights so I might as well be open about it.

Back to why I'm here. I'd love to be able to claim that my rejection of gender feminism is the result of dispassionate analysis of objective facts but it all started because feminist rhetoric hit me right in the gender identity, repeatedly.

Male privilege was the big issue for me. I certainly don't consider being male a privilege. Not only did I see that girls were allowed the life I wanted, they were also largely allowed the life I had (if they wanted it). Feminism had done a great job of dismantling the rigid gender roles for girls and women but had left the, just as rigid, gender roles for boys and men intact... and then had the gall to tell me that being born male gave me privileges.

Feminist rhetoric also has a tendency to group all males into one group and then make statements about them. I for one did not appreciate being put into that box. I actually think, if feminists had let me feel like I was one of them I probably would have ended up on their side. Instead they grouped me with the oppressors. The best I could hope to be was a second-class feminist, a whiteknight trying desperately to make up for the evils of other men.

Finally, 2nd wave feminists seemed to have a real issue with transsexuals. I'm not sure what it was. Maybe they felt that because men were born inferior they could never rise to the status of women, maybe if men wanted to be women it put a dent in their "life sucks for women" fiction or maybe it's because they thought trans women were just trying to sneak into women's safe spaces and rape them. Whatever their reasons, it taught me that feminism was not on my side.

Later I learned about the legal inequalities and how anti-boy schools are becoming. Also, living as boy when you desperately want to be a girl makes you hyperaware of all of the double standards against males.

I was just wondering how many of us (either transitioned, transitioning or just putting up with it) there are in the MRM and whether your experiences and motivations were anything like mine.

Also, are there any trans men here? I'm sorry if my comment above (about masculinity being open to girls) trivializes your feelings. That was not my intention. I was simply trying to convey how I felt about the world while I was developing these opinions. I do understand that there's more to it than dressing like a man and doing masculine things.