They were raised as little girls with all the female privileges and now they have taken their life back as men, they are realizing that the feminists weren't exactly truthful about a lot of stuff. (quotes from a post on a board I'm not linking to).

I miss being trusted around children

The few times I’ve talked about this, I’m been advised to simply limit my interactions with kids to professional settings and to my family/close friends’ kids. To be honest, I hate this advice. I get they mean well, but it’s essentially telling me that I need to adapt to these new expectations with zero validation of the fact that this is a sad thing for me.

Maybe it seems like this isn’t a big deal, but I find myself encountering this nearly every day. And for me, interacting with kids was a way I obtained a positive connection to my community. As an aspie, I’m not great at connecting with adults, yet I can connect with kids. When people saw me make their kids happy, they liked me by default. Now, they’re afraid of me, and become distant. I’ve lost a vital means of community connection.

I feel this immensely. Kids are hilarious, I love their curiosity. I catch myself talking to little kids at work (I work in a specialty café where they like to sit at the bar and watch us make the food, and I like explaining what I'm doing or asking if they want sprinkles etc etc, we're also next to a little museum so sometimes they want to talk about dinosaurs and I'm a huge paleo nerd) and then people are like, wtf? It's heartbreaking.

The reality of being seen or being male is suspicion towards kids. It makes me sad that my cis male friends have felt this way and i didn't realise it before now. I thought they just didnt like kids.

I haven't experienced as much of this directly, but I'm still much more self-conscious around kids. Relatedly, just the other day I was walking down a sidewalk after dark, and a couple was coming the other direction. They shifted position so that the woman was farther away from me. Was that just random coincidence? Maybe, but I've sensed that air of caution from other random women that I never did pre-T.

The fact of the matter is that men are viewed as more of a threat than women. It sucks for cis guys, too. No way to eliminate it entirely, unfortunately.

It sucks to think that right this second there is really no way to "fix" society into being able to think of men as parental, or as a warm and non-threatening presence around kids.