Yes, I'm a man, but I'm still me...

Obviously many folks won't relate to this and I want to say, up front, that my feelings and experiences don't invalidate yours. Despite knowing I was trans since early teenhood and trying to transition in my early twenties, I am just starting (almost 3m on T, hurrah) at 30. I think if I'd transitioned as a teen or in my twenties, this wouldn't bother me as much.

But I'm noticing that friends and acquaintances are having a lot of moments where they look at some part of my personality and attribute it to me being a guy as if "it all makes sense" or, and this is what hurts, forgetting entirely that my being a man doesn't actually erase or invalidate the experiences I had in all of the time I was socially perceived to be a woman. You know, the time during which I experienced five pregnancies and gave birth to four people. The nearly a decade I spent being called "mommy" by my kids and strangers.

I recently tried to express to a group of friends some strange observations I'd made as other parents or people in public started thinking I was a man, and somehow I ended up in a situation where I had two young, childless lesbians trying to explain household gender roles and inequality in the division of parental labor to me...a stay-at-home parent of four kids. I tried to cut them off to remark that I wasn't trying to make a point about all men / families, rather I was citing my experience, and they bluntly cut me off because they felt like I was aggressively not listening to them or respecting the female perspective on the issue.

Like I'm still me!! I'm not a caricature of a man. I'm this three-dimensional being who has had a huge amount of life experience as a "woman" and a "mother". While I know I'll need to learn to navigate these spaces with caution and respect with strangers, who won't actually know that about me unless I share first, I didn't expect my friends to flatten me so much. It's pretty isolating and sad. I'm not chill because I'm a man. I'm not a processor of feelings vs a feeler of feelings because I'm a man. Can we just let me have an identity that accounts for me as a whole?