[Serious] What are your honest thoughts on transgender people?

As a transgender man (FtM or "Female-To-Male. Essentially, I was born female, but identify as a man), my opinion is apparently controversial, but some transgender communities are less accepting of new people. Ironically, these are usually the ones with the youngest members. They'll never say this, of course, but in order to be accepted in certain communities, you have to understand everything out of the gate, and ask the least amount of questions possible. What communities like this don't seem to understand is:

  1. When transgender people first come out, they usually know about as much about being transgender as people who aren't transgender, besides what they feel. They don't even know what being transgender in society is really like yet because they just started, and will only truly learn these things from exposure to society while completely out of the closet.

  2. Google will usually not help when it comes to the more advanced information, unless they knew exactly what to search. Thus, some information would be more widespread and understandable than others. Since there's such a wide variety of terms and preferred behaviors, no two transgender communities are truly alike, and people who have been out of the closet for decades may still be completely lost in certain transgender communities when it comes to terms and etiquette.

  3. With age, transgender people usually figure out which forms of discrimination are a big deal, and which don't actually affect much. Unfortunately, we need to be exposed to normal amounts of discrimination in order to build a tolerance to them, and have improved mental health. This doesn't mean everyone should be dicks to us on purpose, but that we need to use what's there to help us. There are topics like lack of homes, employment, healthcare, and general safety that should be addressed most. While these issues are common in other minority populations, there are no legal protections in many places like there are for race and biological sex. In order to address these topics effectively, the transgender community as a whole needs to be the most level-headed as they can possibly be.

  4. If you view yourself as a feminist, taking voices away from transgender people who were born female should be a larger taboo, yet it isn't. These people did not grow up socialized as men, and are just as likely to have experienced some form of sexism before or during them transitioning to male or some non-binary gender. We do not live in a post-gender society. We do not live in a world where our childhoods have no affect on us. These people are only guaranteed a pass in the greater LGBT community, and are treated for better or for worse as women outside of it. In some groups, these people are even discouraged from discussing transgender topics as a whole that don't involve their small sliver of it.

/r/AskReddit Thread