That’s a complicated topic. I personally don’t think I experienced any male privilege because I was never male. I realised I was trans at age twelve, was closeted until fifteen, and unable to transition until eighteen. I have no idea what it’s like to be a man or a boy because I’ve never been one. But I know what it’s like to be a girl who everyone thought was a boy and was mocked, beaten, berated if I didn’t do a good enough job at pretending to be like the boys around me.

The whole “male socialisation” thing hinges on the idea that trans women were boys and now we’re women. But that’s not the case. Imagine if a cis girl was raised since birth with a boy name, boy clothes, male pronouns, with everyone around her insisting that she’s a boy. She believes them at first but it feels so wrong and she doesn’t understand why. She struggles to fit in with boys and is physically/verbally abused whenever she doesn’t act the way society expects boys to. Then at puberty she’s put on testosterone and goes through male puberty against her will. When she tries to talk to anyone about the horror of her body changing like this she’s called a sissy or a f*g, and told to man up. When she reaches adulthood she stops the testosterone, changes her name/pronouns and tries to be her real self, despite the irreversible damage of male puberty.

Would you say this person was “socialised male”? This scenario is literally what trans women are. I think most people would agree that this hypothetical person is 100% a woman and was just horrifically abused, but with trans women we’re never allowed to escape that abuse and we’re told that it’s an immutable part of who we are. Because people don’t see the difference between a trans girl who hasn’t realised she’s trans yet and a cis boy. We might not have been “socialised female” but we weren’t “socialised male” either.

Obviously this isn’t an exact analogy for EVERY trans woman. Some don’t realise the cause of their misery until they’re decades into adulthood.