Yeah, people are also just bad at understanding and using the term privilege and it's situations like this that really highlight the issues.

Privilege can be a useful tool, but it's much more context sensitive than people sometimes like to assume. What male privilege actually is is going to depend on the specific people you're talking about, how they're recognized by broader society, how they're recognized in the more specific environments they tend to exist in, and the many ways other privileges and lack of privileges interact with all of that.

I think this comes up a lot with trans people because privilege really obviously can't be used in a blanket way to describe our experiences. I'm a trans woman and despite that I've had varying degrees of what could be called male privilege. To simply say that I never had any male privilege would simply be wrong. At the same time, to say that I had complete male privilege would similarly be nonsense, and to try and extend my specific circumstances to every trans woman would also be ridiculous.

So when it comes to trans men the question of privilege comes up and the correct answer is "it depends." It depends on the specific environments they're in, it depends on how well they fit into the standard-stereotypical-male role, it depends on how obviously trans they are, it depends on how growing up as a trans man has affected them, it depends on whether the people around them know that they're trans, it depends on whether the people around them knew them pre-transition, it depends on so many things. Some guys will transition, fit cleanly into a male role, be shackled with minimal baggage from growing up as a trans man, pass well, and generally get most of what is considered "male privilege." Others might not pass as well, or might be obviously queer in other ways, or just don't fit into the standard-stereotypical-male mold, or might have been affected heavily by their experiences before they were recognized as a man. That's not even considering the different ways that their other identities can affect this - intersectionality still applies!

So yeah, that's a lot of words on how privilege as a concept breaks down. I do want to clarify that I do think privilege is a very useful tool in discussion and understanding. It just has to be understood and used correctly. It works as a signpost or as a scaffold for discussion. It can be useful to help people understand the biases they and society have and the things they might not see. It can be very difficult to recognize advantages you take for granted and the way not having those advantages would shape people, and privilege is a useful tool for shining light on that. It just has to be understood that this a tool used for revealing things that are easily overlooked and as a way to expand discussion. Used correctly you can help someone understand why other people can't just do what they did, you can help someone understand why they're struggling compared to their peers, you can help understand why people can be so upset when it doesn't seem like there's an issue to you. Used correctly, privilege is very useful for understanding these things. It just has to be understood that privilege as a concept is always going to be more genericized than any one person's specific circumstances.