There's this seeming divide in the transfem community between those who regard their time in the closet as a time when they were nonetheless experiencing misogyny and transmisogyny, often framed as "girlhood" or "trans girlhood", and those who regard their closeted life as something closer to a "normal" boyhood.
I've had many awkward interactions when trying to argue that trans women were not "male socialised", as the occasional transfem will jump in to contradict me and say that she did have a "normal boy childhood". I've been told at times that, by describing my own life, I make transfems who don't understand their youth as a "girlhood" feel like they're fake or inauthentically trans.
I've often struggled with this, because so much of how I understand my own life is through the lens of desperation to find the words to describe a gender expression that has barely changed since I was a kid. Understanding myself as a woman has helped make sense of experiences in my youth that made no sense otherwise. Why was I talked over all the time? Why was I sexually assaulted so often? Why did I struggle to turn academic success into career success? Why was I underpaid compared to my peers? Understanding that I was viewed as a kind of girl (even as I was denied the right to name myself "girl") sites my experiences within the long history of women who have faced exactly the same kinds of marginalisations.
I understood "transition" as a kind of acceptance of a reality that has always been there, just a reframing of my self-image rather than a fundamental change in how I interact with the world. So discovering how many trans women didn't have childhoods like mine has been a bit of difficult experience, I've had to rework how I understand transition to make sense of it.
I now understand it like this: every "boy" enters the world without any particular idea of which kinds of behaviours are aligned with "manhood" and which with "womanhood". Childhood is the experience of pushing boundaries, seeing what happens, and adapting accordingly.
Every "boy" has likely had the experience of once doing something that aligns far more with "womanhood" rather than "manhood" (whether it be being softly-spoken and meek, crying over the suffering of others, calling out the misogyny of their peers, wearing a feminine item of clothing or make-up, expressing interest in a feminine hobby or piece of media, or anything else) and then being told such a behaviour is not an appropriate one for a boy, it's something girls do. The vast majority of boys will quickly learn and adapt. They will not feel any kind of internal struggle between their performance of masculinity and a deep desire to behave differently, they just think "Oh, ok" and go along with it.
Then there are the small number of "boys" who, in spite of being told it's inappropriate, continue to feel that deep desire to do whatever it was that was deemed feminine. These "boys" have two options:
They can keep doing the feminine behaviour, even as the social punishments, exclusion, bullying, etc, roll in. They will be under immense pressure to change their behaviour, but for whatever reason (perhaps autism boosting resistance to conforming to social norms) will just continue to do what they are told is "girly", often not even understanding why they should not be "girly" in the first place.
They can adopt a masculine mask, feigning no inclination towards the feminine behaviour even as they continue to feel it. This will confer certain superficial privileges, in the sense of avoiding the social punishments that come with "girliness", but at the severe mental cost of inauthenticity. Many autistic people who mask as allistic experience severe burnout when the mask has been up for too long, and so will it be for these "boys": inauthenticity and performance are so draining and make it impossible to live a full life.
If they keep performing even a small handful of behaviours that are socially read as "feminine", the "boys" in group (1) will experience misogyny from a very young age, and if they go on to transition will correctly assess their youth as a time when they lived as girls, being treated as girls, but without the language to describe it accurately until later. Transition is not so much a change in their behaviour as an acknowledgement of what their behaviour has always meant.
The equivalent "boys" in group (2) may avoid explicit misogyny for a long time, but, to use a phrase from gay and bi activists, "the closet is not a privilege". To be required to perform manhood to avoid punishment, even as you know it doesn't fit you, even as you really want to behave very differently, is not a "normal boy childhood". "Normal boys" do not suffer like this. Still, if they go on to transition and remove the mask, it will not be a mere perspective-shift but a major change in how they interact with the world.
To be a closeted trans girl is to be placed in an impossible bind: either be yourself and experience the most horrific social punishment, or mask and experience awful internal strife and self-hatred.
I think we can understand the diverse responses to the closet as a spectrum of an overarching whole, which is that none of us experienced anything like a normal boyhood, none of us were privileged by this experience, we all suffered heavily, and whether that suffering was internal, external, or both is a mere detail and not a major dividing line between us.
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