Hm, I think I hard disagree that gender variance is tolerated more in women than men.

Even feminine looking women feel insecure in their gender, and rates of body dysmorphia are empirically higher in women than in men. Women often feel they have to “put on their face” using makeup and aren’t themselves or recognizable without makeup, whereas men are not expected to do anything to be “themselves”. Being a man is just a default, and as long as you have certain minimal gender traits (like a deep enough voice, a beard, etc.) you’re easily granted manhood. I’m primarily looking at this in cis folks since I think binary trans folks during transition are by definition not stable in their gender or haven’t “achieved” their desired gender yet (and non-binary presenting folks are forever ambiguous and left between genders).

Your experience of transitioning and the very real fragility you experienced (and many men both cis and trans experience) is not meant to be disregarded by discussing the severe insecurity and fragility of gender for women, in fact I know a lot of what you have experienced from being raised a boy and having a much delayed and relatively weak puberty. I wasn’t recognized in my manhood and constantly felt insecure in my gender as people expected me to be a man.

I also live in the deep south and was raised here, so the masculinity here is as you mention of a certain intense quality. Men are more fragile here and more likely to police other men in their gender, it’s true. Even as an adult living as a man it became a kind of sore point when interacting with certain kinds of men. I remember one time I was pleading with a line worker who was shutting off my internet to leave it on (I was in the middle of hosting a meeting and couldn’t get disconnected). The line worker after ignoring me and disconnecting my internet referred to me as a boy, which I experienced as a kind of dehumanizing refusal to recognize me as a man, and a statement that created a stark hierarchy. It was not just that I wasn’t a “man”, he was also implying I wasn’t an adult in his eyes, even though I had finished whatever male puberty I was going to have at that point and was adult by any other measure. I was a bit shaken by that experience, as those kinds of experiences were more common when I was younger, and for the most part adults were more mature and less likely to treat me that way. So I started growing out my beard as a safety measure (and as a form of self-neglect, and as a way to hide my face), and when city workers like that would show up I would crawl into overalls and boots and put on my best man-drag. I didn’t get confused for a boy after that.

So I agree that the fragility is very much there for men, and that the way it works is different for men and women. Still, I think it’s typical for cis women to work much harder for their gender than men, and it’s just empirical that women experience more insecurity and fragility in the gendered expectations. I think this stems from the fact we live in a patriarchal society where men hold a privileged position.

Here is a source about the body insecurities in men vs women:

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16801740/

It’s hard to properly compare the ways gender are enforced, especially when they can be so different. So I will just reiterate what you have said: there is fragility and enforcement in both genders, even if I think it’s well established that fragility is more stark for women in this society than for men. It’s true in different subcultures the shape of gender enforcement is different, and this is also just ignoring the obvious difficulties faced by any trans person whether men or women.

I know trans men struggle, I just don’t know why they don’t show up to support groups and participate in trans culture online and IRL.