How does it feel to spend 36 years in the women’s camp only to transition to male at a time when women are finding courage in numbers, and the world is finally waking up to the brutality of one gender towards another? It’s certainly strange, but perhaps not for the reasons you might imagine.

When I first started to transition, #MeToo wasn’t a thing, and my first experience of some all-male spaces left me very confused. I wanted acceptance by men as “one of them”, but couldn’t stand what I was hearing when there were no women around. It might have been a terrible excuse for disgusting language, but Donald Trump wasn’t wrong when he described his Access Hollywood comments as “locker-room talk” – even it doesn’t just happen in locker rooms. Silence or, as with the TV personality Billy Bush, chuckles seem to be the standard responses if you aren’t willing to join in with that sort of misogynistic “banter”.

My instinct is to challenge any sort of -phobia or -ism, but when this sort of explicit misogyny was tossed around in front of me, I froze for perhaps the first time in my life. I was afraid that calling them out would result in accusations of “not being a real man” and betray my female history.

Stop asking trans people about our genitals and start asking us ​​whether it's true that men get taken more seriously

Such concerns don’t bother me now. Confidence came as my transition allowed me to “pass” as a cis guy and the realisation that my gender doesn’t depend on what anyone else thinks. But when you are in that in-between place – just after coming out but before you’ve transitioned – it can seem incredibly important that everybody around you gets your gender “correct”. It has taken me a while to get comfortable with my trans identity, immersed as I was in our transphobic society. The #MeToo movement has helped. I could be just another man trying to mansplain – but I am not. I am a trans man who has lived both sides and can play a useful part in these discussions.

Having felt in the past, like many women, as if I were alone in experiencing sexual harassment and structural inequalities, to see so many now find their voices is beautiful. At last, women are expressing their anger, loud and proud. The irony, of course, is that I’m now on the “outside” of that movement. I’m one of “them” and I feel the loss of the lesbian community I was once part of. It’s strange, and often lonely, to feel unwelcome in places that used to be safe.

It’s easy to understand why it must be that way. As a trans man, I don’t get to demand female privileges, few as they are, simply because I lived as female for 36 years. But those years of lived experience don’t just evaporate because I flushed the oestrogen from my system. They helped shape who I am now as much as the testosterone and surgery has. Perhaps more so. On the flip side, trans women are being denied full female inclusion because they once identified as male, in spite of how they experience life now. I understand the difficulties this all presents. But advantages one may have had in the past because of your gender do not erase difficulties you may face once you have transitioned. Equally, disadvantages I may have faced as a woman cannot be deleted from my lived experience now that I’m a man.

Trans men who transition are conferred many, if not all, of male privilege’s benefits, but that doesn’t take away what went before. If #MeToo is about holding cis men accountable for their actions, no matter when they happened, then we can’t ignore what trans men went through before they transitioned.

Trans people are uniquely placed to give insight into this whole matter. We know what it’s like on more than one side of the gender coin and can speak clearly on the different ways we treat men and women, and everybody in between those two ends of the spectrum. For example, I know that my opinion is apparently more important now I’m a man. Groups of teenage boys that once loomed menacingly over me as I walked home don’t even register my presence in any discernible way. On the flip side, men have no problem shoving me so they can stand closer to an attractive woman. Women who might have once nodded “hello” to me on a quiet street now cross the road and pick up their pace.

Trans people have hundreds of stories that would enlighten a polarised “debate”. Explicit, gendered abuse I used to receive regularly writing as a female football fan stopped as soon as people started seeing me as male. My views on football are still the same yet, somehow, they didn’t render me a “stupid bitch” who should “get back to the kitchen” any more. Men stopped threatening to rape and kill me, too. Being a man clearly has its advantages. We trans people are a real walking, talking gender experiment, yet few seem interested in the results.

It doesn’t matter how I felt inside for those 36 years. The world saw, socialised, categorised and treated me as female whether I wanted it or not. I know what it means to live in this world as a woman and want to use my status as a man to help this cause. Stop asking trans people questions about our genitals and start asking us whether it really is true that men get taken more seriously just because they are men. (They do: trans men report they are taken more seriously, trans women less so than before they transitioned). Men listen to me more now. It’s like I’m a secret undercover agent, pushing feminism and undermining the patriarchy from the inside. And it is the structure of patriarchy that allows me to do this.

If we’re including people in the #MeToo movement based on their systematic repression at the hands of a cis-run patriarchy, then trans men have a useful role to play.

• Lee Hurley is a writer from Belfast covering football, Arsenal and LGBTQ+ issues