After twelve years, it is still maddening. I have lived as a man and I have lived as a woman, and life is much easier as a man.

That subject was the theme of my memoir, As a Woman – What I Learned About Power, Sex, and the Patriarchy After I Transitioned. It was the subject of my first and third TED Talks, which have had over eight million views. I’ve heard from women from all seven continents (yes, including two women from Antarctica) thanking me for validating their experience.

For the last four years I served on my town’s Board of Trustees. In the first term I never felt dismissed as a woman. Our mayor was a woman, as is our town administrator. It felt good to be taken seriously. In the last term, not so much. There were male members who before arriving on the board, questioned my competence. One assumed I simply rubber-stamped what the staff suggested. When I was Paul, not once did anyone ever make that assumption about me. It was obvious I had my own thoughts. But as a woman, different story.

In this last term there were those who did not give me the respect I would have expected given my corporate experience, my years chairing a plethora of boards, my leadership abilities, and my accumulated wisdom. Rarely were they overtly misogynistic, but their assumptions belied their misogyny, as did their tendency to cut me off when I was speaking.

I have met with politicians who were mildly interested in the fact that I was mayor pro tem, but when I was talking with most of them, they had an eye on the room looking for someone else more powerful with whom they could engage. Once they found out about my TED Talks, books, and international speaking career, that all changed. But by then the damage had been done. Their glances over my shoulder had already told me what they really thought, that I was expendable, little more than talking wallpaper.

As Paul, when I could be helpful on an airplane I would offer my knowledge, thinking the other person would be pleased that someone who has flown three million miles was able to help them navigate the overhead space in the front of a 737-800. (Because the fuselage narrows toward the front, the bins are not as large as they are further back in the plane.) But for the last ten years or so, I say nothing. The poor souls turn their bags on end and try to slam the compartment shut, to no avail. But hey, as a woman apparently I cannot possibly know anything about complicated flying machines, so I keep my mouth shut.

What I did not include in my TED Talks was what I have learned about competition among women. As one of my close female friends said, “You missed the teenage years when we learned how to deal with the mean girls.” Over the past twelve years I have developed close female friendships and watched them crumble into dust in ways that never happened, not even once, with my close male friends. Until I transitioned, I never lost a friendship. As Paula, I have lost more than one.

Women know they have to fight for what they have, and protect it once they have it. The world does not hand them anything. My experience is that women are reluctant to empower one another. They understandably work from a scarcity mentality because opportunities are, in fact, scarce.

With the friendships I lost, I found myself confronted by female drama, something I had never experienced as a man. Since then I have learned to identify and avoid it. I back away the second I see toxic drama forming like some spinning tornado. Now I know why Paula, my girlfriend, generally prefers working with men to working with women. She has said, “If you are both competent and attractive, other women will try to take you out at the knees.” Good to know.

Still, the difficulties of female relationships do not hold a candle to the power I relinquished when I transitioned. Men almost never treat me with the same respect with which I was treated as Paul. There are a few exceptions, like Stan, Fred, Mark, Josh, Colby, and others. Interestingly, most of them are post-evangelical pastors.

It is not that people dismiss me because I am transgender. Most do not know I am transgender. They dismiss me because I am a female, and an older female at that. In American culture older females are functionally invisible. Older males, on the other hand, are granted positions of honor for their supposed wisdom. Four of our last seven presidents have fallen into that category, including one who is spectacularly devoid of the tiniest shred of wisdom.

I do not expect things to change anytime soon. When I watch the elk during the rut I realize gender arrived out of  a primordial soup that gave the male of most species more muscle mass than the female, and therefore the power to treat females as objects and possessions. It’s been that way for millennia.

The good news is that one species has evolved to the point in which males have developed the agency to allow them to grow beyond that misogynistic behavior. Now, if just more of them would exercise that agency.

And so it goes.