After transitioning, my straight guy friends started to hit on me. It made me feel like a piece of meat.

• I hung out with my straight guy friends for the first time since transitioning.
• For the first time, they hit on me and started making strange jokes.

Earlier this fall, I was sitting around a coffee table with four of my best guy friends. We were preparing for another year of fantasy football, getting ready to draft the players we might ride out the season with.

It had become our yearly tradition, and this was the fifth time I had a night just like this. But this year was different. Instead of being a bearded man with sunken eyes and drinking half my weight in beer, I was a bubbly girl with turquoise eyeshadow matching the Miami Dolphins jersey I was wearing. I had a new name, new clothes, and a new pair of breasts sitting on my chest.

As much as I'd like to say I was the same person, that would be a lie. Transitioning made me much happier. But I wasn't prepared for how it would affect my friendships — especially with my straight, cisgender guy friends.

My straight, cis guy friends started treating me differently

Through much of my early transition, I didn't see many of my guy friends. I spent nearly eight months away from that group of people. They knew I was transitioning and supported me, but they didn't know just how much I'd changed in that time.

When fantasy-football time came around, I finally saw them again for the first time since coming out. As I began embracing a bubblier personality, budding breasts, and tighter clothes, the comments and jokes took a different angle. Instead of just talking about things such as gaming, music, and sports, they made observations about my body and how it was changing. They even made jokes like: "Let me see how your boobs are growing."

In a subtle but noticeable way, I could see them looking at me differently, scanning my body with their eyes in a way that I'd never experienced before. Men who I knew pre-transition were even making passes at me, talking about how "hot" I was and how "men would be interested in me if I wanted it." I felt like a piece of meat, and I felt gross, but also more like a woman in some twisted way.

Even strangers began treating me differently

Early in my transition, men treated me differently. I think it was because I took up less space, and it was harder to make my voice heard.

Men I'd never spoken to before started locking their eyes on my chest. I imagined they were trying to break the barrier between my clothes and my skin. Maybe they were just gawking because I was visibly trans.

But when I first expressed these thoughts and feelings to a female friend, she responded, "Welcome to womanhood."

It wasn't all bad, though. There were small instances when the men around me embraced my womanhood in a way that made them want to protect me. The time that sticks out most in my head is the first time I wore a woman's bathing suit to the beach, and a small family decided to scowl at me as my group walked back to the car. One of my male friends met their eye and scowled right back. I don't know if that friend understands how important that was to me on that day.

I was a woman and wanted to be treated and seen like one — not something different.

I'm learning to accept all these changes

Back at the draft party, it became obvious just how much things had changed. I wasn't a "new" person, but I was definitely different. I noticed it in the way they spoke to me and in the way they were navigating conversations.

The men who sat around me — while supportive and understanding — didn't have the life experience to fully empathize with who I was becoming.

I wasn't the man I once was. I was becoming more of a woman every day in front of their eyes. I don't yet know what that means for our friendships, but they definitely see me as more of myself.