“can transmen ever go stealth”
This is going to depend on your definition of ‘stealth’ and what it is you want to do to your body. Do you want to never have to tell anyone in your life that you’re trans, including sexual partners? If you want T, top, and lower surgery you can probably find some way of pulling that off. More if you want a meta. Want to do that, but don’t have any interest in lower surgery? That’s going to be pretty damned difficult unless you plan on never taking off your pants or ending up in a situation where you’re incapacitated (which you can’t really control).
I’m what I call ‘mostly stealth’ or ‘I just like my fucking privacy’. My doctors know I’m trans. The guys I fuck know I’m trans. *Most of the people I knew before transitioning know I’m trans. When I was still moving around a ton there was always one non-fuck who knew and was given medical power of attorney in case of emergencies. Very occasionally one of the teenagers I mentor will be told I’m trans (almost always because they’re considering transition themselves). Oh, and my boss knows because she got a gender no-match letter. In total in my current city I think six people know I’m trans and I live with four of them. My boss, my boyfriends, one of the guys in my theatre group, and the two teenagers I have guardianship of. Expand that to the rest of the country and the number goes up a bit, but still hovers around 0.5-1% of the people I know and interact with regularly.
I haven’t had lower surgery. I’m not likely to have lower surgery in the near future unless the options change. I’m 5’0″ and maybe 110 pounds dripping wet. I’m a small, rather atypical guy with a gender presentation that’s been described as “Kurt Hummel in Harry Potter”. I’m also lucky enough to have photos of cousins who are just as small and atypical as I am so that people assume late bloomers run in my family. Which they do, my father was just as scrawny and androgynous looking as I am until he was in his early 30s and he was a Marine. Guys who don’t have my particular family background will likely have a harder time brushing things off as “oh, it’s just genetics”. Luckily, you’re also far more likely to start passing within a year or two on T. With my genetics I knew that wasn’t going to happen.
That’s actually where problems come in. Many trans guys find themselves accidentally becoming stealth. T changes can happen largely without us noticing, especially for the guys who start passing quickly. One day you wake up and realise that none of your new friends know you’re trans and have to decide whether you want to tell them or not. For some guys that’s great, they wanted to be stealth from the time they came out. For other guys it feels like ignoring a part of themselves. It’s not really something you can know for sure until it starts happening.
So can trans guys be stealth? Yeah, sure. The bigger question is, do you want to be?
*This is an odd quirk of my own history I didn’t discover until after I’d started this blog. For most people everyone you know before transitioning will know you’re trans.