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I think this is actually a core worldview difference here. I'm well aware that people act differently in single-gender vs. mixed-gender spaces, and in my teens and early 20s actively avoided being in male-only spaces because there's a subset of men that act like assholes in male-only spaces. I'm not entirely certain if I've stopped encountering that due to selecting friends better, older people just being more mature, or just rarely finding myself in male-only groups, partially because essentially all of my socializing is now in explicitly queer-accepting or queer-normative spaces.
The idea of anyone I know acting differently purely based on the gender distribution of the group they're in, strikes me as strange. Sure there's significant personality differences based on the size of the group and awareness of sensitivities of certain individuals (e.g. not making sexual comments around prudish people). But as I said, I also mostly socialize in queer spaces where gender is naturally going to be treated differently.
I am not the person you responded to but I think this must be true, the groups you sound like you prefer sound like a nightmare I'd run from. They sound like female dominated groups that have always been incredibly exhausting to be around for me. The dynamics are incredibly different and it really sounds like there is an entire experience that you have managed to never have in male only socialization.
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Gender is an useful estimation of the sensitivities of individuals. If I'm in an all male group, I'd be careful about making an off-colour jokes and slowly dip my toes into dark humour. Because those jokes can make people laugh the most and get the best reaction, but could also cause a really bad reaction. If I'm in an all female group, I probably wouldn't even try. There are some girls who are as fine as any guy with off-colour humour, but if you take a group of ~6 random girls, there'd almost certainly be at least one who'd be deeply offended.
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But if you treat groups differently based on whether they are male by sex VS male by gender, isn’t that an admission that trans men are in some fundamental way different in personality than natal men?
I'm not sure how you got that from my comment. But also, I don't think I knew any (out) trans people before my mid-20s, so I can't make any strong claims about how I would have acted around them at that time.
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Do you act differently to people you find attractive?
If by "find attractive" you mean the extreme of "have a crush on", then yeah. Mostly along the lines of being super-shy if it's someone I'm both very attracted to and don't know very well or if I know them better probably less shy and more just trying too hard to impress them in stupid ways. I don't think anyone enjoys being around people who are acting infatuated, though. And that doesn't exactly come up a lot, especially if hanging out with more or less the same friends group (and as I'm no longer an adolescent with raging hormones, those emotions are probably just less strong when they do happen, although one of those examples of me acting like an infatuated idiot happened in the past month...). Also, I'm not going to claim to be immune to the halo effect, so I probably act differently around people I find attractive in ways that I don't notice.
... but I'm not quite sure what the point you're making is.
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