“The reality is often transgender men such as myself are left out of the current narrative on reporting about transgender people as is the intersectionality between our sexual identities as well as our gender identities. Frankly there is a quite obvious media assault on the reputation of trans women, so much so that trans women and femmes are daily demonized in the media to be regarded as “predators” as reported through such bias cishet conservative channels and lenses, for example; FOX NEWS.
In these publications our community is consistently villainized with the line of rationalization that these publications attempt to gaslight the public through is that of pretending to champion the safety of women by portraying transgender women as obscene creatures who must be “dangerously lurking in the shadows of restrooms” when in fact that is not the case. My existence as an openly proud gay transgender man completely not only debunks the gaslighting about transgender women because if transgender people are so dangerous why do you never hear about a singular transgender man or woman attempting to assault anyone in a restroom or threaten their safety? You simply do not because it does not occur. The true monsters of society more often than not are men – cis men who have a well known documented high rate of violent crimes against women and children for hundreds of thousands of years.
How conversations in the media surrounding transgender people like myself can be better is to number one, include the people you are discussing and our view points in articles that are speaking about our community. I can not count the amount of reporting on my transgender community that has not been inclusive of us or has allowed us the opportunity to speak for ourselves rather than hear about our community through the controlled bias agenda of conservative cisgender individuals who are ignorant to the reality of what it is to live a trans life.
In addition to this education on trans issues and language as a whole must be studied by journalists as to how often “transgenderism” is utilized or “transgenders” when both in fact are not words and are as derogatory as they are grammatically and socially ignorant. All in all you can root it back to the patriarchy and misogyny because when you boil it down the cisgender conservative media reports on trans women as if they are cis men when they are not. We do not see this happen to transgender men like myself because it does not serve the bias media ’s narrative that these bigoted publications wish to push about transgender women so transgender men as a whole are left out of all reporting on trans issues when in fact as AFAB people trans men like myself have most likely some of the most valuable insight to the very real threats women in society face from cisgender heterosexual men due directly to having experienced gender discrimination and harassment as being perceived as female for much of our lives, in addition to that of the experience of privilege most men have daily after we have transitioned we can see how dangerous cisgender men are because we know how they act when women are not around.
Cisgender men and biased conservative media are the true threat. Always have been. Certainly not transgender women and not transgender men. Protect the Dolls.” – Dylan Thomas Cotter