Four years ago when I began my transition, the things I gravitated towards were blogs from America featuring confident, young, attractive, transgender men. I did not make a choice to transition, I rather reluctantly realised that this was just something I would have to do whether I liked it or not, so these seemingly happy successful bloggers were a real inspiration and aspiration for me. I felt that the more I looked for references to transgender people, the more I could not trust the mainstream media, as the news and documentaries I saw were portraying transgender people as some sort of spectacle for people to comment on. Sadly this is something we still see today, as our social media timelines are filled with clickbait articles exclaiming “Man who used to be a woman has a baby with a woman who used to be a man!”
The fact that a loving couple have conceived a child does not usually make the news. However, if they are transgender then that changes everything. Our stepping outside of the usual criteria for the nuclear family makes us something worth staring at. This led me in 2014 to wrap myself up in this American bubble, where people were transgender yet perfectly normal, which was refreshing.