Selective Outrage: How the Left Erases Trans Men While Claiming Inclusivity

    Progressives insist they are the champions of marginalized voices from immigration policies to LGBTQ advocacy. Yet when it comes to anti-trans violence, their advocacy reveals a glaring hypocrisy: trans men, especially trans men of color, are consistently erased. Liberal organizations, media outlets, and Democratic leaders claim inclusivity while sidelining entire communities. This selective outrage not only distorts public understanding but undermines the credibility of the Left’s own movement.
    The current presidential administration—as per the official White House website—has a policy concerning gender and sex: “It is the policy of the United States to recognize two sexes, male and female. These sexes are not changeable and are grounded in fundamental and incontrovertible reality.” Regardless of personal opinion, it must be acknowledged that against this backdrop, Democrats continue to paint themselves as staunch defenders of transgender rights. Yet their rhetoric often collapses under scrutiny and exposes a deeper hypocrisy—one that undermines the very inclusivity they claim to champion.
    Liberal advocacy has a blind spot. The Human Rights Campaign (HRC) – the nation’s largest LBGTQ advocacy group – publishes annual reports on anti-trans violence. Yet in its 2024 An Epidemic of Violence report, trans men are barely mentioned. The HRC itself admits: “Underreporting and misidentification…lead to skewed statistics that fail to reflect the true scope of violence against trans male individuals.”

    Despite this confession, progressive leaders continue to build policy and fundraising campaigns around incomplete statistics. They know the numbers are wrong, but they use them anyway. As Reason bluntly put it: “Progressives betray trans Americans when their activism devolves into performative gestures instead of safeguarding basic rights.”
    The Left’s media allies are no better. Media Matters—a liberal watchdog network—revealed in 2025 that corporate broadcast and cable networks devoted just minutes total to fatal anti-trans violence in 2023. Even more damning, violence against trans men was almost entirely absent from coverage.

    This is not a conservative talking point; it’s liberals admitting their own failure. And when even their watchdogs concede that the media erases trans men, it proves the hypocrisy of a movement that claims to “speak truth to power.”

    The New York Times has also been called out by former staff for biased coverage of trans issues, with one trans editor saying: “Years of coverage ignored the realities of trans men, reducing them to footnotes.” These are not right-wing attacks–they are confessions from within the Left’s own institutions.
    Even Democratic leaders have deprioritized trans rights when politically convenient. Politico reported that centrist Democrats are furious with party leadership for mishandling transgender issues, warning that the party is “reading the public wrong.”
    California Governor Gavin Newsom–often hailed as a progressive champion–openly agreed with conservative commentator Charlie Kirk on restricting transgender athletes in women’s sports. When push comes to shove, Democrats will sacrifice inclusivity for political expediency. And trans men of color, already marginalized, are the first to be erased in this calculus.

    This pattern is not new. Scholars like C. Riley Snorton has documented this long invisibility of Black trans men in Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity. Yet despite this knowledge, progressive advocacy continues to replicate the same erasure. Even the LA Progressive admitted that legacy media–including liberal outlets like the New York Times–have failed trans communities by spreading “misinformation and panic.”
    Taken together, these patterns of erasure reveal a deeper contradiction at the heart of progressive advocacy. If the Left wants to claim to care about inclusivity: their own reports, media outlets, and leaders must not erase trans men of color. Advocacy that excludes entire communities is not advocacy at all. Until progressives confront their selective outrage, their credibility will remain in question.