One might be under the impression that transgender people have never been so visible nor been so accepted, from the Time Magazine cover declaring the ‘trans tipping point’ to the coming out of reality TV star Caitlyn Jenner, to more meaningful progress in access to medical treatment and human rights across much of the world. But visibility has always been a double-edged sword for transgender people, and while there have always been transphobic responses to trans gains (Germaine Greer, for instance, has been predictably awful for forty years), it was inevitable at some point that a substantial political backlash would emerge.

When Caitlyn Jenner, former Olympian and erstwhile patriarch of the Kardashian clan, came out as a transgender woman in early 2015, magazine editors around the world rubbed their hands together in glee. This is, I should note, not a new phenomenon: transgender women have been a figure of public interest since Christine Jorgensen made news headlines around the world in 1952: ‘Ex-G.I. Becomes Blonde Bombshell’. There was nothing new about Jenner’s story – it is no news to the world that transgender women exist – and yet every development of her transition has been recounted with breathless enthusiasm in gossip magazines and on Jenner’s own reality show, I Am Cait.

Forget The Crying Game. Forget Transamerica. Forget The Dallas Buyer’s Club. Dear god, forget Transparent. Forget every gross-out movie and sitcom plot and T-word punchline you have ever seen. They are all, in a word, bullshit. The history of the representation of transgender women onscreen is not a history at all, because it does not even represent the group ostensibly being shown.

At the time, the cynical among us may have remarked that all of this was in the name of building suspense for Jenner’s new reality show about her transition, and, significantly, not alienating her audience with anything too difficult – such as respecting a trans woman’s identity based on her say so. Some unkind people might even have gone so far as to suggest that Jenner was mobilising transphobia for her own personal ends: a reality star to the end, making bank from her difference.