It's common for transphobes to see us as our gender only when it can be used against us. The trans man is a man only when being intimate with him would make you gay or when his masculinity and the idea of him being a man disgusts you, but never in a context where it would be affirming to him. In the mind of a transphobe, he can be both a disgusting predatory gay man trying to turn a straight man gay and a woman who will never ever be a real man. He can be a deranged female fetishist preying on gay men and also a naive girl who just wants to escape misogyny. He can be a butch lesbian groomed into transitioning by homophobes who want to turn her straight and gender-conforming and also an unsafe man who deserves no protection and must be kept out of women's spaces. Transphobes can hold multiple of these pairs of beliefs at the same time about the exact same person because they're bigots and that's how bigotry works. The enemy is both too weak and too strong.
Chloe Atkins’ portraits of lesbians at San Francisco’s Club Q featured in her published collection Girls Night Out (1998)
Marilyn Monroe at the Plaza Hotel in New York photographed by Eve Arnold, 1956
Cab Calloway and his Cotton Club orchestra on stage at the Trocadero Theatre in Elephant & Castle, London, 1934.
Four Asian Butches, Perminder Sekhon, 1997 from Butch/Femme: Inside Lesbian Gender (1998)