When I saw the casting call for the new Will Young video, Brave Man, I walked into my bathroom and stripped to my waist and wondered if I could reasonably apply for it. A slightly portly tummy born of two and a half cookbooks and the soft but loathed curves of my Mediterranean heritage laughed back at me. I joked on the casting call that if it was a year away, the other side of coming out as transgender, running a marathon and potential top surgery, I would definitely apply myself. I watched with interest from a distance, reassured that transgender friends were involved in the casting, filming and consultation. My friend Juliet, a vicar and founder of Urban Expression, once said: “About us, without us, is not for us.” It’s a value I hold dear – you can’t tell someone’s stories without first asking them what those stories are. (Rightwing press, I’m looking at you.)

And so, on Monday, the video was released. The press predictably exploded with headlines focusing on the public nakedness of the 19-year-old trans male lead, and I rolled my eyes at the subeditors’ shock-jock clickbait habits. I watched it and tweeted about it, relieved that a transgender person was being represented in the mainstream media with full permission, consultation and disclosure – unlike Channel 4’s Trans Lovers, or the Girls To Men documentary, which participants claim included chunks out of YouTube videos without permission; and without the obsession with genitalia and surgery that the mainstream press seems to have when it comes to transgender and non-binary individuals. Here was a project with integrity, I thought.

I logged back onto Twitter in the evening to see friends, activists and campaigners raging, furious. Furious that the lead “character” was white, as though the colour of his skin would have made him more or less transgender. Outrage at the abuse depicted in the film, as though we live in a world of cotton candy and universal acceptance. Many transgender people are abused every single day – by strangers, by colleagues, by their partners – and this is why films like Brave Man are made. The shoving and name-calling and physical violence and objectification is sadly an accurate portrayal of the day-to-day abuse suffered by trans men and women everywhere.

No, we haven’t all had ketchup thrown in our faces. For some of us it was punches, pint glasses, deadnames

A season of “transgender-themed programmes” on television does not erase that reality. Witnessing that abuse, from the position of helpless bystander as you watch that video, would make most decent people uncomfortable. It made me uncomfortable because it triggered memories of assault and sexual violence. If you have ever been abusive to a transgender person, it probably made you uncomfortable. If you were unaware that transgender people face horrific physical, mental and sexual assaults, it probably made you uncomfortable. Guess what? The depiction of trans people as novelty sex objects in Grand Theft Auto makes me uncomfortable. The headline Girls To Men to describe one of my friends who has never identified as a “girl” or a “man” makes me uncomfortable. The misgendering of Leelah Alcorn on her gravestone by her religion-blinded parents, makes me uncomfortable. The National Enquirer disrespectfully referring to Bruce “Caitlyn” Jenner, makes me uncomfortable. The fact we only have seven clinics in the UK specialising in gender dysphoria makes me uncomfortable. The Daily Star referring to “ladyboys” in its headlines makes me uncomfortable. A transgender man walking naked through the streets of Brighton for a music video, tossing a few Polaroids into the sea, does not make me uncomfortable.

The video was never meant to represent the entire transgender community. It couldn’t. In the same way that Caitlyn Jenner is not representative of every transgender woman, or that I, on the front cover of Diva magazine, do not represent all lesbian-identifying women. We can’t. Not on our own. We are a diverse and beautiful community, and one that has been battered and bruised by recent salacious media intrusions disguised as friends. I understand why people are suspicious of yet another “trans thing”; a formerly very good friend called me a “transbore” the other day – the irony being that she works in “diversity” herself. We have been so gawked at and misrepresented by the mainstream media for so long that some of us are seizing the opportunity to finally tell our own stories.

Joe, the character in the video, is not every trans man. But his experiences are sadly similar to many of ours. No, we haven’t all had ketchup thrown in our faces. For some of us it was punches, pint glasses, deadnames, being shoved off bicycles into rivers. The “what even ARE you?” loudly, at a US airport from a customs official. Being followed into toilets by thickset men determined to start a fight. My five-year-old coming home from a taekwondo class crying because an older boy was teasing him because his “mum is a transgender” and asking me what it meant.

About us, without us, is not for us. The Brave Man video was made by the people who launched Trans Pride. Cameos from people who told their own stories on My Transsexual Summer in 2011. The lead was a trans man who put himself forward for the role– not coerced or exploited as some commentators suggested, and the end result was a tapestry of the stories and experiences of all of the contributors. This is just the start of the conversation.

If you have a platform, whether that’s a social media space that you feel safe and comfortable in, or a conversation with trusted friends, please use it to tell your story. We have come so far, but there is so much left to do. And in the eye of the storm of all the chattering rage is a 19-year-old trans guy, just about to start at university, who bared his vulnerability to tell his story and to force a discussion about abuse of transgender people into the eye of the worlds media, and for that I thank him. And Will Young, and Wiz, and Fox Fisher, and everyone behind that film. We have come so far, but we have so much more to do.