The concept of "transmisogyny" had to be invented because without it there was no way to explain why transfeminine people are so particularly marginalised. The logic of transphobia is that we are actually failed men, men who have broken the rules of gender and so need to be punished. Likewise, transphobia considers trans men to be failed women who have broken the rules and so need to be punished. If you follow that logic, you would expect to see trans men occupy a position in the social hierarchy similar to "marginalised woman" and trans women to occupy a position similar to "marginalised man", i.e. trans women should be below cis men, trans men should be below cis women, and trans men should be below trans women. But that is actually not what we see when we look at something like the gender pay gap statistics. Trans women are actually right at the bottom, well below trans men, and everyone else.
So, if the logic of transphobia is that we are actually men, how the hell do we explain the fact that we occupy a social position significantly below those that transphobes believe to be actually women? There's only one way to make sense of it: that the nature of our "failure" (i.e. the direction of our transition) brings about a massive extra social penalty. That's exactly what "transmisogyny" refers to: this extra form of oppression that sits on top of transphobia, and whose existence is necessary to explain the data that we see in the real world. It's just like physicists theorising Dark Matter: the universe is not behaving how it should according to our current theory, so there's a new force we need to incorporate to make it make sense.
In light of this, what purpose is served by hypothesising a counterpart to transmisogyny called "transan***phobia"? What data is unexplained by the current model? Are trans men being treated even worse than we would expect based on how transphobia operates? I am not aware of any evidence for that, nor of any transan***phobia theorists who even think about oppression in this way. Instead, it's far more common for them to understand "transmisogyny" as "any oppression a trans woman experiences", and to think, "but I also experience oppression, so I need a counterpart name for my oppression", and then land on "transan***phobia", "transmis***ry", "anti-transmas***inity", etc.
They don't understand that transmisogyny is a specific form of oppression due specifically to transition direction, it sits on top of transphobia, misogyny, and anything else, it doesn't displace them. To say, as many transfeminists do, that "transan***phobia doesn't exist" is not to say that trans men do not face oppression. It's just the assertion that the direction of their transition does not incur any extra oppression on top of what they already experience due to transphobia and misogyny (which is a lot!).
I find it useful to think about which specific form of oppression I am facing in each situation. E.g. I am walking down the street and some guy wolf-whistles at me (that's misogyny, it's the presumption that my body is a sexual object for men's gratification). I tell him to fuck off, but he hears my voice is weirdly deep and then clocks me and shouts "You're a man!" (that's transphobia, he had noticed a disconnect between my gender presentation and what he presumes to be my AGAB). He chases after me, swearing, screaming, calling me a T-slur, etc, and I have to run really fast to avoid getting beaten up (that's transmisogyny, it's an instinctive disgust reaction that he probably couldn't even articulate why he feels so strongly about). Transmasculine people are likely to be able to relate to the first two experiences but not the third.
A month ago I was running a trans event and I asked people to share any news they wanted to related to their transition. There was a trans man who talked about the waiting list for being seen by the gender clinic, something everyone could relate to and we commiserated with him about it. And there was a trans woman who talked about how she had ordered an Uber Eats grocery delivery, and when he arrived she went out to his car to help him carry the bags, but when he saw her he called her a "fucking [T-slur]" and chased her down the street where she had to hide in a bush and wait for him to leave before going back to her house. She was less upset about that than the fact that after she complained to Uber they banned her from the platform. She had been using grocery delivery to avoid going to the store because she gets abused there. When she said all this, the transmascs in the room were like "what the fuck", while the transfems were like "this is why I boymode with delivery drivers"/"this is why I pretend I can't speak"/"this is why I do all my shopping at 3am at the 24hr supermarket because there's no one there to harass me". There is a serious gulf in the kinds of negative experiences we consider unremarkable, and the kinds of negative experiences transmascs consider unremarkable, and that gulf speaks to the differing levels of oppression we face.
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