Thank you for this. This is exactly how it happens.

Someone scrolls the internet. They turn to their friend and say: "So there's this one person, I think they have a name and live in a place, and there's a transgender person, I don't remember their name, who came along and said 'up is down,' to which the normal person replied 'no it's not,' and swiftly the normal person was fired from their job, canceled, run out of town, labeled a bigot, lost a lawsuit, had juice poured on them, and had their social media account suspended. Trans is madness and insanity, huh! They are radical activists who must be stopped!"

And if you say: "Um, that story sounds sketchy and incomplete, why would I believe that? And even if it were true that someone once had a disagreement with someone about something and lost their job, how does it prove that being transgender is bad?" the first person will reply: "You, too, are a trans activist, incapable of hearing reason!"

I am transgender. Recently, a friend of seven years—he knows I lived in another gender before I met him—came to me with this very routine. Despite his having personally known a trans person (me) for seven years, whatever he'd just seen on TikTok had erased his brain and it suddenly occurred to him that being transgender might be invalid, which made him feel weird about his only transgender friend, and that the proper way to sort out this hypothesis would be to call me to inform me that "biological" people have opinions that must be listened to, respected, and obeyed, and see if I said "sure" (thereby legitimating myself) or "nope" (thereby damning myself as a trans activist). He'd seen "the backlash" against trans people on TikTok: a "biological" person with a half-forgotten name had been saying that something was confusing and unfair, related to a trans person existing — and he felt the need to pledge allegiance to the message and actively inform his only trans friend that he now agreed with the "biological" people he was listening to, QED and amen. I said: I believe you've found some transphobes, and he seemed to think I was making an extremely unfair assumption and disrespecting "biological" people.