I always feel it is important to know what the "water temperature" outside one's bubble is. The general view of what you are or what you do is. Just seems like common sense, to be prepared. Each individual opinion or comment on its own doesn't matter and is somewhat meaningless, but the overall "sense" of things from thousands of comments on a regular basis forms a picture of the state of things and the public attitude in a sense, at least online. Better than we might have if we didn't look at all. This is why I'm against chasing haters off all platforms to make "safe spaces" everywhere. Safe spaces are ok on occasion, but the world itself is not a safe space and never will be. All those nasty pieces of work will still be out there somewhere if we chase them off, only worse being we won't know what they are saying or thinking if we shut down their talking platforms. I'd rather they had their places and we had ours and they can see what we think and we can see what they think, and not have them driven underground where they will still be there but their philosophizing and thought process about us becomes invisible to us. At the moment I've been watching them in their thickest hangouts where they discuss exactly "what we are" and where we "came from" in their view. I can see the thought process they have, what's influencing it and where they're getting their info from, and from that I can usually predict exactly what card people of this persuasion are going to pull up in a debate, what sort of case they think they have. It's not essential but quite useful when tackling these people in a public arena discussion about the trans phenomenon. Know your enemy. You'll stay a step ahead... maybe three. I can understand why not everyone would want to immerse themselves in a cesspool of course... but personally I like being able to completely dismantle my ideological opponents and present a robust case for our existence, since plenty out there is at stake - including my own life potentially.
I do expose myself to just about the worst opinions regularly, and now they do not bother me in the slightest. The worst ones are apparently in the minority from the picture I get. There are plenty of of positive and tolerant views as well, and some ambivalent, and some mildly negative but hardly hardcore.
Some people read the negative stuff as a form of confirmation bias; some people look for someone to argue with - and that will be the first person with a dissenting view from their own. Maybe some are just morbidly curious how much of a train wreck they can find in the comments section. Have to remember people might not be making a serious comment at all, and treating every neg comment we see as serious fodder is probably a waste of time and energy. The recent high sensitivity and visibility of trans issues has generated plenty of trolling, people who actually don't give a fig for the subject but whose irritation with the topic's prominence itself has prompted them to be obstructive or dismissive whenever possible. That's the same as the "I hate X because it's popular and I'm tired of hearing about it" sort of thing from what I can see. It began around the time Caitlyn Jenner came onto the scene and people were exposed en masse to the trans phenomenon.
