Actually yes - a lot of people are living in a sort of bubble, a "safe space". They have no idea what's waiting for them out there if they spend all their time in such a space.
But as mentioned, much of this is a backlash among people who otherwise wouldn't have even bothered to chime in - apparently many are angry because people are teaching their kids about this in schools, or they are seeing an explosion of pronoun issues, bathroom issues and so on that never used to be mentioned at all. They perceive the sudden high profile of trans people in the media as propagandizing and that we are a "protected status" now, and feel that if they don't want to acknowledge our lifestyle or pronouns then they will be branded bigots, fired, etc. In other words that our movement - which they could usually care less about - is now being literally forced upon them and their kids.
I do not spend time in safe spaces because I like to know exactly what's out there waiting for me, and how its mind works.
Currently there are many supportive people, but there are problems with our movement for rights having been co-opted in some cases by people who are trying to push a different sort of agenda on the rest of society. I.e. the one where gender is completely broken down and we don't acknowledge it at all, or we remove the use of biological sex on forms or in the classroom or even try to remove it from science discussions, or we teach children they can choose their own genders and so on. That is not the same agenda as one that is fighting for the rights of trans people to be treated equally to all other people and to be left alone. It appears to be one that wants to now dictate to the rest of society how they must think about gender, not how we are allowed to express it in our own lives. People are naturally resistant and unhappy about this, and we will get the flak.
I spend a lot of time explaining to endless people what transsexualism actually is because most are woefully uninformed, and are parroting things they heard from a scaremonger. But there are legitimate points of worry I see among them. For example, children being asked to decide their own genders in school and possibly seek gender treatment. Making services available to trans kids is one thing - asking every single one of them to question themselves at the ages of four or five is quite another, and I too would be concerned about what exactly is being taught to my child. That's what's being proposed for a Scottish high school apparently (this was all over the media in my country recently) and if approved more schools with more than likely follow. This has some parents' hackles up, in a population already now highly sensitized to "trans issues" in the media. I would also be concerned about just how easy transitional treatment is for a young impressionable child to simply walk into, and there have been pushes in the media trying to get treatment much easier to access. I am of the belief that while it should not be restricted, it should not be something handed out like candy either. There should be a process and a proper psychological analysis involved to determine this is not just a children's phase. These are some of the concerns these people have, as well as the idea that they must ditch their thinking about the biological sexes and now adopt some new form of thinking.
As always there is a price to be paid for being high profile and having our issues thrust to the cutting edge of such a politically polarized world, whether we wanted them to be or not. Our issues have been very much politicized, and used as political ammo. What you are seeing when someone refuses to acknowledge your gender online or says "men are not women" and stuff like that, is now the only way many of those people feel like they can rebel against a push to force them to accept all these new words and labels. I do understand their concerns and that had this not become another political media battleground, we would likely have had a quieter time of it. Some prefer that it is a battle ground... but I know that an idea never gets acceptance from anyone if followed up with an "...or else". It's not trans people that have necessarily been doing this, but often just the activists and people who say they have our interests at heart. Unfortunately they don't seem to know or care much about human psychology. And it's not them or their tactics that become the target of the anger. It's us.
If I had to sum the feeling of some of these people up at the moment, if you're wondering, it's that they perceive we - trans people - our movement and our activists are trying to turn the traditional notions of biological sex upside down (which will cause problems as it now has in people trying to take advantage of 'trans status' in bathrooms and prisons etc.) and are trying to indoctrinate their kids. That's it in a nutshell. They fear the trans movement has gone nuts and is going to wreak havoc on society.
Some of them are not actually concerned about us, or about the trans condition itself, but about the effect of teaching malleable gender to children on those children, or about how people can and will take advantage of new trans status rules to commit crimes. In my country already there have been two high-profile cases in which a notorious child murderer in prison has asked to transition to a woman, and another in which a trans woman sent to a women's prison sexually assaulted/raped other female prisoners in there. Naturally the responses are things like "well that was bound to happen", and yes, it is if the laws are changed to allow situation to arise... at some point they are going to because at some point someone is either going to commit these crimes, or use the trans label to get into a position to commit them. It's unfortunate but we are going to be dealing with these problems as they come.
