I think most commenters here are missing the point.

There is a more extreme reaction to transgender people as opposed to gay or lesbian people, because of issues like sports and bathrooms. And that hits at people’s sense of injustice. For example if you have a young daughter, a lot of people will hate the idea of a person with a penis going into the women’s room and being around their little girl. Or if that daughter grows up and joins a sports team, the idea of somebody who is hormonally male and thus naturally more muscular competing against your daughter is unpleasant.

Put differently, I think a lot of people we now classify as ‘transphobic’ don’t actually have much problem with trans people themselves. Rather, with how the efforts to ensure trans people receive the full treatment of their chosen gender can affect the rest of society.

For me personally, I don’t know what the answer is. I generally don’t care which bathroom you use as long as you wash your hands. I have no problem with anyone presenting themselves to the world as whatever they wish, if it makes you happier than by all means. At the same time though, I don’t think it’s transphobic to point out that somebody who is largely or entirely biologically male will have a natural competitive advantage in the field of sports.
So while I certainly don’t want to exclude anybody, I think there is at least a little justification for restricting some women’s sports to those who are genetically female.

They’re an easy minority to scapegoat. In the US they make up between 0.5% and 1.6% of the population. A sizable portion of straight people associate being transgender as something sick and weird and a sexual deviancy, so it’s easy to target them and to try to associate them with actual objectively bad things (ie pedophilia). They’re just people trying to find their place in the world and live their lives, same as most of us.

Materialist answer (inspired by a video called Why The Political Compass is Wrong: Establishing An Accurate Model of Political Ideology, by breadtuber Halim Alrah… and also Jane Elliott’s famous experiment)

Business owner makes money by paying workers to produce widgets at $6 / unit. Owner sells these widgets at $10 / unit, making a $4 profit each sale.

Before long, the workers catch on to the reality of the situation: the owner could be making a lot less and still be able to provide “leadership” (or whatever it is he provides). They decide not to work for less than… $8 per unit. With this price, the owner will still be wealthy (the business makes hundreds of widgets, after all). But now, so will the workers.

So the workers save up money and use it to go on strike.

However: business owner comes up with a better solution to the problem: he divides the workers into brown-eyed workers and blue-eyed workers. He then uses his money to discriminate against the brown-eyed workers. His cronies in government make it legal to deny brown-eyed workers jobs and housing. His cronies in the media write hysterical anecdotal stories about various brown-eyed rapists, thieves, and murderers.

Terrified mobs – stoked into a frenzy by the business owner’s well-funded propaganda – tear down brown-eyed people’s homes and food supplies, leaving them destitute before the strike is done.

The brown-eyed workers now must choose between returning to work for the business owner at $5 / unit… or starving to death.

The blue-eyed workers, meanwhile, have just been tricked into betraying their own team. Some were not tricked, but simply unprepared. These unprepared workers stood by in either shock, uncertainty, or laziness, unable to comprehend how their fellow blue-eyed workers could have become so foolishly self-defeating and cruel.

But now the business owner can put up the illusion of no longer needing the blue-eyed workers. He can run his factory on a skeleton crew of desperate, brown-eyed workers, and say to the blue, “uh oh! Looks like the brown-eyed workers just stole your jobs!”

Much like the brown-eyed workers, the blue-eyed workers have a restricted set of choices: A) admit they were suckers --fooled into attacking their own team – and try to apologize and rebuild their union, B) double down and blame brown-eyed people for undercutting them… but reluctantly return to work, because the strike is broken, or C) just like the brown-eyed workers, they can choose to starve to death.

(A) will be the most difficult. As Mark Twain said: “it’s easier to fool people than convince them they have been fooled.”

The business owner wins, and now society has an eye-color-discrimination problem. Eye color was an arbitrary characteristic. Yet now it decides where someone lives, who they spend time with, and what kinds of opportunities they have access to.

The business owner can rinse and repeat for: skin tone, religion, country of origin, sexual orientation, gender identity, etc. As the saying goes,

“Divide and conquer.”

You asked why trans people are currently the subject of fear and hysteria? No reason. Not any new reason at least. Trans people are different. Any and every difference between workers is an opportunity for those fatcats rich enough to own “The Daily Mail” and the “The New York Post” to separate us into camps and drain us dry, one camp at a time.

Because queerness (trans, gender non conforming, gender fluid, agender, bigender and related) threatens hierarchy.

In western society regardless of how ‘progressive’ some parts of it have gotten, for the majority there’s still a strict hierarchy. Man most important, then woman, then children first boys then girls. Trans people completely disrupt this hierarchy by being able to change what they are and those who cling to hierarchy freak the fuck out over it.

Then there’s the sexual panic, a straight man who’s insecure is gonna freak out if the woman they think is cute actually has a penis.

Because stirring up hate against vulnerable minorities, by positioning them as a threat is a well tested and effective technique for the power hungry to gain and retain power. And it’s effective, because it works by pulling people in and making all of the conversation about whether or not it’s right to hate on the group they’re targeting.

For a simple example: my mother is Catholic and until Trump came along, a lifelong single-issue Republican voter who always said she would be a Democrat if it weren’t for abortion. She attends church in an extremely progressive, famously LGBTQ-friendly town.

There’s a transwoman who attends her church (let’s call her Rita). This lady is probably in her mid-50s to mid-60s and has been a fixture at the church for at least 5 years. My mom has been in choir and bible study groups with her for years now. She still just can’t see Rita as a woman. Treats her politely but behind her back refuses to call her “she” and says she’s a “man in a dress”.

She’s really offended that Rita uses the ladies’ room. I’ve asked her why and she can’t articulate it, she just feels like it’s an invasion of her privacy, because men don’t belong in the ladies’ room. And when I point out that Rita isn’t a man, she just rolls her eyes. I’ve asked her if she’s worried that Rita is in there for predatory purposes and she admits that she doesn’t think Rita intends any harm. I’ve asked her how she’d feel if she were forced to use the men’s room and she says “but that’s different!”

My mom prides herself in being a moral person, and still can’t manage to get past her bigotry to see Rita as a woman. There are just too many mental blockades against it. But since she thinks she’s so highly moral, she thinks she must be correct in this situation. It excuses her from finding empathy and bettering her attitude toward trans folks.

My longwinded point is that when people who consider themselves highly moral are bigoted, there’s almost zero chance of getting through to them. And I think a lot of the people who are bigoted against trans folks feel that morality is on their side and being trans is morally deviant, so they think they’re justified in their prejudice.

As someone who grew up in a conservative household in a deep red state, I think that part of it is that a lot of people are letting Lizard Brain dictate their response to transgender people.

Let me give you a personal example. A while back, I went to a social dance, and there was a trans woman there. Before the dance starts proper, the couple that runs it will teach a dance lesson, and we rotate partners while that’s going on. Eventually, I was rotated into being her partner. For some background, she was obviously early on in her transition; she still looked like a dude in a dress, she didn’t quite have the appearance down yet. But she gets huge props for not only having the bravery to go out as herself, but doing it in fucking Arkansas.

So I rotate over to her, and it dawns on me that she’s trans. In my head, Lizard Brain immediately starts screaming. “WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS?! THIS PERSON IS OBVIOUSLY A DUDE IN A DRESS, HE MUST BE UP TO SOMETHING IF HE’S DRESSING AS SOMETHING DIFFERENT THAN WHAT HE IS! RABBLERABBLERABBLERABBLERABBLE”

Keep in mind, where I grew up, you just didn’t see trans people, and even now, it still tickles that primal part of my brain that was trained to be uncomfortable around people who aren’t white and straight.

The difference between me and many of the people I grew up around is that I recognize that it’s happening and try to tone Lizard Brain out when it starts screaming. A lot of other people listen to it and don’t care that the person that it’s screaming about is exactly that: a person.

A lot of conservatives want to simplify life because they have a simple mind.

Conservatives come in two types. The rich ones who want more and more money. And the poor ones who also want more money but are unable to obtain it because the rich hoard money.

The rich conservatives need to stop the poor conservatives from realizing the rich are why the poor can’t get money. So they make up vulnerable groups to blame for the poor’s problem, and the poor are generally too poorly educated to catch on to this game.

Different groups have been the scapegoat. Women, blacks, the italians, the irish, asians, gays, and now it’s transgender people.

The good news is transgender people WILL get full rights in about 20-30 years if you look at historical cycles. The bad news is it will be a fight and many will die before they get treated as human beings by these asshole conservatives.

Conservatives are afraid of change, because they control current status quo. They can’t let people escape from that control, so every nail that is a little outside it’s hole gets hammered.

In short, they rather prefer trans (and broadly queers) to hide or die, unless they can control them. Everyone different from what they can control is a big danger. Imagine if everyone could be like they feel like? Conservatives see this as chaos, they are the guardians of peace and good values, so anything not already controlled by them is the opposite, chaos, destruction, fire.

That’s why they rarely present anything new, their policies and general opinion tend to fight the natural evolution of civilization. USA, as obviously all of the American Continent, was built by immigrants (and slaves). Now they fight immigrants, undocumented ones mostly, because they can’t control them. And we know what happened when ‘the libs’ back then tried to end slavery, you know, other people that they CONTROLLED.

Thanks for coming to my TED Talk.

Their systems of power rely on having an “in” group and an “out” group. Overt racism is less acceptable these days because now there are brown Republicans, but transphobia? Very in.

They’re just choosing a new group to “other” so that we don’t realize they’re coming for everyone who doesn’t fit into their narrow worldview.

I’m a southerner. Take what I’m about to tell you as close to the grain of the problem as possible, because it is.

Here’s the thing. 9 times out of 10, a Southern man is going to meet a lone trans or gay person, have a pleasant experience talking to them and go about their day, they even make friends with the person, spend years talking to them, send gifts, become family members, etc.

But you know what?

Behind closed doors, it’s “fuck those trannies”, “not in my schools”, etc. My mom does it, her sister does it, my dad did it. It’s hypocrisy at an extreme level while also ignoring it at an extreme level.

“Well I have gay friends… I’m not homowhatzit”

THEY’RE TEACHING WHAT!?

“Double Standard” might as well be the tagline for the entire South. They’ll protect their religion and the expectations put on them by their parents and social norms on a general level across the board, while still shaking hands and eating cake with their lgbtq+ buddies.

Just remember any southerner is one thought from God away from stabbing you in the back at all times, because no matter how close you get to them, even as a family member, that book and the expectations behind it means more, was beat into them more, every day since they were born until you met them.

They are just propagandized. In general, it’s so much like racists - they may know trans people and just think they are the exceptions, like them as individuals and still think they hate them as a group. They are intentionally riled up by being forced fed edge cases and disinformation.

Trans people are just people. They aren’t angels who are never criminals and they aren’t degenerates who are always criminal, they are a diverse group like all of us are. But you can bet your ass that whenever a trans person does something criminal it will be blown up so big in conservative media and used to paint them all as criminals. It’s just the right wing media machine.

Fascists are cowards who attack the most vulnerable people as a standard tactic.

You all are overthinking it way too much.

Most people hate anything that’s different or uncommon to themselves and their “world”.

Simple as that.

It’s heterophobia in the semantic sense of the word “fear of anything that’s different”.