Because we have a history of being seen/treated as sex objects and objects of ridicule. Authoritarians are super weird about sex, especially since we can trigger deep insecurities when people find us attractive. Multiple far right personalities have been caught watching trans porn (such as Alex Jones and Nick Fuentes) and one (Steven Crowder) has been accused of being a chaser (general term for body type fetishists, particularly ones who aren't respectful of the people with those bodies).

And so here we come in, demanding to be treated as fellow humans and given respect and legal protections and all that (especially so we're no longer economically pressured into sex work) and right wingers are thinking of us as anything from "the joke from Ace Ventura" to "the prostitute nobody can ever find out I hire". This makes it easier to treat our very existence in public as obscene and with that obscenity, disgust and anger. And now we're demanding people stop making fun of us, that we have opportunities to be their bosses, that they change how they refer to us…

There's also a lot to be said about how we make simple things in their eyes like gender into something more complicated and how by challenging their models of parts the world that seem basic and foundational some people just get angry. That's where a lot of the "common sense" transphobia comes from.

Oh also because enough people feel this way it doesn't matter if everyone does, some will be convinced to be angry because people they generally agree with are angry (especially friends and preachers), and others will see it as a winning issue upon which to piggyback the things they actually care about like lower taxes or increased power for the rich.

At least that's my read on it as a trans woman who's thought a lot about this in the past decade. I think the best things we can do to combat it is to normalize our existence as equals and to normalize support of us. Especially in non-political-coded ways. But also by framing support for us in terms of generally popular ideological goals, like the freedom to live the way you want, or small/unobtrusive government not thinking it knows better than the passport holder how to identify their gender.

Because there are so few of us so it's easy to get away with and also transphobes prey on people's insecurities

the fash trash are traditionalists. they stay true to the classics.

Institut für Sexualwissenschaft](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institut_f%C3%BCr_Sexualwissenschaft)

Probably because homosexuality isn't the minority it used to be and trans people are another secret minority that makes them spookier.

Republicans were already wound up about sexuality, it unfortunately makes sense