Transphobes will do anything to justify their behaviour
Ask a transphobe why they are being transphobic and they will launch into a broad range of topics including protecting women’s spaces, protecting women’s bodies, and their personal right to call a trans person whatever pronouns and names they like. It is exhausting engaging with them because you have to work around their personal biases, cross-examining why they feel justified in abusing trans people, especially when they try to rationalise it using science and rationality. Then you take a step back and realise they are just like racists, antisemites, and all the other bigots who couch they hate in the same rhetorical processes. Hates are going to hate, and will go to any length to justify their hate.
It is not to hold a hateful position, you have to make that position societally acceptable for you to allow those views to be spouted in public. Racists thrive when they can openly denigrate their targeted minorities, using all forms of dog whistles to speak to their followers, while also taking about their “concerns” and how polite society should care about those “concerns”. Transphobes have co-opted these techniques to frame trans women as predators, much in the same way Muslim men and immigrants are targeted by racists. You listen long enough and the justifications blur into one.
