I think this is correct--thank you for taking it as such. Note that, despite being emotionally un-invested in any side save that which leads to as many people as possible having satisfying and meaningful lives, I am also fairly well-informed.

I think your responses aren't quite directed at the position above, though, which has led you to mostly miss the main thrust of the argument, which is that there is a center, which is large, and important.

"In other words, “Look what you made me do.”"

No, this is not what I'm saying (I guess unless the person in question was directly threatened by trans advocates--then, well, yes, if the target decides to fight back instead of capitulate, those doing the threatening bear some culpability for escalating the situation.)

You are probably right that some people are using the current situation as a great justification for showing antipathy openly. But I'm not talking about those people. I'm talking about people who are perfectly willing to believe that trans people should have fulfilling lives and need appropriate rights to enable that, but might have reservations about some of the details.

The point isn't that the backlash is justified, but rather that the advocacy has been structured in a way that doesn't seem to care either whether it triggers a backlash, or how it appears to anyone save those with the strongest opinions. This alienates two groups of potential allies.

(1) A relatively large group of relatively unsteady allies who don't care to look into things in detail and when there are what seem like two loud and obnoxious groups will try to find what feels like a middle position that cuts out most of the obnoxiousness.

(2) A relatively small group of potentially strong allies who will support causes when there are good reasons and careful consideration of all significant consequences.

It also motivates an opposition which was always unreasonable but now they're unreasonable and energized. This might hurt them more than it helps, if they show their true colors and the colors are ugly.

"Scepticism and hating people are not mutually exclusive. They can and do frequently coexist. “Sceptics don’t hate people” is not a logical statement."

But that wasn't my point. My point was that if you find that rather a lot of skeptics are on the wrong side from you and they say so (as opposed to ignoring you), it should cause a different type of reflection than if you find the right wing hating you. Because right-wingers have "let's rally around hating a group" as one of their standard plays. Skeptics don't (except I suppose inasmuch as people who promote nonsense to the gullible is a "group").

I was using the frequency (not the existence) as evidence of my point about trans advocacy failing to adequately capture the center.

"Because it’s “be your authentic self, live however you please, etc”, with the unspoken rider of, “As long as it doesn’t offend my worldview – then watch out”."

Well, that might be true for some people. But it's not the only source of pushback.

The more widely unspoken rider is, "As long as I can keep being my authentic self in the same way as usual."

There is very little you can ask society to do differently before you're not just being your authentic self, you're also asking others to endorse (not just ignore) your authentic self. And that could be fine but the way to ask is to build understanding, and be willing to respond to "no" with more persuasiveness not with hostility.

"But as I also mentioned, the medical profession as a whole is increasingly of the view that being trans is not, in fact, actually a ‘medical condition’, any more than being gay is"

But the problem with this is that there's no fully objective definition of what a medical condition is. It depends in large degree on what the view of society is, and of the affected group.

The upside of something being a medical condition is that it's an endorsement that we'll take measures to try to cure it. The downside of something being a medical condition is that there's often some stigma associated with it. These things aren't really separable.

In the case of sexual orientation, there isn't much one can do medically, so there's basically no benefit to the medicalization of it. It's a behavioral variation, but unlike psychopathy which is too problematic to be termed a "normal variation" (even though we honestly can't do all that much there either), it's something that society can work around without all that much effort. But even so we do have to recognize the friction and actual, genuine distress caused to some people (especially highly religious ones) because of this change in society. We can still decide that this subpopulation is wrong, but it is also wrong to say that their discomfort doesn't matter. It does...just not enough to abrogate the far more fundamental needs of gay people.

On the other hand, in the case of ADHD and the like, there is a lot that one can do medically. And the behavioral patterns themselves already cause plenty of stigma. So there's little benefit of avoiding the medicalization of it (although the recasting of many such things as "neurodivergence" is trying to recast it to some extent). So, both because of that--and, probably, because drug companies are delighted to have a larger market--we have over the past few decades shifted a lot from "he's just stupid / a troublemaker" and "she's weird" to "this is a diagnosable and treatable mental disorder".

So if you say "doctors are going along with the wishes of the trans community who want it to be classified as 'not a medical condition'" then I wouldn't have any way to object (if this were the actual reason, of course). But if you say that there's some medical or psychological reason that they're changing their mind--well, plausible also, but there's no way I'm going to accept "doctors say X" as the reason alone! I want to see the evidence they're using to make the determination.

You clarify the distinction between gender and sex; I admit that I kind of wandered back and forth across between them, but this was due to wanting to match common usage (which sometimes uses "sex" in a partially gendered context). I understand the distinction, but it's not central to the point I am trying to get across which is the value of speaking to the center. (For instance, the "policing body parts" suggestion is exactly backwards from what I was talking about.)

"gender-segregated bathrooms and other facilities exist not because women fought for them...because men instituted them as a means of keeping women contained in society"

How about some citations for this claim? When exactly did this happen? You do know that ancient Rome had segregated baths, right? Segregation by sex and/or gender is a very old (and back-and-forth) phenomenon.

I do know that public bathrooms were in European culture male-only for a long time and that this was a reflection of the presumption, at least, that women were to stay at home. But what is the source of the belief that adding public restrooms for women was neither asked for nor done in the interests of equality?

For instance, check out page 47: https://books.google.com/books?id=rKkrBgAAQBAJ&pg=PA44&lpg=PA44&dq=design+of+victorian+public+toilets&source=bl&ots=DX0q3MCMUI&sig=0O0blPxipdc60FT2ks_Q9o28Rmo&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwinnYnItsDfAhVLUt8KHXTwAb84ChDoATAAegQICRAB#v=onepage&q=design%20of%20victorian%20public%20toilets&f=false

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There's the usual mashup below which conflates both multiple different types of identity and multiple different reactions to those identities. My whole point is that mashing everything together is not an intellectually sound strategy, because for the argument to work, it has to work in every single case for everyone in a mashup, and yet it's usually argued for the most extreme reaction against the most understandable and accepted case.

Let's take this apart:

"We’re asked to engage in ‘debate’ about our right to exist, to express who we are, to live as ourselves and enjoy the rights that cis-het society is free to take for granted."

First of all, "We're". The trans community as a whole consists of people who range from having severe sex dysmorphia and want to be as close to the opposite sex as possible, and those who have no interest in changing their bodies at all. Many people think this distinction is important. If they're wrong, it's essential to patiently explain to them why the obvious thing that they do all the time every day is in fact wrong. It's a big ask. Let me repeat, for emphasis: it's a BIG ask. That doesn't mean it's unreasonable, but the case needs to be proportional to how much is being asked.

Now let's take the debate points.

"We’re asked to engage in ‘debate’ about our right to exist"

There is very very very very little support for non-existence right now. Almost everyone (though, dangerously, not quite everyone) thinks that death is not an appropriate consequence, and nobody is willing to say that they think it is. Anyway, nobody is asked to debate their right to exist at all. Doesn't happen. They're asked to debate the nature of their existence.

It is extremely extremely dangerous to conflate "I can't live as I want" with "I am going to be murdered". There are good reasons why the former are cause for dramatic action (for instance, slavery, lack of freedom (c.f. United States Revolutionary War), and so on). But blurring them all together in a muddle--missing the "live free or die" part (New Hampshire's state motto, incidentally)--only risks losing the stigma against actual violence without convincing anyone of anything.

The stigma against violence is highly protective. It's not nearly protective enough for trans people. The stigma needs to be higher--much higher. Rhetoric like this lowers it by diluting the concept of existence.

"We’re asked to engage in ‘debate’ about our right to express who we are and to live as ourselves"

There is more pushback here, but still pretty broad support. (I don't think "express who we are" and "live as ourselves" are particularly different concepts.)

"We’re asked to engage in ‘debate’ about our right to enjoy the rights that cis-het society is free to take for granted."

Here is where there is the most tension. And it's because, in large part, the way you phrase it isn't quite right. Of course, cis-het members of society actually are asked to fit in to cis-het society too. It's just easier because cis-het society is centered pretty well on behaviors that can be pretty natural to cis-het people after a lifetime of training.

The ask here is to change cis-het society. Not establish a separate trans-gay society, which would be the logical parallel to the cis-het experience. (That would not be a good ask--"separate but equal" doesn't work.) Everyone gets asked to debate when they want to change cis-het society. Women getting the vote? Debate. Eliminate the death penalty? Debate. Voting age at 18 instead of 21? Debate. End legality of alcohol? Debate. End illegality of alcohol? Debate.

So at the one end of your seemingly straightforward statement, you have people who are, say, doing everything they can to be as much like biological women as possible, and it is acutely distressing to them that they're not, and the question is whether they should simply be allowed to live.

At the other end of the statement, you have people who are fine with their body but don't like the gendered expectations associated with their morphological sex, and would like society to change to accommodate them without them needing to debate.

These are extremely different positions. You can conflate them out of solidarity, to have a "shield wall" stance, but they're not close at all. They're very distant positions, no matter how right you think they are. There's also a way to make them very similar positions, but that requires a long argument about the weight we give to reports of internal mental states vs. observable characteristics, and stuff like that. You can't skip it.

Regarding GRCs, two quick points. (1) legally GRCs are actually pretty much a non-issue, but (2) the visibility on GRCs has made a lot people in the U.K. notice that there were quite a number of other self-ID policies that were instituted that they never really remember assenting to, and now they're like, "hey wait, you needed to ask us about that!" (Also, the changes in attitude have been ongoing even if the legislation and policies are mostly already in place.)

Regarding the demonization of trans people: it's horrible and needs to stop. Everyone should fight back against that, not just trans people or trans advocates. But it's really really important that we maintain distinctions between people who think that, say, trans women might retain too great of a physical advantage after 12 months of testosterone blocking to fairly compete at elite levels in sports with gender categories, and those who think that trans people are perverted pedo groomers.

Because in the latter case to stop them from committing violence, violence might be called for. But if you are indistinct, you are doing exactly the thing that you warn against, engaging in stochastic terrorism against a large population who merely has a different idea of how society should be structured.

Being mistreated is not cause to mistreat others. We should all stand together against mistreatment, leaving the abusers isolated and powerless. When they are isolated and powerless, unable to hide in a crowd, they're also much less likely to act on what they think their beliefs are, and rather re-examine whether their beliefs are actually that strong.

While I agree that gay marriage rights are still under attack, they're far more secure than trans anything, because the groundwork is there. With trans rights, it touches on all sorts of issues that are already in flux in other ways regarding what the role of gender should be in society.

And while I agree that nobody should be sacrificed to mollify a manipulated mob, that's not my point. My point is to talk to the center and level with them. If you can't explain the baffling complexity of transness, gayness, gender-fluidity, and pan-bi-querritas to a majority of people, you have no right to expect that society will made sacrifices to enable them. Everyone has to explain to society why it should make a change, because society is fundamentally a negotiated agreement.