Unfortunately, I think this isn't true.

Of course, the right-wing fringes will attack almost anything that isn't aligned with their own weird flavor of regressive activism (very much not "conservative" because it's not about conserving--it's about imagining a new more regressive future and making it happen). The fringe is big. But not 50% big; nowhere close in most places. So it doesn't have very much power. It's loud but weak.

But there are a lot of people who aren't on the fringe, who basically are open to new ways of looking at things, but they need to be convinced and they need some time to adjust.

Trans activism has made enemies, unnecessarily, of huge swaths of that population. From highly public displays of fury over seemingly pretty mild or even supportive statements (c.f. J. Jamil), to not bothering to check whether a "dog-whistle" is meant as such by the person who says it or if rather they just heard it and it kinda made sense so they're repeating it, to frequent dismissal and minimization of any harassment or hate from (a few extreme) trans activists directed against people who have opposed trans rights or trans activism in some way, the overwhelming impression is not one of seeking to be better understood. It's more like all-out rhetorical war, with lots of civilian casualties. Not a great idea when you need those civilians to be on your side when it comes to legislative issues.

But even worse than that, I think trans activism has simultaneously thrown transmedicalist concerns under the bus and partly by so doing has lost any semblance of intellectual legitimacy to a significant number of people. For instance, there are a lot of skeptics who are anti-(trans activist positions)--not just Richard Dawkins, but he's perhaps the most prominent.

Skeptics don't, by and large, just go around hating people for fun, unlike the farther reaches of the right wing. Skeptics don't hate people. They hate bad, illogical arguments. They hate when people try to bully their way along by using bad, illogical arguments.

There's a decent case to be made, which you did, that people's internal experience of gender is important despite not being directly observable by others. Makes sense. Be your authentic self. However, what isn't so obvious is what that entails for society beyond not making a fuss when people are doing their own thing and not bothering anyone else.

In contrast, for people who are in distress because of gender dysphoria with body dysmorphia, there's a good case to be made that we should treat this like any other medical situation: we help with what technology we can (covered by insurance, etc.), and the person is treated as a normal person of the type they should have been as much as possible. Makes sense. There's a medical problem: girl develops with male morphology; help her out and try to fix it.

But what doesn't make sense, however, is using the existence of the latter to argue for the societal changes that are not easy to justify for the former. And that, in trans advocacy, is absolutely ubiquitous. Even if people don't parse it out all that carefully, a lot of people can feel that something is amiss. This isn't a matter of shield-wall solidarity. It's a matter of honesty.

For instance, take bathroom access. It's very important that people be able to use bathrooms. But which bathroom, if bathrooms are gendered? So, for the transmed-style case, it's pretty easy. When you pass as the gender you're transitioning to, you use that bathroom: you wanted to be that sex, and you're close enough now, so go ahead. For any other case, you have to make a much more complicated argument and make a much bigger ask of society, pointing out that the stringency of gender norms that demanded same-sex bathrooms was always overstated, but then argue that we should retain enough gender norms to even have gendered bathrooms, and that it's internally-felt gender, not externally-displayed gender (or sex) that is really by far the most important consideration, all things considered. Oof! Who wants to do all that?

Well, mostly not trans activists, from everything I've seen. It's much easier to go, "But...dysphoria! You can't make actual women use the men's room (or vice versa)!" Aaaaand are you doing everything practical to become that actual woman (or man)? No? So how is the whole thing not just a pack of lies?

Well, it's not entirely a pack of lies, it's just that the argument used was the wrong one. It was the easy one where society really has no choice, instead of the hard one where there can reasonably be a serious negotiation between the preferences and needs of different members of society.

That this disparity exists is quite clear in polling data. Check out the differences in the results regarding whether a trans person has had gender reassignment surgery or not (https://yougov.co.uk/topics/politics/articles-reports/2020/07/16/where-does-british-public-stand-transgender-rights, first table).

The problem with using transmedicalist arguments to support non-transmedicalist causes is that some people look at what's being proposed, recognize correctly that it doesn't follow from the supposed justification, and conclude that it's all just ideology. There's no medical issue after all.

It's the wrong conclusion--the right conclusion is that the situation is complicated and you can accept that an argument is compelling in only some cases not all, and ask for additional arguments to cover other cases. All while trying to maintain people's dignity and safety across society. That's what ought to happen.

Alas. What ought to happen often doesn't.

This is an utterly foreseeable problem. And thus, trans advocacy has been throwing trans people who actually have a good medical case under the bus to try to extract more rights for the rest of the community. And now that the farther-right has realized that this is an awesome lever to use to push their societal goals, things like basic access to medical care are under threat.

I don't think that ever could have happened--certainly not this much--if the medical side of things was kept firmly medical.

It's the right's fault, first and foremost. But it's trans activism's fault, too. If it was done consciously--which I rather doubt--then the gamble was that you could get greater rights by risking the most obvious rights, and in the United States at least, in the farther-right states, the gamble is being lost.

It's dreadfully sad and alarming. I worry for trans people generally (and moreso for those who I know).

But solidarity with people who use people like you to argue for things that would apply logically to you but try to get it to apply also to them when the logic doesn't work cleanly any longer is not the answer. That is a big part of the problem.

If you want to change society, you have to do it honestly. It might be frustratingly slow, but when it happens it also way more secure. Gay marriage is in good shape in large part because the groundwork was laid for people to accept that, actually, two people being devoted to each other is a special thing, and it isn't crucial after all that one is a man and one is a woman.