Transgender people make a great political dog whistle for conservatives. They are a tiny minority that the public has had a hard time empathizing with. It’s harder to empathize with people whose experiences you don’t understand. That lack of understanding allows conservatives to fill in the gaps with their own explanations of the transgender experience. It is relatively easy to demonize a group of people you don’t know or understand, and social conservatives have done so with gusto in recent years.
