Just the latest social group that's still broadly acceptable to shit on.

There's not a ton of global census data out there, but in Canada trans and non-binary people make up 0.33% of the population. Which means there's a lot of people who don't know anyone who is trans or non-binary. Unfortunately there's also a lot of people who are unwilling to emphasize, or even sympathize, for those they feel are different or strange to them. It take time and effort to listen to others' stories and to gain appreciation for their perspective, and it's an effort many people are uncomfortable making if it feels they are deviating too far from society's norm. What you're observing is those in power taking advantage of the same human weakness that's been used forever to discriminate on whoever the current permissible outgroup to hate is.

How many times have you heard, "I don't care about anyone being/doing Y, but...", and then proceed to say some sort of transphobic, homophobic, racist, or sexist shit? When I grew up it was the G in LGBT. When my parents grew up it was African Americans. Women only got the right to vote a century ago, you better believe some of our great granduncles had some shit to say that would make today's uncles look like saints.

Because it's nothing more than a trick to divide public opinion and control it.

Divide and conquer.

It's called smokescreen. Turns the attention of the masses away of their wealth and power

As far as I can tell, they didn't. J.K is a straight example, but Elon went looking for an edgy movement to align with, and Zuckerberg just wants to stay rich.

Your everyday regressives want to go after trans people because they don't think they can take gay people on anymore. Some political movements have capitaised on this to gain their support, and have captured rich supporters as well because trans abuse is compatible with the rich continuing to gain more and more power.

How rich are the Wichowski sisters? You bet they're not a fan of any of this.

They will pick whatever group they think will suddenly put as many idiots as possible under their control when they say "GROUP A IS BAD".

Most of them don't care they are trans, they only care that they can take advantage of the oppression of a minority group in order to consolidate control over people so that they can oppress more people.

When everyone alive and dead is either oppressed or under your control, you become god. This is the goal, but they don't care about the process to get there.

Scapegoating

All threaten the oldest hierarchy of all: man over woman.

As for musk, he has a trans child he hates and disowned. And he’s a Nazi, straight up. Family left Canada to go to apartheid South Africa because they agreed with apartheid and white racial supremacy. See the hierarchy here?

Zuck is an opportunist who will align with anything that makes him money. But he also has a weird obsession with Roman history that’s a red flag to me about being a closet fascist.

Jk Rowling is a second wave feminist and she’s big mad that people without vaginas can call themselves women and be in women’s spaces.

They are frequently interviewed.

Which means they are frequently asked: “Why’s everything fucked up?”

They can’t give the real answer, which is “ultra-rich people”.

So they give no answer at all (in which case you don’t hear about it) or they cite the Enemy Of The Day.

They saw /egg_irl and blame them for why eggs are now expensive.

The reasons generally start out personal and become generalized as a political “position”, which really consumes your life after a while.

Rowling has said that she had a queer “phase” and that if she were going through that nowadays, she would likely have ended up considering herself trans (incorrectly, by her assertion). That reads to me as some internalized bigotry that she never worked through. Musk has a daughter who’s a trans woman and disowned him for being a piece of shit. He started posting about “pronouns” soon after. And Zuckerberg seems to have seen the way the winds are blowing with the current administration and jumped on the anti-trans bandwagon because he’s a lizard man with no soul (metaphorically, not in the David Icke antisemitic way). These are all guesses, but not based on nothing.

It ends up being socially unacceptable to say, “trans people remind me of my estranged daughter so I don’t like them,” and rightly so. So you have to retreat and bury the context, taking it up as a matter of principle. And your mind can backfill the justification over and over again, further cementing the ideas as people start to ask you to talk about trans people over and over again. After all, you’re a public figure who doesn’t like trans people. That’s a hot topic. People on Twitter want to talk about it. Reporters want to talk about it. So it snowballs from there. Transphobia can absolutely take over the life of a public figure.

Philosophy Tube has an excellent video on something called phantasms and how people get stuck in irrational worldviews. Would recommend.

Gender is a load bearing brainworm for capitalist society. Capitalists need stratification, having a gradient of various degrees of precariousness for workers to experience that would push them into accepting a worse deal for selling their labor. Gender is clearly one of the primary ways to achieve this: an absolutely incredible amount of domestic labor is performed without compensation by women every day, and society would fall apart if it wasn't. The rigid structure of the patriarchy is a key feature of this system, which means that trans people represent a clear break in that logic; if AFAB individuals can just choose not to be subjected to gender-based exploitation, it starts to rip the whole thing apart. Equally, transfeminine people represent another break in the opposite direction. The patriarchy is more or less incompatible with the existence of trans people, at least without significantly transforming itself.

Easy to scapegoat like most minorities that a large part of the population has never interacted with before.

Poor, trans, minorities, leftists, educated, and even moderate Republicans are all under attack. These billionaires participate so they can be part of the fascist takeover of this country, not through any personal conviction.

Trans people’s very existence requires the rest of us to question our own upbringing. There are a lot of childhood experiences that boil down to you doing something or not doing something on no basis other than the fact that you were told.

You were told by your family, you were told by your friends, you were told by random strangers, you were told by the media, and they were all telling you the same thing. So you listened, even though you didn’t know why they were saying it. Surely EVERYBODY can’t be wrong, right? Some people might have told you something contrary but they were the losers, the outcasts, the villains. You don’t want to be any of that, surely?

For someone to transition, they are required to do the exact opposite of what so many told us all. They embrace the very outcome we were threatened with when we failed to conform, that we would not actually be the gender we were failing to conform to.

To accept that they are valid in doing so requires us to admit that many of our own guiding forces were actually just bullshit. We have to question why we are the way we are anew. If what they’re doing is strong, what we did, what we’re continuing to do, was weak.

When confronted with the idea that we were all just raised wrong and that much of what we collectively spend our time and energy stressing about is stupid and pointless, how many people do you know that will just shrug and say “oh well” and then move on with their lives? Easier to find an excuse to keep doing what you were already doing. “They’re just lying because they’re perverts that wanna cheat at sports.”

Some of these rich people are insidious and manipulative, no doubt, but the loud ones are usually just idiots no different from the uncle you don’t want to talk to except that being rich means they’re able to yell louder.

There must always be an "underclass" in capitalism for the upper echelons to threaten the middle echelons. No exceptions. Wether that's the homeless, psychiatric patients, gay or trans people... doesn't matter. There will be some regional differences in what constitutes this underclass but the end result is always the same. Capitalism CANNOT FUNCTION without this implicit threat of excommunication and starvation.

The only real difference with the recent past is that all of this has become much, much more explicit than it ever used to be before. But make no mistake, even with a Biden or Harris at the helm, this would still be the case, just much more muted.

This is a feature of the system, not a flaw, and will never change as long as capitalism in its current form dominates.

preface: conjecture

musk and zuckerberg benefit from “othering” a group so that the majority of people get caught up in arguing about the rights of that group. While you’re busy being distracted by that they can push for agendas that benefit their companies and personal wealth, which inherently fuck you over.

musk does seem to have a personal vendetta as well given his issues with his trans daughter but I truly think this is ancillary to enriching his wealth and power. He also seems to love getting involved in topics that rile people up because deep down he’s a 14 year old reddit troll

rowling is double down and attention. She has a shit take, posts about it, people call her out. She’s a literal billionaire “beloved author” used to being surrounded by hangers on so being challenged wrecks her shit. Rather than reflect and look at scientific consensus she doubles down on her shit take. Because of people like above this gets her increasing amounts of attention and relevance so her beliefs are reaffirmed and deepened constantly. Now she’s consulted to speak authoritatively on the matter despite having no actual qualification other than being a rich lady who got into twitter arguments about it

Many of these apply to nobodies as well. Your stupid anti trans neighbor benefits from “othering” someone because it gives them someone to deflect blame onto. For most of American history it was black people, or Hispanic people, sometimes Jews, basically any minority. They also will double down when called out on shit takes and will absolutely respond to attention given for shit takes.

You can't get ultra-rich while being a compassionate person

It is easy for many people to think trans wars is a distraction, scapegoating, or a genuine threat to the authoritarian world view. I ask you to carefully consider that anti-trans hate is genuine.

Nazis had prioritized Jewish genocide and pursued it to an irrational degree, even prioritized the genocide to actually winning the war. Some analysts say that this shows their war was always and primarily against civilian Jews.

We have evidence to think this is the case with trans people now.

The recent "anti-christian bias" order outright frames trans rights as an enemy of their ingroup.

Reed has covered the leaked Christian emails that show them believe trans people are demons and evil incarnation and want to wipe them from the face of the earth.

Rowling has been caught on tape saying she wants to minimize the number of people transitioning so that they have less work to do "special accommodations later" for trans people.

For those aware of the term Sonderbehandlung this leaves no doubt: trans people are their primary enemy, they have poured their millions into the pockets of nutjobs and politicians that will relieve them from having to live side by side with trans people.

Don't be fooled that this is just distraction and/or scapegoating by power-mongers.

They have a trans Holocaust in the making and they have already put the plot in motion. ACT NOW

Edit:

I realize I might have not responded directly to OP's question. See the following for my take.

My analysis linking Bathroom Bans as early signs of completely banning trans people out of public life https://lemmy.ml/post/25037664

I wrote this while still believing that anti-trans hate was an election-winning distraction. It partly responds to where anti-trans hate comes from https://lemmy.ml/post/24711061

In this sense many people are deeply transphobic, but billionaires have the resources to eradicate trans people from public life. The rest can only curse, badmouth, trash, verbally attack, workplace harass, fire, refuse healthcare, sexually or physically attack or mob-lynch trans people. Every transphobe does as much as they can get away with. Billionaire transphobes can get away with genocide so they're doing that.

Additional resources in support of the argument

Summary of early Holocaust course of events and why targeted people were not mobilized https://lemmy.ml/post/25008729/16208799

Erin Reed article on fundamentalist anti-trans lobbyists' leaked emails https://www.erininthemorning.com/p/2600-leaked-anti-trans-lobbyist-emails

I tried to read the wheel of time once and what i learned is that gender is the ultimate defining factor in some peoples lives. It is their whole defining principle in interacting with others. Everything about you is a direct consequence of your sex. Mess with sex/gender and you destroy their entire way of interacting with humans. Hunans dont exist for them, only men and women. The sexes are actually incapable of communication or cooperation of any kind. Effectively different species. This makes trans people a literal impossibility. A leopard cannot become an attack helicopter. A trans person threatens their world view in a fundamental way.

These people also want control of everything, probably due to inability to cope with anything they don't understand, which is a lot. I don't understand being trans, but i undetstand the right to health and happiness and i wish it for you.

They want you fighting a culture war to keep your mind off the class war.

The mainstream "left", such as the Democrats benefit from this too.

Draw the national party lines between bigoted and non-bigoted. Now everyone can fight over that and nobody has to address the fact that two thirds of the country want universal healthcare.

Musk: more politically oriented than just money now, had aligned himself with a very large part of the population that thinks at a minimum that even if some people need to transition for their own health, society retains the right to consider their pre-transition history to still be part of reality

Zuckerberg: profit driven, is aligning Facebook etc with the political reality in America and the real prospect of being fined or embargoed by a Trump administration, would flip back if a democrat won in 2028

Rowling: belongs to a British generation of certain age where trans people are superficially accepted BUT regards their pre-trans history to be something still relevant. That's where this started and it escalated / deteriorated from there E.g. compassionate to a degree and willing to entertain the "fiction" that a biological man is now a women for the sake of that person's mental health: see them at the shops presenting female? carry on as normal.. talk to them? use their current name and pronouns out of politeness.. BUT.. if they want to access a female shelter, draw a line.. if they want to teach young children, risk assess them including their pre-trans gender and history etc. Rowling then got into increasingly fractious arguments on Twitter, largely arising from other people she followed and liked and what the trans community inferred from that. At that point she doubled down declaring advocates on Twitter to be increasingly hysterical and deluded whilst simultaneously insisting she would treat trans people humanely in person. She's then lashed out in numerous ways including in her writings aligning herself with increasingly extreme anti-trans people. FWIW, I think she would have carried on being a mildly tolerant (if dated) person of a certain age had she just stayed off Twitter entirely. But lashing out, being misinterpreted and misinterpreting others had led her to spiral down into viciousness and bitterness.