Asklemmy

My personal opinion is twofold:

1. they need a diversion. Like a magician (or more accurate a pickpocket) they will take anything to make people blind while they amass their power. It is a sickness of the mind. They are addicted to power and ever anxious to loose it. Minorities are a good enemy for the people to blame the problems on that these people either cause themselves or dont want to take care of. In the past it was witches, nowadays it is other minorities.
2. minorities have been fighting for a place in the world for a long time and there have been significant improvements. But that is not a positive development if you want to rule supreme. If you‘re power crazed, you need people to fall in line. Otherwise it wont work. We have ample evidence that only a sufficiently subdued population will not rise up against authority.

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.

trans people are a threat to the status quo of the patriarchal-capitalist Gender regime. the ideology of patriarchal capitalism is that your gender assigned at birth is immutable and there are only two. in patriarchal capitalism your gender defines a lot of what path your life will take, the societal expectations placed on you, and importantly what opportunities and privileges are afforded to you. obviously the setup is men dominating and oppressing women which has been going on for far longer than capitalism but worsened significantly under it. the division of reproductive labour is the social basis of gender. according to traditional gender roles, women are expected to act as broodmares to reproduce more worker stock and also perform most or all domestic labour in essentially a slave role. the existence of trans and trans nonbinary people disproves the two axioms on which this all rests, that your gender is immutable and one of just two. gender in capitalist ideology is little more than a tool or system of oppression, and by existing and living our lives as we see fit and not railroaded by traditional expectations based on assigned gender at birth, we show clearly that it doesn't have to be that way. so to answer your question they come for us because we are a genuine threat to capitalist patriarchal orthodoxy, we show by our actions and existence that a better social order is possible, one where individuals are actually afforded self-determination instead of being locked into a predetermined role based on what genitalia you are born with.

sorry it's kinda an incoherent thought dump, there is plenty more to say this is just a quickie of the root superstructural reasons that we are perceived as a threat to patriarchal capitalism. of course, most transphobes won't have these specific reasons in mind (in fact probably couldn't comprehend them at all due to ignorance) and have just been convinced by capitalist propaganda and transphobic media to hate us because we are icky etc. the prevalence of misogyny also is why it's so easy to get people to be transphobic, a lot of it just boils down to either "hah! why would a man want to be a woman?", or "hah! a woman could never be a man".

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.

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.

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.

Transphobia, just like any form of queerphobia, serves the maintenance of property rights and the reproduction of the workforce that generates billionaires' wealth. This is where the antagonism comes from.

Also, please don't call Elon Musk that.

Point 8

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ur-Fascism

They are a fairly small group compared to other marginalized groups, and particularly vulnerable compared to others. There is already a lot of misinformation about them. Average people often dont run into them or understand them Well enough to make informed decisions. Its easy for billionaires and republicans to wield religion against them. They are often vocal about their beliefs. Intersectionality is also important (e.g. supporting and protecting other minority demographics' rights because it is the right thing to do, and tearing each other down is counterproductive) to them, which isnt always the case. Disappearing them sets an example and is a test run for setting up the infrastructure and means to take control. See: nazi germany with the deaf, and current marginalization by the trump administration of the trans and disabled communities.

My conjectures:

Musk: Trans kid who disowned him for being shitty so obvipusly it must be trans peoples fault and not his.

JKR: I firmly believe she's selfhating in the closet trans. The equivalent to the homophobic pastor who eventually gets caught with the choir boy. We just haven't seen the choirboy yet.

Zuck: Not transphobic, just a sociopath (at worst) who will go whatever way the wind blows.

There are a lot of other good answers, but it seems worth remembering lots of poor powerless folks hate trans folks too.

Part of the reason they're coming after trans people is because it's human nature to hate or fear those you don't understand and who are different. A dark, and sad part of human nature, but part of human nature nonetheless

All the other stuff folks are talking about is also a true, but it's not like they're unique in their contempt for people who are different

Mostly a people to blame and for others to fear monger, it's a way to make people look the other way also, a common "enemy" instigated from the true enemy. And sense there is not a lot of trans people statistically it's hard for them to defend themselves. It's all about manipulation and control over the people

Rich/famous transphobes' voices are louder because they're rich, unfortunately. It's the same problem with every other awful opinion that rich/famous people have.

I do suspect though that it also has to do with social class and thinking that they are "above".

Products of their generation. As they die off others will take their place and society will move on to other groups to target.

Correlation is not causation.

Personally I just think they're just pandering some group of people who have real power to determine how money flows in a society and they happen to be right wing conservatives.

US democracy is collapsing and the future throne is probably already set and they might have inside information.

Like you said, trans people can't really do anything. Perfect target when you want to show where you are planning to stand.

They may not be politicians but they spend money to get themselves into positions of political power as these few days have shown with Musk. And these people get most of their power from the masses that are dumb enough and bigoted enough to be swayed by a shared common hatred of groups to scapegoat for everything.

Because there are alot of ignorant people in the world afraid of what they perceive as different.

In your first two examples, regardless of not being politicians it's clear that by helping put politicians in power they benefit, so whether they genuinely care or not, it's just about money and lack of compassion to them. And continuing to drive class warfare continues to benefit them.

In your last example, I think that person is just in the ignorant and afraid of change category with an unfortunate amount of exposure.