Maybe some of them, but that’s hardly a prerequisite for this type of thinking/behaviour, and most of them likely are not. What they are is afraid of what it means for there to be difference. If people can be x, y, or z, then maybe they had possibilities cut off from them, happier lives they could have lived if they had gone their own way one this, that, or the other thing.

There’s a type of rigid thinking at play: These are the options open to us all, and you will be punished if you deviate from them. And if they look around and see people deviating from those options and not being punished, they’re forced to either confront the idea that their world view is arbitrary and wrong, or they’re forced to be the ones doing the punishing. Or get to be the ones doing the punishing, depending on their relationship to violence.

Today it’s trans people, yesterday it was queer folk, most days it’s railing against descriptive linguistics and living language. These are people who will have a tantrum about anything, because the world outside of their head will never match the rigid one inside it.