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Notes -
I have no great overarching theory, but a couple of thoughts. One is that, at least since the 90s, and I'm guessing earlier, the idea that "separate is not equal" was taught as dogma to kids due to the history of the US, i.e. Plessy vs Ferguson & Brown vs Board of Education. We took that to heart. That meant that any difference at all in how people were treated - i.e. being "separate" - was, definitionally, unequal. So treating transwomen as literally indistinguishable from women in every single way, i.e. in their sex and not just in their "gender identity," became a moral prerogative.
Another is the success of the gay rights/gay marriage movement on the idea that it was an innate "born this way" thing. I remember back in high school, a friend of mine dated a girl who came out as gay after they broke up; when I talked about how he dated her back when she was straight, my friend "corrected" me by telling me that she was already gay when she dated him, she just didn't know it yet (I bought it at the time, but now I wonder how I could have taken this on faith when it's obvious that such a definitive statement about how sexual orientation works would require absolute mountains of empirical evidence to prove - I was very good at coming up with epicycles for this kind of stuff, I think). The movement to normalize trans people took the same tactic, hence the claim that, say, Bruce Jenner was a woman when "she" won the men's decathlon gold medal or Ellen Page was a man when "he" was nominated for best actress for Juno. This reinforced the idea that someone's "transness" is not tied to anything in physical reality but rather entirely up to the individual's personal judgment, which meant that autogynephiles were encouraged to and celebrated for transitioning, and such people absolutely want access to female-only spaces, and so discriminating against them on the basis that their sex was male despite their gender being otherwise became verboten.
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