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Speaking for myself: you have, like many decent folks on the trans activist side, buried a lot of very salient details in reasonable-sounding language.
As a general rule, yes, I will use someone's preferred pronouns. But what if I earnestly believe someone is a fraud, a bad actor, someone whose "transition" is at best highly suspect, and at worst, a cynical grift? Someone like Jessica Yaniv, or Dylan Mulvaney, or a convicted rapist who discovered during his trial that he is actually a woman? I would like to reserve the right to say "No, I don't think you are claiming a trans identity in good faith and I refuse to respect it." A lot of trans activists would tell me that I need to use whatever pronouns someone tells me to, period.
"Need" is a bit of a question mark, though. But again, if you are an adult of sound mind, sure, do whatever you want to your body, I guess. But trans inmates who demand that the prison system foot the bill for their transition, to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars from an already overstretched prison budget that barely accommodates the very real medical needs of other prisoners? To say nothing of minors who say they "need" to make permanent alterations to their body at the age of 14? Phrasing it as "the right to the healthcare they need" sounds like opponents want to deny them medical treatment in general, and ignores the actual issues.
Again, if it was just trans women saying "I'm a woman, please call me a woman," I think most people would accept that, with varying degrees of grudgingness. One of the thiings that's made it such a flashpoint, though, is trans people demanding that references to "women" (when talking about, e.g,, pregnancy, menstruation, etc.) be changed to awkward if not offensive circumlocutions like "pregnant people" or "uterus-havers." There are many examples of even more egregious howlers. These are things being pushed by the same folks who say they just want us to accept their "reasonable," flexible, and constantly changing definition of "woman."
It is unfortunate that so much of the debate is driven by bad actors, and not by reasonable people like (I assume) yourself who just want to live your lives and be left in peace. But the fact that even the reasonable people will generally refuse to even acknowledge the possibility of bad actors means that when you get the "trans woman" who makes a point of strutting around a women's locker room naked, waving "her" erect penis at a captive audience, it discredits all the other trans women who say "No, really, I just to want to use the locker room and change in peace."
I could have said this, word for word, re: Islam during my Internet Atheist years. And the fact that this epistemic rigor was not observed by the people I argued with really opened a lot of cracks in my old, blue-tribe worldview. (Charlie Hebdo and the reactions to it opened those cracks into fissures, and from there it's been rabbit holes all the way down.)
I don't really have a point here, but I found the historical resonance startling.
Interesting that Sam Harris is one of the people targeted by Contra in this video too for saying the activism has gotten a bit crazy when there're reasonable questions.
He's still showing cracks.
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The primary one is noticing and rejecting the following general pattern: if we have a good thing G, and we add some stuff to G, we still get a good thing G that is just as good. It shows up in many contexts. Some examples:
The addition of "arts" to STEM, making "STEAM" (while liberal arts are fine in their own right, they're completely different to STEM);
The addition of arbitrary numbers of foreigners to a country, while expecting the host country's culture to remain completely unchanged;
The addition of experimental mRNA medicines under the label of "vaccine"; or
The addition of anything with vaguely-positive emotional valence to the label "democracy".
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