the real answer is that, throughout most of its history, gender affirming care (GAC) was gatekept and typically restricted to those who were highly likely to pass and agreed to stealth. the public rarely thought about trans people, and coverage of them in media was mostly limited to human interest stories depicting them as medical curiosities. this started to change at the beginning of the 21st century, when the developed world began to shift to an informed consent model that removed a lot of the gatekeeping. this resulted in an increase in the number of trans people who were unwilling or unable to integrate into normative gender roles.
by the mid-2010’s, trans issues started to become more visible on social media. these initially garnered a lot of public and institutional support, since at this point the public still imagined trans women and trans men as being roughly the same as “normal” women and men. this was also accompanied by a dramatic increase in adolescent girls seeking referral for GAC, a reduction of the threshold at which agp males consider themselves appropriate candidates for GAC, greater encouragement for highly gender non-conforming trans people to be visible, etc.
it turned out that there are actually a LOT of reasons people may desire GAC, beyond “gender dysphoria” as initially conceptualized by doctors ~80 years ago in the Weimar republic. but the conceptual framing of GAC has not really evolved with the changing patient presentation, so we have wound up with this population of people who are very visible and insisting they are men or women in a way that is completely antagonistic to existing gender norms.
this makes them good scapegoats. they also draw a lot of ire, scorn, and contempt from normies who rely on norms to navigate their social reality. i think a lot of people have whiplash, too, given how quickly the way they were being asked to conceptualize trans people has changed.
hope this helps.