*dangles shiny keys*

"I quell chaos and make you safe by dominating outsiders" is the core argument of power, going back to the earliest records we have of the lies of the powerful.
Engravings of pharaoh, club in hand, twice as large and looming over enslaved foreigners could still work as PR today if you give pharaoh trump's hair and make the defeated others trans.

It can be both. The bottom pane is more important, but I think a lot of right wingers have some real animosity in their hearts.
- True believers and cynics. From the outside, how could one tell?

crucially, underlying all this is the fact that trans people actually do represent a threat to the status quo of patriarchy and the traditional gender regime.
- It's no accident that tons of cis women have also been hurt by the rise in anti-trans attitudes. Part of the project is to bully any woman with any presentation perceived as not femme enough to change themselves to better fit inside the box.

Funnily enough, the exact same argument can be applied to the progressives who often rally behind LGBT and minority rights to also distract from doing anything meaningful to fix the economic issues.
This essentially results in an endless back and forth between progressives and right-wingers, where the ball is the minorities.
- And if you happen to be a minority and "pass", advocating for your own rights is seen as a distraction by some.

God. I'm intimately familiar with this shit. The real kicker? The people they're trying to please don't have any real feelings about trans people. They have a shitty community, a friend group, that will accept nearly worthless awful people just because they'll agree to an ideology who's central tenants are faux masculinity and how the members may seem like they're broke/sexless/stupid/unmasculine/different but that's for an outward societal reason. And now they'll do anything to fix that fake reason and focus elsewhere. They'll be lying and making excuses at first but community support emboldens you and they will really really begin to believe it. And now, guess what they have that they've never had? They're cool in that community. And now that's everything to them. They'd die to keep that social status because our old caveman brain says that being accepted by your tribe is important and being rejected is death. The rest explains itself.

Going after the most vulnerable groups of people, the easiest to attack, and working their way to less vulnerable groups until they're attacking them all

Hungary has an actual "legal grooming" problem, as the age of consent is only 14. People like to pretend it's actually just for "close age exceptions", but that's not the case. We even had a Fidesz politician groom his wife since she was 14.
Yet, Fidesz only has an issue with it if it's done between same-sexes. If a businessman "saves a young girl from poverty in exchange of getting the fruit as soon as it ripens", or a "sexy" teacher "teaches a lucky boy", it's not their concern. In fact, consentual relationship between same-sex adults is seen to be worse than actual and "heterosexual" pedophilia.
- Isn't like Emmanuel Macron auch a case? His former teacher is his now wife, they started their relationship when he was her student?

I'd argue the hate come after the "practical" reasoning. They target a group for various reasons (as a scapegoat, to create the illusion of progress, to steal resources, etc) then create an intellectual framework to justify their targeting of the group. The hatred comes out of that justification.