> Now, one might say, this is just a matter of basic politeness... why wouldn't you use them?

because enough people don't have any basic politeness left any more, to the contrary, they're actively pissing someone off.

> However, consider the situation if a white coworker started insisting that people refer to him as black, and you could get fired for not referring to him as black.

That one has been a thing for far longer than the entire trans issue, with it peaking in the rise of rap/hiphop music (and leading to the term "whigger" [1]). It eventually sort-of sorted itself once it was no longer edgy to troll people with such moves.

> If we use the common meaning of the word "genocide", the one that is intended the vast majority of the time the word is used, there is no trans genocide.

The common meaning is "a group of people, almost always the national majority, tries to get another group of people extinct". Given that trans youth already have among the highest suicide ratios, it is likely that policies restricting trans youth lead to more trans youth attempting suicide - and guess what, there's proof of exactly this happening [2].

> Pushing for equal bathroom access long before the American public had actually been made ready for something like that

Part of that is the ridiculousness in how many bathrooms are built. On festivals (portapotties), airplanes, trains and most if not all toilets for the disabled, there is no such thing as gender segregation at all - you wait in line, enter the next free booth, do your thing and that's it. Pretty much everyone has used a gender-neutral bathroom at least once in their life, chances are high you used one of them in the last 12 months.

There is no reason at all why toilets cannot be converted to "equal designations". I'd even go as far as to say that "equal" bathrooms are safer for everyone, simply because the facility will be higher frequented.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wigger

[2] https://www.npr.org/sections/shots-health-news/2024/09/25/nx...