Thing is, that’s not Transgender, just Transsexual.

Ideally there wouldn’t be a distinction in the legal sense, but for example Cuba had to amend its laws to allow trans people to get corrected legal IDs. The old law required sex reassignment surgery, but this eventually became due to the US blockade reducing supplies for non-urgent ops.

Many people who we’d consider brutal transphobes may be accepting of trans people who have undergone SRS (something seen in a recent spat between Reform UK politicians) the same people are denying rights for people to obtain those surgeries, thus keeping them in a class of folks being slandered as “delusional cross-dressers”. (And, just as a note, not all trans people want SRS, but many have to just to obtain legal status!)

The distinction has been made to make the argument to deny the rights of trans people easier: If we claim anyone without SRS but is Trans are mentally ill, we can deny them civil liberties that would be harder to restrict if we had to acknowledge that our idea of gender being “your private dangly bits” falls apart if we let any of them get surgeries that modify those bits.

It’s a bit like how black people and other minority groups can some acceptance under the whote supremacist state if theh accrue political capital and wealth. The system, that doesn’t wish to admit that nonwhites are capable of social mobility, simply focusses on denying rights to the poorer section of these communities who are thus easy targets for the “fbi crime statistics” gang.